Author: Redactor

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Today

March 8 anti-slavery Paine

On March 8, 1775, an anonymous writer published “African Slavery in America”, the first article in the American colonies calling for the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery. Some people think that Tom Paine was the author.

Other March 8 events:

In 1908, Jennings Randolph was born. Randolph was best known for sponsoring eleven times an amendment to the Constitution that would grant citizens aged between 18 and 21 the right to vote.

In 1917, seeking to limit the ability to maneuver with the filibuster, the Senate voted to establish the cloture rule.

In 1983, U.S. President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” He thus scored points for telling the obvious truth.

Categories
education and schooling folly responsibility

Cold Contempt for Common Sense

It began when a science experiment at a Minnesota high school set off a fire alarm. One of the students, Kayona Tietz, was swimming at the time. Her clothes were in her locker.

Because the alarm was unplanned, a teacher ushered Kayona outside without letting her retrieve her clothes. All she had between her wet swimsuit and the five-below-zero weather was a towel.

Once outside, to be protected ASAP from the cold the 14-year-old could simply have sat in one of the faculty-owned cars. Everyone knew this. Nevertheless, ten minutes passed before she was allowed to do so, by which time she was suffering frostbite. A teacher felt it necessary to first acquire permission from school administrators for an exception to rules obviously inapplicable to the circumstances. Eventually, also, a teacher lent Kayona a jacket . . . but not immediately.

What happened immediately is that her classmates huddled around to keep her as warm as they could. Apparently they lacked the training to blindly follow rules intended to protect students as morally superior to, well, actually protecting their classmate.

A girl got frostbitten because school personnel were complicit in a bizarre and dramatic loss of common sense. One needn’t “review procedures” to prevent such things. One need only use common sense (and be free to use it!) The inane regulations may have originated in some bureaucrat’s cubicle. But those on the spot were responsible for their own judgment.

Or lack of it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Frédéric Bastiat

The true and equitable law of humanity is the free exchange of service for service. Spoliation consists in destroying by force or by trickery the freedom of exchange, in order to receive a service without rendering one.

Categories
crime and punishment insider corruption U.S. Constitution

Fifth Dimension Feds

I like the Fifth Amendment.

I took it myself in 2007 when Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson was witch-hunting with his grand jury. My attorney advised that I had more to fear from innocently misstating something and being vindictively charged with perjury than from the ridiculous indictments the AG would file against the “Oklahoma 3” — and then dismiss.

The Fifth Amendment protects the individual from government fishing expeditions, from browbeating by big, bad prosecutors — which includes congressional committees acting as such.

I don’t want to diminish our Fifth Amendment rights in any way, for any citizen.

Even when Citizen Lois Lerner asserts her Fifth Amendment privilege while the acting director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division. And yes, even in yesterday’s repeat performance — having since retired with a pension — she still avoids congressional questions about official actions that appear to violate fundamental civil rights.

The House committee may charge Lerner with contempt (I already do). Admittedly, without her testimony, we may never know the full extent of the official campaign against certain political groups.

But we do know enough to take action.

Free and democratic participation in society requires a better system. Each non-profit group that forms must file a tax return, so there is transparency and oversight. The time has come to shut down the IRS Exempt Organizations Division approval process for non-profit groups and end the current prior restraint on participating in public policy.

We don’t need the Internal Revenue Service to stand as a censor bureaucratically or politically approving or dawdling to decide whether certain groups are permitted to organize.

A free society cannot tolerate it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Frédéric Bastiat

If the greatest philosophers have been able to deceive themselves as to the iniquity of slavery, how much easier is it for farmers and manufacturers to deceive themselves as to the nature and effects of the protective system.

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Thought

Frédéric Bastiat

[T]o destroy an error is to build up the truth that stands opposed to it.

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judiciary

Beardless in Arkansas

The United States Supreme Court has accepted a legal petition presented in an unusual manner: in handwritten form, without the benefit of any lawyer.

