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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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WGS

Now, if we have state regulation, what is always forgotten is this: Who pays for it? Who is the victim of it? There always is a victim. 

William Graham Sumner, “The Forgotten Man” (1883), in Albert Galloway Keller (ed.) The Forgotten Man and Other Essays (1919).
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Today

Eleven/Eleven/Eleven

On November 11, 1889, the State of Washington was admitted as the 42nd State of the United States.

In 1918, German officials signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car in the forest of Compiègne, France. The fighting officially ended at 11:00 a.m. — the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The war officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919.

In 1921 on this date, U.S. President Warren G. Harding dedicated the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery.

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national politics & policies representation

Senators, Old & New

term limits, Congress, Senate, House of Representatives

The make-up of the next U.S. Senate is taking shape. New committee chairs, for instance. While Senate Democrats do not have a rigid seniority system for choosing committee chairs, seniority is one factor considered and, realistically, the longer a congressman is on a committee the more likely he or she is to ascend to a position of leadership.

Plus, the Democrats don’t have term limits for committee chairs.

Which leads to an average age, so far, of not-quite-Seventy!

Well, that’s what ChatGPT projects. “Using January 3, 2027 — the scheduled opening day of the 120th Congress — as the common reference date, the 18-person working roster of projected Democratic committee and select-committee chairs has an average age of 69.8 years.” 

And boy, does the AI present a revealing chart, a few senators just popping out:

  • Patty Murray (Washington) for Appropriations, 76
  • Ron Wyden (Oregon) for Finance, 77
  • Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts) for Banking, Housing, and Urban (not Indian) Affairs, 77

The youngest on the chair list is 53; the oldest — Bernie Sanders! — is 88.

Now these positions aren’t set in stone. They are in the process of development. These are merely projected names, the most likely names based on august Washington tradition — and the long list of oldsters still in power. 

But, in contrast, we do know for certain the average age of the eight Democratic U.S. Senators who won critical races in Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas. It’s 50 years old. 

Nearly two decades younger than the average age of those running the committees.

Seniority may be a good way to run a gerontocracy.

Term limits are a good way to change it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Marquis d’Argenson

Laissez faire, telle devrait être la devise de toute puissance publique, depuis que le monde est civilisé […]. Détestable principe que celui de ne vouloir grandir que par l’abaissement de nos voisins! Il n’y a que la méchanceté et la malignité du cœur de satisfaites dans ce principe, et l’intérêt y est opposé. Laissez faire, morbleu! Laissez faire!!

Leave be, which should be the motto of all public power, since the world was civilized […]. A detestable principle is that of wanting to be enlarged by the lowering of our neighbors! There is only malice and malignity of heart in it, the principle being directly opposed to the general interest. Leave us alone, gadzooks! Leave us be!!

René Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, Marqis d’Argenson, Memoir es et Journal inidit du Marquis d’Argenson (1736 diary entry; first published 1858), echoing the words of M. Le Gendre, who, when asked, in 1681, by the eager mercantilist Controller-General of Finances Jean-Baptiste Colbert how the French state could be help promote commerce, Le Gendre replied simply: “Laissez-nous faire.” In a Journal économique article in 1751, d’Argenson put the Le Gendre anecdote into print first. “Laissez faire” became a rallying cry after that, and a major feature of liberalism until its transformation by its encounter with socialism. One often sees the phrase “laissez-faire capitalism” used to distinguish free markets from protectionism and dirigisme. René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis d’ Argenson.

NOTE: “Gadzooks” is a clever rendering of “morbleu,” which is an oath, not a word with literal meaning. The word morbleu is a 17th–18th century French expletive, a minced oath — a deliberately mangled version of a blasphemous phrase to soften it. It derives from “mort de Dieu” (“death of God,” or “God’s death”), with “bleu” substituted for “Dieu” the way English speakers said “zounds” instead of “God’s wounds” or “gadzooks” instead of “God’s hooks.” Other, period-appropriate English equivalents of the French oath are the clipped Shakespearean-era oaths, the aforementioned “Zounds” along with “Sblood” (for God’s blood) and “Egad” (for “O, God”).

