Every man’s memory is his private literature.
Categories
Author: Redactor
Categories
Aldous Huxley
The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
Lately, governments have sought to seem more fiscally responsible by re-confabulating how they calculate a measure of economy-wide economic strength called Gross Domestic Product. (The principle involved is ancient. It’s been denominated “fudging.”)
One of the crassest number-jugglers is the Italian government.
Italy wants to comply with a European Union demand that it limit debt to 2.6% of GDP. If the country’s GDP is statistically fattened by using looser rules for calculating it, then debt as percentage of GDP becomes magically “lower” — as a statistical percentage. Italian politicians can lurch to waste more money while still fetching EU handouts.
A year ago, the American fedgov was guilty of similar fudging when it statistically padded our GDP by $500 billion.
Statistical aggregates like GDP entail much guesswork and many dubious assumptions to begin with. For one thing, why is government spending — including that huge portion that dampens or destroys economic production — included in a calculation supposedly measuring economic value? (A better indicator of general economic strength, Gross Output, hasn’t quite caught on yet. And I don’t expect those highest up in government to push it.)
The purpose of the number-tweaking by Italy, the U.S. and other governments is hardly to improve or amend or salvage whatever is conceivably salvageable in the original number-crunching. The purpose is to disguise bad policies.
But jiggering with how the impact of awful policies is guesstimated in order to better to hide their consequences won’t erase the awfulness of those policies. And curtailing or ending awful policies can be done entirely without peering into statistic-stoked crystal balls.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Video: America, the Very Idea
From Dinesh D’Souza’s new movie, now in theaters:
July 27 births include that of Samuel Smith (1872; pictured), an American who served as a captain, major, and lieutenant colonel in the Continental Army, and later as a politician in several capacities in the state of Maryland; Hillaire Belloc (1870), author of a classic analysis of modern political governance, The Servile State; and American singer and songwriter Bobbie Gentry (1944).
On July 27, 1694, the Bank of England received a royal charter, beginning a long history of central banking in England. Subsequent inflationary booms and deflationary busts are subsequently considered “mysterious” by people connected with the bank.
On this day in 1974, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee voted 27 to 11 to recommend the first article of impeachment (for obstruction of justice) against President Richard Nixon.
Categories
Townhall: Torpedoing P2P?
Things are about to change for the better. The only thing that is standing in the way is pig-headed government.
Over at Townhall, a revolution is considered. Back here, the intellectual ammunition is provided:
- Wikipedia: Uber
- Wikipedia: Lyft
- Common Sense: Let Us Drive
- Common Sense: P2P Jitneys
- EconTalk: Michael Munger on the Sharing Economy
Be a parent, go to jail?
Should it be normal for parents to get arrested for making normal parental decisions — just because someone else believes it’s a mistake?
I’m not talking about demonstrable child abuse. I’m talking about the kind of decisions Radley Balko cites in a column on “the criminalization of parenthood.”
In one case, a South Carolina working mom was jailed for “unlawful conduct toward a child” — for letting her nine-year-old play in a well-attended park while she worked at McDonald’s. Social services took the child.
In another case, an Ohio father faces six months in jail because, unbeknownst to him, his eight-year-old son skipped church to play with friends in the neighborhood.
In a third, an Illinois woman was arrested for leaving a stubborn eight-year-old in her car for a few minutes while she dashed into a store.
We may disagree with what the parents did here (to the extent they could have done anything different). But arrest? Jail?
For six months?
One minute?
In the world that these incidents prefigure, the only way for parents to be “safe” in using our judgment will be to stop using it.
This would be life under the tyranny of “experts” and busybodies: to always project what the most skittish and punitive “authority” would require — and to do that instead of what we ourselves consider appropriate given all relevant, sometimes difficult circumstances.
Final question: What lesson does this brave new regime teach the children?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Aldous Huxley
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
In the closing days of Arkansas’s 2013 legislative session, solons of the Natural State surreptitiously voted to put a measure on the state ballot, without fanfare or ballyhoo.
Five months later, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette finally noticed what happened, and published an editorial, “Outrage of the Year.’ It has just been reprinted. The outrage hasn’t changed. The measure would extend time in office “for state representatives from 6 to 16 years and for state senators from 8 to 16 years.”
But what an Arkansan will read on the ballot seems a tad different: “An Amendment Regulating Contributions to Candidates for State or Local Office, Barring Gifts From Lobbyists to Certain State Officials, Providing for Setting Salaries of Certain State Officials, and Setting Term Limits for Members of the General Assembly.”
“Setting” term limits? No sir. Term limits, already set by voters, would be drastically weakened.
But the good people of Arkansas are beginning to hear the good news, the truth, thanks to the campaign being waged by Arkansas Term Limits against what will be “Issue 3” on the ballot.
The group is led by Bob Porto and my brother, Tim Jacob, who are traveling the state speaking to audiences. Not surprisingly, the people are shocked and angered upon hearing the manifest fraud their representatives are perpetrating.
At a recent talk, Jacob called it “an attempt to deceive the voters,” noting “they have done it on purpose.”
Yet another argument for strict term limits . . . and fully informed voters.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Aldous Huxley
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.