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Update

Starship Makes Progress

Paul Jacob has been covering Elon Musk and his various enterprises here for over a decade. The rocket biz developments have been especially interesting, for by outsourcing the production of rockets and launches, NASA has been able to gain some cost-cutting efficiencies. And above that, SpaceX, Musk’s rocket company, has been making money hand over fist not just with government contracts: Private businesses have hired the company, too.

Business appears to be booming, in the words of The Epoch Times:

SpaceX successfully sent its Starship on its most ambitious mission yet: a roughly 22-hour-long mission that will set a new personal record time in orbit, with the goal of the upper stage making its first return to the launchpad.

While controlled capture of the booster stage failed — the booster’s land capture was aborted and the rocket was re-routed for a controlled drop into the sea, the safe return of the upper stage is on track for this afternoon — around 4:17–4:20 p.m. EST (3:17 p.m. Texas time) at Starbase, about 22.5 hours after liftoff.

Meanwhile, Democrats — hot off mid-term wins, and apparently eager to engage in overreach — increasingly call for prosecution of Elon Musk and government takeover of SpaceX!

And it’s just not a matter for ninnies and nobodies on social media. Before the election a Clinton Era relic made the case: “Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich called on Democrats to target billionaire Elon Musk if they regain control of Congress in the midterm elections, urging lawmakers to investigate the SpaceX founder and lay the groundwork for nationalizing his companies.”

“It should be a public corporation,” Reich says of SpaceX. “We should not ever have that kind of power in one person’s hands.”

Reich blithely sees no problem with that kind of power — along with far more potent varieties — being placed in the hands of Democrats like him.

Categories
Thought

Brandeis

At the foundation of our civil liberty lies the principle which denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.

Judge Louis Brandeis, Dissent, Burdeau v. McDowell, 256 U.S. 465, 477 (1921).

Categories
Today

The Great White Whale

On November 14, 1851 — Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville — was published in the United States of America. The book was first published in three volumes as The Whale in London in October, and under its definitive title, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, in a single-volume edition in New York in mid-November. The London publisher, Richard Bentley, censored or changed sensitive passages; Melville made revisions as well, including a last-minute change of the title for the New York edition. The whale itself appears in the text of both editions as “Moby Dick,” without the hyphen.

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies partisanship

Honk If You Love Excuses

Thomas Massie, Pete Hegseth, Congress, courage, impeachment, war

Top congressional Democrats found themselves in a jam.

One of their big selling points in the mid-terms was how corrupt and unprincipled Trump and his MAGA movement had become. Democrats salivated at the prospect of re-initiating lawfare — investigations, impeachments — against administration officials and supporters.

But there was a wrinkle. Before the new session could start — indeed, before all mid-term votes were counted — they were given the opportunity to impeach Secretary of Defense (“War”) Pete Hegseth. 

Unfortunately for them, there were a few problems with the whole enterprise.

First, it came from Representative Thomas Massie, who was not and is not (nor is ever likely to become) a Democrat. In Congress, doing good only countsif you can take the credit. Share credit with the most libertarian member in the House? Not hardly.

Second, Massie targeted longstanding practices of modern warfare, bringing “eight impeachment articles against Hegseth,” explains Newsweek, “three of which allege Hegseth has waged war against Iran in violation of the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which limits the White House’s power to use the U.S. military in foreign wars without congressional approval.”

The Democratic elite is not against the modish practice of war — where presidents commit U.S. forces abroad willy-nilly — they are against Republicans. 

Massie’s impeachment articles were too principled.

What a jam.

How to respond? When a motion to dismiss Massie’s resolution came up, many Democrats didn’t show up for the vote. 

“Eleven Democrats missed a consequential vote in the House Tuesday on impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, allowing Republicans to band together and shut down the effort,” The Hill summarizes. While a majority of these tardy pols offered a variety of excuses, “at least five who said traffic issues prevented them from voting in time.”

So the political jam was solved by a traffic jam!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
Thought

Mises

Only in the later decades of the nineteenth century was the hold of liberal ideas shaken. This was effected by the doctrines of etatism. Etatism . . . is a system of socio-political ideas which has no counterpart in older history and is not linked up with older ways of thinking, although — with regard to the technical character of the policies which it recommends — it may with some justification be called neo-Mercantilism.

Ludwig von Mises, defining statism (etatism) in Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and the Total War (1944).
Categories
Today

Shooting Stars

On this day in 1833, Denison Olmsted was alerted by his neighbors to something truly amazing, a night sky filled with shooting stars.

