Common Sense with Paul Jacob

On July 21, 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution in a public school classroom, and fined $100. The ambiguous legacy of the trial would continue — for decades, even to the present — to reveal the tensions inherent within a school system run by government and funded by taxpayers.

Scopes’ biology lessons leaned heavily on a “eugenics” play on Darwinism, at variance both with Darwin and the general thrust of today’s evolutionary thought.

Today is the 57th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission’s perambulation upon the Moon, on July 21, 1969. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked upon the surface of Mare Tranquillitatis for about two hours and 15 minutes. They spent over 21 hours on the surface, total, most of it inside the Lunar Module, at the site they called Tranquillity Base, before launching to rejoin astronaut Michael Collins in lunar orbit and returning to Earth on the 24th.

Born on July 20, 1754, Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy, French philosopher and economist. Perhaps best remembered for coining the term “ideology,” he didn’t mean by that term what scornful Napoleon and communist Karl Marx later turned it into — for Destutt de Tracy ideology meant “the science of ideas,” a unified approach to all knowledge, from epistemology to social theory.

Though his family had been enobled twice, he renounced the title and entered the 1789 Estates General conference as a member of the Third Estate. During the Reign of Terror, he was imprisoned, and would have been executed had not Robespierre been pushed to the scaffold ahead of him.

Two of his books became popular in early 19th century America, his commentaries on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, and his Traité de la volonté, which Thomas Jefferson, the editor of the American edition, retitled A Treatise on Political Economy. Tracy’s economics was of a deductivist stripe, familiar to readers of later economists such as Nassau Senior and Ludwig von Mises.

Destutt de Tracy’s political philosophy was republican, and his preferred economic policy was laissez-faire.

NASA’s Apollo 11 landed two humans on the Moon — Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin — on July 20, 1969, at 20:17 UTC.

If poverty is not a result of lack of resources or opportunities, but of poor institutions, poor government, and toxic politics, giving money to poor countries — particularly giving money to the governments of poor countries — is likely to perpetuate and prolong poverty, not eliminate it. 

Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (2013).

On July 19, 1817, Georg Anton Schäffer — unsuccessful in his attempt to conquer the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi for the Russian-American Company — was forced to admit defeat and leave Kauaʻi. The effort had begun in 1815 as a shipwreck recovery mission but escalated after the German physician in the company’s employ had been played by native politicians. Legal action against Schäffer — considered, after the fact, a bungler (his efforts cost his employer over 200,000 roubles) — proved unsuccessful.

In A.D. 64 on the 19th of July, the Great Fire of Rome began. It caused widespread devastation and raged for six days, destroying half the city.

One thousand seven hundred eighty-one years later, the last great fire to affect Manhattan began early in the morning and was subdued that afternoon. This “Great New York City Fire of 1845” killed four firefighters and 26 civilians, destroying 345 buildings.