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Today

Cry of Independence

On November 10, 1821, the First Cry of Independence in the small, interior town of Villa de los Santos, occurred in Panama. The November 10 date has since become Panama’s “Cry of Independence Day” in the country.

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ideological culture public opinion too much government

Socialism vs. Socialism vs. Socialism

State Socialism, collectivism, obedience

“Together we will defeat communism, socialism and Marxism in America,” said President Trump in a mid-term election spot. “America will never be a communist country.”

But what does he mean by those words? 

Vice President J. D. Vance was asked to define socialism at a press conference soon after the ad ran. 

The word, he said, is “a very hard term to define these days because . . . you know, classically, you would think, socialism is about prioritizing workers. And yet, in reality, I bet most of the self-described socialists running across America are going to howl about this announcement, today, which is prioritizing American workers over foreign workers, so, I don’t know what the term means any more. 

“I think in reality, what it actually means in the American context, is that you want to replace American workers with foreign workers, and you want boys to play in girls’ sports. That’s what I see that unites the socialists that I see running across the United States of America today.”

Vance focused on the woke nonsense (the boys in girls’ sports reference) because that is what he sees. By pointing to socialists’ opposition to administration policy against Microsoft replacing American workers with foreign ones, Vance was aiming to note an irony. 

Most folks, however — including from National Review and the Orange County Register — see a bigger irony in his defense of Trumpian policy by recourse to workers’ socialism.

It’s just protectionism, of course, but instead of frankly favoring home-grown businesses, it’s framed to favor American over foreign workers.

Yet, many economists insist that protectionism is just socialism in short pants.

“You can’t defeat socialism with an alternative form of collectivism,” explains Agustina Vergara Cid of the Register, “only with its opposite: the principle that the individual is not a means to any group’s end.” 

That’s unfortunately not how Trump or Vance approach the issue . . . but that may be of limited relevance, considering that their failures led to a backlash sending actual communists into Congress.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Francis Amasa Walker

Protectionism is nothing if not socialistic. It proposes, in the public interest, to modify the natural course of trade and production, and to do this by depriving the citizen of his privilege of buying in the cheapest market. Yet the protectionist is not to be called, therefore, a Socialist, since the Socialist would not only have the state determine what shall be produced, but he would have the state itself undertake the production.

Francis Amasa Walker (Davis R. Dewey, ed.), Discussions of Economics and Statistics, Volume II (1899), p. 260.

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Today

McNamara

On November 9, 1960, Robert McNamara was named president of the Ford Motor Company, becoming the first non-Ford family member to serve in that post — only to resign a month later to join the newly elected John F. Kennedy administration.

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Update

Effrontery in Alaska

Alaska Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola must be granted extra points — for effrontery. After her campaign’s plot to engage in spreading confusion among the Alaskan electorate on the Republican spaces on the ballot was uncovered, you might think she’d slink her way into obscurity.

But that’s the old way, maybe. Not the new way.

Paul Jacob has covered that story, of scheming and anti-democratic trickery. The latest update is that her backers are suing the “state Division of Elections to disclose, ‘without further delay,’ the names of Alaskans who sent absentee ballots the agency turned down, according to a complaint filed on Nov. 6 in the Superior Court for the State of Alaska.

Accusing state elections officials of having “constructively denied and obstructed” the Peltola campaign’s request for public records pertaining to rejected ballots, the group said in the filing that the Nov. 18 certification deadline is fast approaching and any delay in releasing the records costs Peltola the opportunity to help ensure that qualified voters have their ballots counted.”

Tom Ozimek, “Peltola Campaign Sues Alaska Over Rejected Absentee Ballots,” The Epoch Times (November 7, 2026).

After such indecent trickery as engaged by the campaign in the Dan J./Dan S. Sullivan matter, this all may be a form of effrontery. Nevertheless, it remains true that the State must conduct its elections in an open and fair manner, obeying the letter of the law.

That being accepted, the State of Alaska has made a public statement about the lawsuit — which could, indeed, force an outcome on an extremely close race: “the Alaska Department of Law said the absentee ballot information Peltola’s campaign seeks is preliminary and that the Division of Elections has long treated such data as confidential.”

A lot of eyes will be on this case as well as the race itself.