The case comes from a convict in the Arkansas State prison system, one Gregory Holt, “aka Abdul Malik Muhammad,” who wants to wear a beard while incarcerated, in accordance with his religion. The prison rules prohibit beards on hygiene and security grounds. Muhammad’s case is interesting. Questions include (and I quote)

  • Whether the Arkansas Department of Corrections’ no beard grooming policy violates the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act…
  • Whether a 1/2 inch beard would satisfy the security goals sought by the policy.
  • Whether the no beard grooming policy violates Petitioner’s First Amendment right to practice Islam as he believes it…

How will the Supreme Court rule? On the face of it (no beard pun intended), prisoners’ appeals for court intervention in how they are incarcerated, on the basis of their rights, may seem odd to some. After all, the whole point of imprisonment is to deny the most basic right to liberty, because, presumably, a criminal has denied someone else’s rights.

But in our society, even those guilty of serious crimes and having lost much of their freedom retain certain rights. This stems mostly from our fear of what becomes of us — not the criminals — should we stop respecting every person’s humanity.

It’s also heartening to see a petition rise to the highest court in the land from the very lowest perch without aid of a lawyer … or even a computer or typewriter.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

Autopsy Myopia

The results are in: Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died from acute mixed drug intoxication. He had combined heroin with benzodiazepines. That combination did him in.

It wasn’t a “heroin overdose” as such.

Indeed, according to Jacob Sullum writing at reason.com,

Drug combinations like this are typical of deaths attributed to heroin or other narcotics. Data from the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) indicate that “multi-drug deaths” accounted for most fatalities involving opiates or opioids in 2010: 72 percent in suburban New York, 83 percent in Los Angeles, and 56 percent in Chicago, for example. Back in the early 1990s, the share of heroin-related deaths reported by DAWN that involved other drugs was even higher, 90 percent or more.

We hear about “overdoses” of illegal drugs for the simple reason that this plays into the hands of those who run the War on Drugs. It’s an inconvenient truth, for them, that the most deadly problem with most narcotics (illegal or prescription-legal) is with what other drugs (illegal or prescription-legal or over-the-counter) they interact.

One might argue that drug warriors, by focusing on targeted illegal drugs, are killing Americans by distracting us from the biggest danger, mixing drugs.

This over-focus on a hated thing to the detriment of good diagnosis is not limited to pharmacology.

Consider economic policy. I know many people who blame the 2008 financial implosion (as well as its lingering effects, even) entirely on the 1990s (bipartisan) repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. They focus on one bit of deregulation. Other enforced regulations leading to the debacle, not to mention Federal Reserve inflationism, housing market subsidies, anti-discrimination programs, and a whole mortgage after-market created by government creatures, Fannie and Freddie?

Blankout.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

Categories
Thought

Frédéric Bastiat

Among the new arrangements that feeble mortals are invited to make trial of, there is one that is presented to us in terms worthy of attention. Its formula is: Association, voluntary and progressive.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Are You My Father?

Van Jones, the president’s controversial former green jobs czar, must have been struck by lightning yesterday en route to taping ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

Discussing President Obama’s new “My Brother’s Keeper” program to “build pathways to success” for at-risk “children of color,” Van Jones embraced a notion of corporate personhood far beyond anything previously expressed . . . well, by anyone.

First, Jones advanced the new Obama initiative as just another bailout: “Listen, everybody else . . . got in trouble in America. Wall Street got in trouble; we were there for them. The auto industry got in trouble; we were there for the auto industry. You got a whole generation of young kids who are clearly in trouble.”

A bailout isn’t a dad, though.

And functioning fathers are “essential,” argued Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald. Noting that fatherless kids are 20 times more likely to go to prison and nine times more likely to drop out of school, she applauded the president’s statement that “nothing keeps a young man out of trouble like a father who takes an active role in his son’s life.”

MacDonald also highlighted that a whopping 73 percent of black children are now born to single mothers, and that three decades of social programs “haven’t made much difference.”

“Do you think you need anybody to tell us how terrible this is?” Van Jones, who is black, pointedly asked Mac Donald. “We work on it every day. We need corporate America to step up.”

Jones wants corporations to be fathers to our children? That’s taking personhood for corporations too far.

And asking too little of men.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.