Category Archives: Opinion

Other business problems in general.

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OPINION

At the council meeting on February 27th, various business issues concerning Williams were raised.

One was the issue of sales tax. Sean Casey noted that Williams is among the highest in the country. The Williams city council voted to remove sales tax on the sale of groceries which was a tremendous step. The point was raised that more attractions had the potential to keep sales taxes down.

There used to be a bowling alley in the building behind Goldie’s Laundry, which was used by Rosa’s Cantina. A few years ago long-time Williams resident Marv Mason attempted a movie theater, but was denied by the council. The city also attempted an outdoor ice skating rink which failed due to weather conditions.

Another attraction that is probably not marketed as well is the new Veteran’s Memorial at the Memorial park on the west end of town near Family Dollar. In that same area, the city allowed a swap meet for years to support the scholarship efforts of the Kiwanis Club. Last year they made the decision not to allow people to stay over night near their set up which caused most of the people to avoid the swap meet. Rumor has it that the city will rescind that order.

The city also had a big attraction with Rendezvous Days which brought in thousands of people over the Memorial Day weekend. It included a parade which is no longer held. Over time it was brought down. Some of that was due to weather conditions which moved the Rendezvous to the Bob Dean Rodeo grounds. In the mid-90s, they used to close off up to four blocks of downtown for vendors which attracted a lot of foot traffic. The original owner of the Grand Canyon Coffee and Cafe complained that food vendors would hurt his business before one of the Rendezvous Days events. About midway through the event he had to close because he ran out of food.

The repeated noise complaints brought to light that there is no noise ordinance in Williams. The Canyon Club and Sultana routinely turn their jute boxes up to full volume. Adjacent businesses have complained that the noise has actually diverted customers away. The Canyon Club left its outside speakers on all night on one occasion disturbing customers at the Red Garter Bed and Breakfast. Recently they seem to have lowered the volume on the outdoor speakers. The Canyon Club also has Karaoke, the volume of which affects the Grand Canyon Hotel and other residents in the area. Pancho’s and the Italian Bistro have competing outdoor speakers.

The Williams city council, of course, is in the precarious position of having to balance between business concerns, the codes intended to maintain the Historic District, and the voter.

On Religious Liberty, Arizona Gets it Right and NY Times Gets it Wrong Again

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The headline reads “A License to Discriminate.” And the New York Times editorial board goes on to claim that Arizona has just passed “noxious measures to give businesses and individuals the broad right to deny services to same-sex couples in the name of protecting religious liberty.” The Times got it wrong. The proposed legislation never even mentions same-sex couples; it simply clarifies and improves existing state protections for religious liberty. And as the multitude of lawsuits against the coercive HHS mandate and the cases of photographers, florists and bakers show, we need protection for religious liberty now more than ever.

In 1993, overwhelming bipartisan majorities of both houses of congress passed, and President Bill Clinton signed, the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The Act states that the federal government “shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless it can demonstrate that such a burden “is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest” and “is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling interest.”

In 1999 the state of Arizona passed similar legislation that prevents the state government from similarly burdening the free exercise of religion. The bill that the Arizona legislature just passed is an amendment to the 1999 state RFRA clarifying that the protections extend to any “state action” and would apply to “any individual, association, partnership, corporation, church, religious assembly or institution or other business organization.” In other words, it protects all citizens and the associations they form from undue burdens by the government on their religious liberty or from private lawsuits that would have the same result.

Respecting religious liberty for all those in the marketplace is particularly important. After all, as first lady Michelle Obama put it, religious faith “isn’t just about showing up on Sunday for a good sermon and good music and a good meal. It’s about what we do Monday through Saturday as well.”

Read more at The Foundry

The President Inhales

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He ought to change federal drug law rather than refuse to enforce it.

300px-Obama_Portrait_2006To the delight of dorm rooms everywhere, President Obama has all but endorsed marijuana legalization. “We should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing,” he told the New Yorker magazine. Let’s try to see through this political haze.

