COLUMN Is Any Government Agency Efficient? By MIKE ZAGATA • View From West Davenport When Bernie Sanders starts a sentence by saying “The truth on this matter is,” it’s time to reach for your wallet to see if it’s still there. He’s not alone in that regard, as there are lots of candidates trying to sell us on the virtues of socialism. To learn how socialism has affected you, read the last three paragraphs. The major differences between socialism and…
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Opinion - Page 282
from CHIP NORTHRUP Texans Say, Don’t Mess With Cattle To the Editor: Had the local dairyman moved to Texas and knowingly allowed his cows to starve to death, he would have been charged with up to 25 felony counts, each carrying up to 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine per head – which adds up to 250 years in the state pen and $250,000 in fines. About the same as for manslaughter. In New York, he gets a…
from SETH CLARK 58 Businesses Shut Leaving ‘Spooky’ City To the Editor: Oneonta has felt spooky to me lately. “Spooky” is kind of a funny word for a newspaper, but it really is the word that best describes how I feel about so many longstanding local businesses closing. Several were touchstones of my life, businesses that have operated in the greater Oneonta area for decades. I decided a couple of weeks ago to see if my spooky feeling could be…
COLUMN Slow-Walking Inflation-Rate Hikes Hurt Poor By DAN MASKIN • CEO, Opportunities For Otsego Mollie Orshansky was an economist at the Social Security Administration in the 1960s. At the time, she proposed Official Poverty Thresholds (OPM) based on the cost of food. She calculated that any family earning less than three times the USDA estimate for the subsistence food budget was considered poor. That’s how the poverty guidelines began. These thresholds have remained in place for the last 50 years…
from NICK PALEVSKY Super-Majority Aims To Keep Tyranny Out Of Zoning Plans To the Editor: For 150 years after Independence, government attempts to limit how landowners use their property were seen as unconstitutional because: 1. Zoning laws take property rights without compensation, and 2. Zoning laws constitute unequal treatment under the law. Then came the ‘progressive’ era, in the early 1900s, which brought us the income tax, direct election of Senators, the Federal Reserve and Prohibition – all the so-called…
from NICHOLAS CUNNINGHAM Take Heart: Make Capitalism Work For Us To the Editor: Adrian Kuzminski (May 30-31, 2019) recalls Garrett Hardin’s classic 1968 “Tragedy of the Commons” with appreciation, but closes with a rather forlorn, indeed hopeless take-home message. As I recall, Harden pointed out that, faced with exploitation of “the commons,” rationing provided a workable solution: for example, if “free” parking becomes scarce and is being exploited by the powerful or the feckless, parking meters offer a simple practical…
EDITORIAL Legal Marijuana Will Enslave Many A visitor to Otsego County from Vermont a few days ago described what seems to be a sensible end to marijuana prosecutions in the Green Mountain State. Smoking pot has been legalized in a number of states. Folks who smoke it are allowed to grow enough for their own use. So it then comes as no surprise to find that some people may buy cannabis seeds from weed-seeds.ca, for example, in the hopes of…
EDITORIAL The Downtown That Was, And The Downtown That Might Be In The Future First and foremost, welcome back! The half-million or so visitors who will be coming to Greater Cooperstown over the next 13 weeks – for Dreams Park and Cooperstown All-Star Village, for the Baseball Hall of Fame, for The Fenimore Art Museum, The Farmers’ Museum and Hyde Hall, for Glimmerglass Opera, for fishing and boating and summering on Otsego Lake, for hiking and canoeing. While our visitors…
from CARL SEELEY Nothing Is Perfect, But Green Movement Is Looking For Answers To the Editor: I don’t always catch Mike Zagata’s column, but every time I do, he’s revisiting the same two themes—one right, one wrong. Theme One is that even “green” technologies have negative environmental impacts. This is true, and it’s important to understand and keep in mind. When we get electricity from photovoltaics rather than coal or gas, we reduce our CO2 emissions, but we increase other…
COLUMN Can Only Small Business Save ‘Common’ For All? One of the landmarks of the early environmental movement was the essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” published in 1968 by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in Science. It can be to an individual’s private advantage, he points out, to exploit common resources at the expense of others. In the absence of other constraints, he argued, most people will take more than their share, out of greed or fear, eventually depleting the…
