Not all capitalisms are created equal:
I prefer the term “free market” to the word “capitalism” because it emphasizes a system that is “free” rather than one feature of it, capital. Capital is a critical aspect of every economic system. But freedom is something we can add to our current mess to bring not only more wealth, but a more feasible order. And sense of justice.
Kudos to Annette Meeks at the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota for highlighting crony capitalism.
On May 19, 1795, Josiah Bartlett, a New Hampshire Patriot and signatory of the Declaration of Independence who also served as the state’s governor and Supreme Court chief justice, died.
On May 19, 1897, Oscar Wilde was released from jail after two years of hard labor. In 1891, the Marquess of Queensbury denounced Wilde as a homosexual. Wilde, who was involved with the marquess’ son, sued for libel but lost when evidence supported the marquess’ allegations. Because homosexuality was a crime in England, Wilde was arrested. His first trial resulted in a hung jury, but a second jury sentenced him to two years. After his release, Wilde fled to Paris and began writing The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). Wilde died just three years after his release.
On May 19, 1935, T.E. Lawrence, known to the world as Lawrence of Arabia, died as a retired Royal Air Force mechanic living under an assumed name. The legendary war hero, author, and archaeological scholar succumbed to injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident six days earlier. Sent to join the Arabian army of Hussein’s son Faisal as a liaison officer in 1916, Lawrence proving a gifted military strategist, helping the Arabs launch an effective guerrilla war against the Ottoman Turks. After the war, he lobbied hard for independence for Arab countries, appearing at the Paris peace conference in Arab robes.
“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.”
Taking on the government employees’ unions was a gutsy move for Wisconsin’s freshman governor, Scott Walker. Now facing recall, he’s caught in a swarm of controversy, his opponents as angry as bees near a kicked hive.
Nick Gillespie and Jim Epstein, in a Reason TV video segment called “3 Lies About the Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker Recall,” look behind the hysterical denunciations and at the facts. All three of their points deserve consideration, but I’m most interested in the first, their debunking of the “lie” that “Gov. Walker Cut Spending.” Surprise, surprise — total spending in Wisconsin is going up:
Gov. Walker has cut the rate at which Wisconsin’s state budget is growing, but he hasn’t actually cut spending. In fact, the state’s biennial budget is scheduled to increase by about 3 percent on Walker’s watch, rising from $62.6 billion (2009-11) to $64.3 billion (2011-13).
We see the same disconnect at the federal level.
A few Republicans present budgets that slow growth in spending, yet do not decrease spending in total. But, since we do see cuts here and there, to this program or that, Democrats take each minor cut as an occasion to scream and holler about how indecent and heartless “greedy Republicans” are for cutting spending.
And yet spending has gone up.
The complainers, by focusing on those few actual cuts, ignore the overall increases. They thus effectively demand that government spending increase always and everywhere.
While talk of Republican “cutters” must be taken with a grain of salt, it’s impossible to take their critics seriously at all.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On May 18, 1989, a crowd of protesters, estimated to number more than one million, marched through the streets of Beijing calling for a more democratic political system. Less than a month later, Chinese troops would forcibly remove protesters from Tiananmen Square, killing an estimated 2,500 and injuring as many as 10,000.
On May 18, 1917, six weeks after the United States formally entered the First World War, the U.S Congress passed the Selective Service Act, giving the president the power to conscript soldiers. Of the almost 4.8 million Americans who eventually served in the war, some 2.8 million were drafted.
On May 18, 1652, Rhode Island passed the first law in English-speaking North America making slavery illegal.
“The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency.”
When times get tough, the tough . . . switch currencies.
A fascinating report in The Atlantic tells of the upswing in “local currencies.” In the United Kingdom, the Brixton Pound is being floated, engraved on its paper notes the likes of “David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust era.” Pegged to the British pound, it serves mainly as a scheme to promote local business and trade, though maybe it’s a tad more than mere boosterism.
Bavarians are also “enthusiastically using the local currency as a protest” — the local currency being the Chiemgauer. And “similar currencies have popped up around the world,” including in Canada and the United States.
The Atlantic story also mentions the idea of a “time bank,” a one-step-up-from-barter method based on labor hours and (in some cases) accounting for a variety of skill levels. Such “systems are in use all over the world . . . though the organizers are careful to make sure that the time is never given a specific value in a hard currency, which would open the door to taxation from governments.”
That caveat shows how barter and labor time exchanges might seem the more “revolutionary,” from, say, an establishment point of view. It’s worth noting that the idea’s greatest early proponent was Josiah Warren, America’s genius utopian experimenter and theoretician of “individual sovereignty.”
Less of a radical, Rep. Ron Paul echoes eminent monetary economist and Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek by promoting the “denationalization of money,” arguing that government policy should allow all currencies to float, getting rid of all taxation on trade amongst currencies as well as repealing all legal tender laws.
For my part, I would greatly enjoy spending a Ziggy Stardust banknote.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
On May 17, 1792, the New York Stock Exchange was formed.
On May 17, 1954, in a major civil rights victory, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, ruling that racial segregation in public educational facilities is unconstitutional.
On May 17, 1973, the U.S. Senate’s televised hearings into the Watergate scandal began.
On May 17, 2004, Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to legalize same-sex marriage.
The day before the official debut of Brian Doherty’s Ron Paul’s Revolution — the new book on the man, his crusade and his many enthusiastic supporters — Ron Paul slipped his 2012 presidential campaign into neutral:
Our campaign will continue to work in the state convention process. We will continue to take leadership positions, win delegates, and carry a strong message to the Republican National Convention that Liberty is the way of the future.
Moving forward, however, we will no longer spend resources campaigning in primaries in states that have not yet voted.
The BBC puts Ron Paul’s delegate count at 104, with frontrunner Mitt Romney 178 short of a lock on the nomination — but that’s at present, before the upcoming primaries. As the BBC concisely summarized Dr. Paul’s campaign, he had some successes in “several contests, in states such as Maine and Nevada,” gaining “some delegates and sometimes a significant portion of the popular vote. But he was viewed by the Republican establishment as a candidate outside party orthodoxy, and he did not manage to win a single primary election.”
Talk to a Ron Paul organizer, and you can hear harrowing tales of how the Republican establishment treated Paul’s supporters as outsiders. Despite such ill treatment, chronicler Brian Doherty compares Ron Paul’s future influence on the party to that of the past influence of Barry Goldwater. “His fans understand that Ron Paul is not just out to win an election.”
Dr. Paul’s near-term influence, though, is less obvious. In his 2008 outing he was shut out, and held his own very successful parallel rally. What he hopes to accomplish at the upcoming nominating convention remains to be seen. He concludes his letter with promise of further elaboration of his campaign’s delegate strategy. But his main thrust, in this letter and elsewhere, has been to build a long-lasting movement.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.