Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.
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Ludwig Wittgenstein
Author: Editor
Last Saturday’s Washington Post editorial blasted both President Donald Trump and his presumptive Democratic challenger Joe Biden for a “sleazy stratagem” — namely, “accusing the other of being a stooge for Communist China.”
At issue are dueling advertisements from each campaign and a pair of SuperPACs.
The Trump ad features Fox Business’s Stuart Varney declaring that “Biden’s son inked a billion-dollar deal with a subsidiary of the Bank of China,” followed by Biden telling an audience that the Butchers of Beijing “aren’t bad folks, folks.”
“For 40 years, Joe Biden has been wrong about China,” warns the America First Actiom PAC spot. “I believed in 1979 and I believe now,” offers Biden, “that a rising China is a positive development.”
Biden’s campaign responded with an ad charging that “Trump rolled over for the Chinese” — uttering their praises “as the coronavirus spread across the world.”
“Trump trusted China,” claims an American Bridge PAC spot, noting that “everyone knew they lied about the virus.”
While acknowledging “that China’s government contributed to the global spread of the coronavirus by covering up initial reports” and “has tried to use the pandemic to advance its authoritarian political model globally at the expense of democracy,” The Post nonetheless bemoaned the “irresponsible” “rhetoric” that “could complicate cooperation with China.”
What the Post’s editors did not make clear — while explaining that China should be “pushed for greater transparency” and “its propaganda … rejected” — was the inconvenient fact that the paper has for a decade published reams of Chinese government propaganda.
For an undisclosed sum, likely in the millions, as I wrote last week.
So let the campaign heat up. Americans are far less interested in cooperating with totalitarian China than is our nation’s compromised newspaper of record.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The Dachau Liberation
On April 29, 1945, U.S. troops of the Seventh Army liberated the Dachau concentration camp.
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Herbert Spencer
What is essential to the idea of a slave? We primarily think of him as one who is owned by another. To be more than nominal, however, the ownership must be shown by control of the slave’s actions — a control which is habitually for the benefit of the controller. That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labours under coercion to satisfy another’s desires. The relation admits of sundry gradations. Remembering that originally the slave is a prisoner whose life is at the mercy of his captor, it suffices here to note that there is a harsh form of slavery in which, treated as an animal, he has to expend his entire effort for his owner’s advantage. Under a system less harsh, though occupied chiefly in working for his owner, he is allowed a short time in which to work for himself, and some ground on which to grow extra food. A further amelioration gives him power to sell the produce of his plot and keep the proceeds. Then we come to the still more moderated form which commonly arises where, having been a free man working on his own land, conquest turns him into what we distinguish as a serf; and he has to give to his owner each year a fixed amount of labour or produce, or both: retaining the rest himself. Finally, in some cases, as in Russia before serfdom was abolished, he is allowed to leave his owner’s estate and work or trade for himself elsewhere, under the condition that he shall pay an annual sum. What is it which, in these cases, leads us to qualify our conception of the slavery as more or less severe? Evidently the greater or smaller extent to which effort is compulsorily expended for the benefit of another instead of for self-benefit. If all the slave’s labour is for his owner the slavery is heavy, and if but little it is light. Take now a further step. Suppose an owner dies, and his estate with its slaves comes into the hands of trustees; or suppose the estate and everything on it to be bought by a company; is the condition of the slave any the better if the amount of his compulsory labour remains the same? Suppose that for a company we substitute the community; does it make any difference to the slave if the time he has to work for others is as great, and the time left for himself is as small, as before? The essential question is — How much is he compelled to labour for other benefit than his own, and how much can he labour for his own benefit? The degree of his slavery varies according to the ratio between that which he is forced to yield up and that which he is allowed to retain; and it matters not whether his master is a single person or a society. If, without option, he has to labour for the society, and receives from the general stock such portion as the society awards him, he becomes a slave to the society.
Herbert Spencer, “The Coming Slavery,” The Contemporary Review (April 1884), p. 474. See also The Man versus the State (1884).
Back in the 1850s, when the Fugitive Slave Act was in force, the federal commissioners who determined whether a nabbed black person in the North could legally be “returned” to the South to serve as somebody’s slave were paid $5 a head if the answer were No, and $10 a head were the answer Yes.
It is universally agreed among scholars that this incentive resulted in free blacks being kidnapped and turned into slaves.
It was one of the reasons why there was so much resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act in the northern states.
Incentives matter.
Similarly, though with far less momentous initial consequences, hospitals get paid more from the federal government if doctors or administrators list a patient as a coronavirus patient when placing them on ventilators.
This became an issue because a medical doctor, Minnesota State Senator Scott Jensen, made it one in several venues, including on Fox News.
The Snopes fact-checking service rated Jensen’s claims a “mixture,” but USA Today diagnosed the claims “as TRUE.”
Not only do hospitals and doctors get paid more, laboratory-confirmed tests are not required — all “made possible under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act through a Medicare 20% add-on to its regular payment for COVID-19 patients.”
Incentives making a difference, you can see how this might inflate the numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths.
We do not know the extent of the resulting misinformation. But we know it has some effect.
Muddying up statistics is itself a danger, since evaluating the pandemic and our reactions to it is going to be a huge issue in the next few months — and years.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Maryland Makes Seven
On April 28, 1788, Maryland became the seventh state to ratify the United States Constitution.