Mr. Obama also muses to an admiring David Remnick that while pot is “a bad habit and a vice” and not something he would encourage his daughters to try, “I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.” He called the Colorado and Washington legalization experiments “important for society,” while offering no comment on the federal Controlled Substances Act that he has an obligation to enforce equally across the country.

Marijuana remains a Schedule I substance under that 1970 law, meaning that it has a high risk of abuse. “No more dangerous than alcohol” is still dangerous, given the destructiveness of alcohol-related disease and social ills like drunk driving. There’s an industry related to mitigating alcohol problems, after all.

We tolerate drinking because most adults use alcohol responsibly, and by all means let’s have a debate about cannabis given how much of the country has already legalized it under the false flag of “medical” marijuana. But an honest debate would not whitewash pot’s risks.

Read more at The Wall Street Journal

Self-Interest Vs. Selfishness: A case for Capitalistic society emerging from a moralistic foundation

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Lately I am hearing lots of statements suggesting the GOP, Tea Party, and conservatives should stay out of social issues or compromise their values to cater to the left, so that we can find a “middle-ground”. Previously when people inquired about my political beliefs, I said that I was “socially liberal and fiscally conservative”. After years of questioning my political opinions, my research led to an awareness of cultural Marxism, the Frankfurt school, and theorists such as Saul Alinsky, who proved that social issues have always been one of the leftists’ key instruments to effect political and fiscal change. I have since decided that my beliefs are more aligned with the “Classical Liberal” ideology.

Government regulation should be as closely limited to preserving the inalienable rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness as possible. Since issues Americans are currently facing, such as a depressed economy, immense national debt, Obamacare, education, and immigration among others that are undeniably infringing upon those rights, it is understandable why popular sentiment even amongst some republicans is that we need to stay focused on these issues and give into or ignore social platforms to find solutions and win elections. Any CEO knows establishing priorities is tantamount to success, however they also know that it’s nearly impossible to achieve growth and prosperity without having a solid foundation. The values embedded in the culture that manifested the United States Constitution lent itself to a society of self-interested individuals who could compete in a free-market that incentivized resourcefulness, ingenuity, and progress fostering the betterment of man.

More at Politichicks

courtenay-turnerCalifornia PolitiChick Courtenay Turner is an actress, producer and passionate patriot who aspires to inculcate conservative values into the American culture via entertaining stories.

Should We Bail Out Cities?

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iALF7L8oomuABy Megan McArdle Nov 26

In the latest City Journal, Steve Malanga writes about an issue that hasn’t yet gotten a lot of attention but is virtually guaranteed to become a serious topic of national debate in the not-so-distant future: Do we bail out cities that have become insolvent?

Malanga quotes a Steve Rattner op-ed from the summer: “The 700,000 remaining residents of the Motor City are no more responsible for Detroit’s problems than were the victims of Hurricane Sandy for theirs, and eventually Congress decided to help them.” Rattner is right, of course; Detroit was largely undone by massive structural changes in the auto industry, which now employs only a small fraction of the people that it used to. And yet, there’s more to the story, isn’t there? Detroit’s biggest problem is the combined burden of its pension funds and retiree health benefits. And the reason that its pensions are in such a state is that they were bizarrely mismanaged by people who apparently didn’t quite get fifth-grade math.

It’s true that it would be easier to deal with these problems if Detroit were more like New York and less like, well, Detroit. But it’s also true that if Detroit had been responsible about its pension contributions instead of underfunding the pensions while simultaneously handing out extra benefits above and beyond what the city already couldn’t afford, its retirees would not now be facing dire straits. New Yorkers did not get to vote for the corrupt Detroit politicians who appointed the terrible Detroit pension managers who made all of Detroit’s problems so much worse than they had to be. Why should they have to pick up the check for all those mistakes?

Read more at Bloomberg