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education and schooling ideological culture international affairs

Expelling Dissent

Drew Pavlout, China,

The University of Queensland may expel 20-​year-​old philosophy major Drew Pavlou. He has been protesting against the Chinese Communist Party and in support of the Hong Kong protesters, but perhaps most tellingly has criticized his school’s ties to China.

Xu Jie, the Chinese consul general in Brisbane, has blasted Pavlou for being an “anti-​China activist.”

This same man, Xu Jie, also happens to be an adjunct professor at the university.

The Queensland campus is home to one of many Chinese-​funded Confucius Institutes, often benignly described as promoting Chinese culture. FBI Director Christopher Wray says that the institutes “offer a platform to disseminate Chinese government or Chinese Communist Party propaganda, to encourage censorship, to restrict academic freedom.”

The Economist allows that the Institutes “project soft power” with “occasional hints of politics,” offering as an example an exhibition at the University of Maryland, whitewashing China’s relationship to Tibet. 

Just a smidgen of politics here and there.

According to Pavlou, “Beijing exercises so much financial leverage over our universities that it can stifle all criticism of the Chinese government on campus.”

Although the school nebulously accuses Pavlou of “harassing” others, his real sin seems to be not going with the flow. Threatening Pavlou with expulsion and even prosecution hardly proves that Queensland would never act to squelch dissent at the behest of China.

There is only one fair resolution. The university should apologize for its CCP ties, reject funding from China, kick out its Confucius Institute, kick out Xu, and commend Pavlou for urging the school to reform its bad conduct.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Drew Pavlout, China,

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Thought

William Leggett

If the clause of the Constitution under which the Post Office establishment exists were struck from the instrument to-​morrow, is any one weak enough to suppose that the activity of commerce would not soon supply a system of its own?

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Thought

Yves Guyot

Yves Guyot

We must not confound liberty with anarchy. Liberty is the reciprocal respect for personal rights, according to certain fixed rules known by the name of law. Anarchy is the privilege of some and the spoliation of others, according to the caprices and arbitrary will of the cunning and the violent, and the feebleness and lack of energy of the timorous.

Yves Guyot, The Tyranny of Socialism, 1894
Categories
Thought

La Rochefoucauld

Sincere enthusiasm is the only orator who always persuades. It is like an art the rules of which never fail; the simplest man with enthusiasm persuades better than the most eloquent with none.

La Rochefoucauld, Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales, (1665, 1678), eighth maxim. 

Categories
ideological culture political economy

Cash Machine Cachet

cash machine, ATM, money,

Shutting down capitalism almost worldwide may prove to be the grandest disaster of all time. Folks on the margin of poverty in poor countries are already starving. Though scads of people seem to think we could ride out a lockdown indefinitely just by cashing government checks, the problem is that if we don’t produce, we cannot buy and consume products. 

It’s not about money, or profits as such: “It’s the productivity, stupid!” 

Elon Musk put it this way: “If you don’t make stuff, there’s no stuff.” 

A “universal basic income” won’t help if the re-​distributed money chases few-​to-​no goods.

So how did we come to believe that we can just shut down most business activity and still survive?

Maybe the idea seems plausible because many people already do not work to survive. As their numbers have increased, our civilization has forgotten that they survive upon the work of others. 

We guffaw at young children who, when their parents say something they want is too expensive, they innocently respond, ‘well, just go to the cash machine!’ But the more people rely upon checks and bank deposits from the government — for any reason — the harder it is to remember that the power to buy stuff doesn’t ultimately come from government. With taxation, redistribution and inflation thrown into the mix, even adults think of government as Cash Machine. 

And the Cash Machine as a model for the economy.

To fight a virus, the world has shut down production — as if we do not survive by producing goods in order to consume them.

Government has reduced capitalism — and us — to absurdity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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cash machine, ATM, money,

Photo by Tax Credits

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Jacob Burckhardt

Internally, the [ancient Greek] polis was implacable towards any individual who ceased to be totally absorbed in it.… The polis was completely inescapable.… The absence of individual freedom went hand in hand with the omnipotence of the State in every context. Religion, the sacral calendar, the myths — all these were nationalized, so that the State was at the same time a church, empowered to try charges of impiety, and against this dual power the individual was totally helpless.… In short, there could be no guarantees of life or property which could run counter to the polis and its interests.
Although this enslavement of the individual to the State existed under all constitutions, it must have been at its most oppressive under democracy, where the most villainous men, ridden by ambition, identified themselves with the polis and its interests and could therefore interpret in their own way the maxim salus reipublicae suprema lex esto (‘let the safety of the Republic be the highest law’).

Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, 1999, p. 57 – 8.