Not just a one or two or a dozen or a hundred: 72,000 or more per hour. Though recognizing where among the constellations meteors came from was ancient knowledge, it had not been recorded by modern-era scientists, at least in this case. What Olmsted noticed was that the meteors were coming from one point in the sky, the constellation Leo. This regular meteor event is now called the Leonid meteor stream.

In the morning, Olmsted wrote a brief report on the meteor storm for the New Haven Daily Herald newspaper, which elicited correspondence from around the country, thus beginning a social storm, in a sense: crowd-sourced science.

Categories
election law national politics & policies Voting

Brave New Presidential Contest

electoral college, president, elections, voting, democracy, representation

“The Democrats Now Have a Path to Sidestep the Electoral College,” declared Sunday’s New York Times headline.

For years, states have been joining the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). The compact commits these states to award all their Electoral College presidential votes to the winner of the popular vote nationwide, even if a majority of their own state voters choose a different candidate.  

It kicks in once enough states sign up to equal the 270 Electoral College votes required to win the presidency. 

Before the election, 18 states had joined, speaking for 222 Electoral College votes. In the election, Democrats gained full control of both legislatures and governorships in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. These states represent another 61 votes — over the 270-majority mark! 

If they all embrace the compact, the next president will be chosen by popular vote — not on the state-by-state basis used these past two centuries plus.

There are legal disagreements about whether the compact is constitutional. But if it happens — and the Democrats have the necessary state legislative votes — there is an additional aspect that may come into play.  

Once we elect the president purely on the total vote nationally, will sanctuary state California give the nearly five million non-citizens living there the vote for president? Those additional voters would constitute about two percent of the electorate in the entire country. 

Constitutionally, states do indeed decide — so says Article 2, Section 1, for president; Article 1, Section 2, for the U.S. House; and the 17th Amendment for the U.S. Senate.  

Will non-citizens in California help decide the next president in 2028?

Republicans should have forced a vote on the U.S. Citizens Vote Amendment, to constitutionally ensure federal election are citizen-only. It was introduced in both the House and Senate but not acted on. 

It could still be acted on. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Thought

Tonie Nathan

Statism is the concentration of all economic controls and planning in the hands of a highly centralized government.

Tonie Nathan, press release upon her selection as the Libertarian Party’s candidate for the Vice Presidency, July 5, 1972, dateline Eugene, Oregon. This was her definition of a technical term after asking the rhetorical question, “What do I mean by a ‘genuine choice’?”
Categories
Today

New Monarchy, New Republic

On November 12, 1905, Norwegians established, by referendum, a monarchy — not a republic. Exactly 14 years later, to the day, Austria became a republic.

Categories
ideological culture responsibility

The Ethical Egg

ethics, institutions, incentives, Donald Trump

Politics and government have long been muddied by a chicken-or-egg issue. Which came first, people with good morals or the just institutions that nurture good people?

Economist and social theorist Deirdre N. McCloskey surprised me, just a bit, by coming down hard on one side of the question last week.

“It is ethics, good or bad, that guides pretty much all human relationships, from a marriage or a small circle of friends to a sports team, a business, or a nation-state,” she wrote, adding that “well-designed laws, courts, catechisms, extrinsic motives, social approval, and even a few good and decent people are of no avail if too many people do not behave like self-respecting and other-respecting adults.”

While this sure seems true, I note that her fellow economists have been preaching the preeminence of proper incentives and disincentives to channel good outcomes. For a long, long time.

Maybe what nags is the odd emphasis. Good laws and institutions nurture moral men and women; moral men and women protect good institutions and the rule of law. 

Not just the chicken; not just the egg.

I certainly agree with McCloskey’s finale: “Statism was a mistake. We need governments for a few good purposes, such as protecting us from Russian nuclear extortion. But in a world of greatly varied human gifts and irremediable conditions, the statists’ promises of equality of outcome or of opportunity are not even approximately feasible.” 

But what is the occasion for this talk about “too many people” not respecting their very own selves and others?

The clue is her only reference to a contemporary person: “Childish pride and envy, grabbing more of the sweets, Donald Trump-style, do not make for a good society.”

Agreed. Yet, even the tiniest suggestion that Trump is the sole exemplar of vice obscures widespread, ongoing, and bipartisan fraud in our politics . . . before Trump, in-between Trump, with Trump. Billions and billions [I hear Carl Sagan] in complete ripoffs in Minnesota and California and elsewhere. Not by Mr. Trump.

We need to place limits on presidential powers. Not just on Trump, but on every future president. And if I were President Trump, I would do all I could to expose and prosecute the massive government fraud industry stealing billions from Americans.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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