Pedestrians have responsibilities on the road
To the editor:
I would like to express my opinion regarding the recent incidents involving both drivers and the death of pedestrians.
I am a police volunteer for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and during our routine patrol in the Strip, we have seen pedestrians ignoring the “Don’t walk” signs.
Furthermore, they cross Las Vegas Boulevard without using the walkways or bridges built by the city and paid for by our own taxpayers’ money for their own safety.
I do not blame some drivers for honking and yelling expletives toward these violators. I do believe that both drivers and pedestrians should be responsible enough for their own safety.
ART RAZ
Las Vegas
Freedom fighters
To the editor:
In his Nov. 9 column (“Don’t put philosophy ahead of people”), Steve Sebelius backs away from claims he made in a previous piece (“Defending liberty?” Nov. 6) that conservative legislators “don’t care if schoolchildren go hungry,” this time granting that nobody “is happy about kids going hungry or workers dying in industrial accidents.”
Having abandoned his textbook false dichotomy — either you agree with liberal policies or you must not care if “parents labor in unsafe workplaces” – he nonetheless misses the mark.
Part of Mr. Sebelius’ beef is with lawmakers who voted against Assembly Bill 137 and Assembly Bill 254 during the past legislative session. He argues, in his more recent column, that even if these conservatives would prefer that children not go hungry, the “conservative philosophy” that drove those legislators to vote as they did will have the effect of hurting “real people suffering in real life.” But that isn’t the case.
AB137 would have required every school district in the state to increase enrollment in the school breakfast program by 10 percent per year — until “the school district achieves 100-percent participation in the school breakfast program.”
Leaving aside the fiscal folly of subsidizing meals for students whose parents are millionaires, this isn’t about breakfast at all — it’s about control, and the question of who should raise and feed your children. Mr. Sebelius and other liberals think the government should. Conservatives and the vast majority of parents think parents should.
It is precisely because parents love their children so much that most prefer that they — not Carson City bureaucrats — determine what their child eats.
AB254 wasn’t any better. It would have given government bureaucrats the ability to fine employers if “any employee has access to a hazard.” The ambiguity of this phrase would have let bureaucrats fine employers for almost anything.
Imagine a construction worker working with a nail gun. Properly used, a nail gun is an important tool. Improperly used, it can be deadly. Is access to a nail gun a finable offense? The law would have left that up to a bureaucrat.
Mr. Sebelius thinks government bureaucrats should have this practically unlimited ability to fine because of the tragic deaths of construction workers on the Strip.
Except, as reported in media accounts, the problem wasn’t that OSHA was powerless to fine construction companies or didn’t know about the unsafe working conditions. The problem was that “investigators found serious safety violations in the cases, but the agency often did not follow up with aggressive enforcement. Instead, after meeting privately with contractors, the agency withdrew or reduced fines.”
So Mr. Sebelius’ argument for giving government more power rests on the fact that, a few years ago, a bureaucracy failed to properly use the power it already had.
That, in a nutshell, is the case for liberalism. Government misused its power, so we must give it more power — and if you don’t agree with that, you’re starving children and endangering workers.
The “abstract vision” that Mr. Sebelius mocks, and that conservatives and libertarians fight to maintain, is freedom. It is the commitment of believers in freedom that stops government from fully controlling families and businesses.
And I’ll take that philosophy — and its practical implications for people — every time.
Victor Joecks
Las Vegas
The writer is the communications director for the Nevada Policy Research Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Las Vegas.
Climate change
To the editor:
No one should be in the least surprised with President Obama’s decision to shelve the Keystone XL pipeline project (Sunday Review-Journal editorial). After all, most of the pipeline’s proponents, particularly the Canadian and Alberta governments as well as the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, shot themselves in the foot by supporting the main factor driving the anti-oil sands movement — the belief that our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are the main cause of climate change. If you accept that hypothesis, then the outcome is obvious — any project that leads to large CO2 emissions will be at risk.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in October that approval of Keystone XL was a “complete no brainer” for President Barack Obama. He was obviously wrong.
The real no brainer is that, if those who support the oil sands don’t want pipelines that allow shipment of the products of oil sands to be blocked, then they are going to have to work out an effective way of addressing the climate scare.
Taking their talking points from Al Gore and other climate activists and completely ignoring reports such as the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (nipccreport.org) that show that the climate scare is groundless, is a recipe for continued failure.
Tom Harris
Ottawa, Canada
The writer is executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition.
