Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Fraud’s a SNAP

Seattle, EBT, scam, welfare, crime, corruption

This may shock you . . . or not . . . but independent reporters led by Nick Shirley have confirmed that food-stamp fraud is rampant. At least it is in the streets of Seattle. Their work supplements a police investigation reported in October 2025.

One scheme involves fraudsters approaching “groups of unsheltered individuals . . . who had an EBT [electronic benefits transfer card] with money on it,” a Seattle police captain reported last year. They would “then take that person to a store with a shopping list.”

The fraudsters keep the goods for resale while paying the original card holder half the card value in cash. Alternatively, the fraudsters buy EBT cards at half-price directly from card holders.

Sometimes fraudsters let drug dealers know which persons living on the street have just gotten cash for their cards. The dealers then swarm into a homeless camps to sell their wares.

Shirley’s work shows that although police arrests of eleven of the scammers made a dent, the scams still go on — in Seattle and doubtless many other cities.

He found that local store clerks proved willing to adjust food prices charged to match the balance on an EBT card, say $120. Then, if all goes “well,” the clerk and the fraudster presumably split the take.

Shirley’s video doesn’t document the last part of the process because, to avoid being complicit in the scam, he kept entering a false PIN.

Welfare fraud is, apparently, easy to perpetrate, hard to patrol.

It used to be understood that the only way to distribute general benefits to the poor was to refuse to make it easy to receive, and to administer such programs as locally as possible. Incentives for bureaucrats and disincentives for abusers must always be made painfully clear. And punishments swift.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags corruption, crime, EBT, scam, Seattle, welfare

Thought

F. A. Hayek

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means as De Tocqueville describes it, ‘a new form of servitude.’
F. A. Hayek, “Individualism: True and False” (1945), in Individualism and Economic Order (1948).

Today

Sartre’s Nobel

On October 22, 1964, philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but turned down the honor — establishing a precedent that should have been followed by numerous Peace Prize winners, including Barack Obama and the European Union.

Sartre rejected the award on account of having rejected previous honors. In this he was not dissimilar from philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) who refused many doctorates late in life, on the grounds that such awards did an old man no good, and perhaps because he was a cantankerous old coot — a judgment that surely applied also to the later French philosopher.

Sartre is best known for his novel Nausea (1938), his play No Exit (1944) and his treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943). One of his main themes was freedom, a concept better explored at the fundamental level of the individual human being than politically, since he become a “Marxist” of sorts . . . the precise nature of which he elaborated in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). He failed to complete his tetralogy of novels, Roads to Freedom, never finishing the final volume.

ideological culture

France’s New Look

One Parisian woman has become the poster child for French politics. Antifa and Middle Eastern and African Muslims are rioting in the streets — burning, stealing, breaking, bullying, and worse — presenting us with the full panoply of protest gone completely wrong.

A distraught woman pled with masked men not to destroy a store, identified by reporters (not memesters) as a Franprix supermarket on Rue du Faubourg du Temple. “Why are you doing this?” she demanded, then screamed “this is not the cause!”

All for naught. The rioters brushed past her, breaking windows, looting, committing mayhem.

The mob cheered.

Her look — of bewilderment and betrayal — has become the new face of France. FAFO, in French fashion.

The “FA” part of the principle is what most of the “meme”-based commentary has been about. The French elites and their rah-rah brigades on the far left — or merely in the “liberal” class — have pushed a thousand bad policies, none worse than allowing refugees to swamp the country, placing them on the dole, while demanding of them nothing in return: no loyalty; no appreciation; not even civility.

A breeding ground for a revolt of the imported masses.

In sum: the elitist French political and liberal classes “effed around” and “found out”: FAFO in its purest political form. President Macron himself asked “how can French people do this to France?” as if the rioters think of themselves as “French.”

“Inclusion” in its most absurd form.

This woman, and so many like her, have supported extraordinarily foolish policies for decades, presumably because it makes them “feel good” and “look good.” You know, “morally,” pharisaically.

But the current look? Bafflement.

Yes, a million French women can be wrong.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags FAFO, immigration, Paris, riots

Thought

Wicksteed

A man once boasted that he had been offered the whole site of Chicago for an old pair of boots, and when asked why he did not close with the offer, replied, “I didn’t have the boots.” The conditions, therefore, for mutually advantageous direct exchange are that two men, who have access to each other, should differ in their estimates of the marginal significances of some two commodities, and that each should possess a supply of that commodity which he relatively underestimates.
Philip Henry Wicksteed, The Common Sense of Political Economy (1910), fourth chapter.

Thought

George Eliot

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
Mary Ann Evans, writing under her pen name “George Eliot,” Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Ch. 4 (1879).

Today

Harding Spoke Out

On October 21, 1921, President Warren G. Harding delivered the first speech by a sitting U.S. President against lynching in the deep South.

ideological culture insider corruption national politics & policies

Ineffectiveness, Please

“I’m into effectiveness,” Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) told an audience last week at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics.

Maybe effectiveness isn’t what we want from government, after all.

Recognizing that, in the next Congress, Democrats are unlikely to have the votes to remove President Trump from office by impeaching him in the House and convicting him in the Senate, Slotkin called for an alternative strategy: pursuing aggressive criminal prosecutions in what she called “signature cases” of the people who have “enabled” President Trump.

Calling for the prosecution of someone who has committed a crime — I mean a real crime, not simply working for one’s political enemy — is not very controversial, of course. But Slotkin’s stated reasoning is.

“I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration?’”

She imagines them thinking, “‘Like, that sounds fun, I might get an opportunity.’”

But opportunities for young conservatives need to be effectively squelched, dontcha know . . .

“I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems I don’t want and so let me avoid participating in that,’” explained the senator.

“I want that deterrence message sent,” she concluded.

Yes, more lawfare is coming . . . in the name of “effectiveness” . . . to chill political participation.

Slotkin presents herself as a moderate Democrat. Really?

Even moderates are now in favor of using the judicial system to prosecute political opponents . . . the better to frighten and intimidate young people . . . who might be looking for a job with those political opponents?

That’s not change. That’s more of the same.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags corruption, lawfare, Slotkin

Thought

F. A. Hayek

“. . . I very much doubt whether monetary policy has ever done anything good. . . .”
F. A. Hayek, Cato Policy Report, from an interview conducted by James U. Blanchard III.

Today

Boundaries

On October 20, 1803, the United States Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase.

Exactly 15 years later, the Convention of 1818 signed between the United States and the United Kingdom which, among other things, settled the Canada-United States border on the 49th parallel for much of its length.