“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet, nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”
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Author: Redactor
On March 3, 1836, Texans signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, officially breaking from Mexico to establish the Republic of Texas.
On March 3, 1863, the U.S. Congress passed the Civil War conscription act, the first wartime draft of U.S. citizens in American history. The act required registration of all males between 20 and 45 years of age. Exemptions could be purchased for $300 or by finding a substitute. Only 18 percent of those registered and drafted actually entered the Union army. The law was fiercely opposed. Protests of the draft law in New York City led to bloody riots, in which estimates of deaths range from 120 to 2,000 and 2,000 to 8,000 people injured.
On March 3, 1945, American and Filipino troops recaptured Manila in the Philippines from the Empire of Japan.
Voters in Wichita, Kansas, went to the polls, Tuesday, to smash a measure that would have forked over $2.25 million in tax rebates to a downtown hotel project. Those supporting the giveaway spent $300,000 to promote the deal, while opponents ponied up a scant $30,000 against it. The vote nevertheless strongly weighed against the big money, 62 to 38 percent.
The Wichita City Council had enacted this “economic development” deal with the hotel developers, and that would have been the end of it . . . but for some pesky Wichita taxpayers.
Kansans may lack a statewide initiative and referendum, but there is a local process, so citizens possessed a tool for effective resistance. They formed Tax Fairness for All Wichitans and, working with the Kansas chapter of Americans for Prosperity, they hit the streets to gather over 2,700 signatures to require Tuesday’s vote.
After the victory, Bob Weeks, the group’s chair, reminded fellow activists that the battle is far from over:
The Ambassador Hotel is receiving assistance from eight taxpayer-funded government programs with costs of $15.4 million up-front and several hundred thousand annually. None of these were affected by the election. Wichita city hall and its allies are ready, willing, and able to use these incentive programs in the future for other hotels and businesses.
Weeks summed up the election results this way: “The best way to create jobs is to get government out of the way. . . . That is what the voters said tonight.”
On behalf of the new Liberty Initiative Fund, I’m honored to have given two cents worth of advice to their effort. They changed public policy, saved tax dollars and threw a big monkey wrench into the machinery of crony capitalism.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Congress ends importation of slaves
On March 2, 1807, the U.S. Congress passed an act to “prohibit the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States…from any foreign kingdom, place, or country.”
“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who’ll decide where to go.”
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Closed: No Competition
Ancient societies were mostly closed societies. Modern society (at least as conceived by most of America’s “founding fathers”) was to be something very different: open.
But today there’s way too much “managed” competition, basically closing out businesses not on some insider list.
Julie Crowe, a veteran of the armed forces and lifelong resident of Bloomington, Illinois, wanted to start up a van ride service, mainly to drive party-going Illinois State students safely home. There are big buses for Bloomington revelers, but no vans. Her new service would have provided interesting competition for existing outfits, and her idea of providing safer, more personal, comfier rides home — arguably better than taxicabs, and certainly better than the buses — smacks of a plausible business plan.
But the city denied her a permit to even try, on the grounds that her proposal wasn’t “in the public interest.”
Preposterous, of course. Or, as her lawyer, Jacob Huebert, puts it,
How can city planners know the “right” number of vehicles to serve the community? They can’t possibly know that, any more than they can know the right number of supermarkets or the right number of restaurants.
Huebert is associate counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, a project of the Illinois Policy Institute, which has as its stated goal ensuring “that the rights to earn a living and to start a business, which are essential to a free and prosperous society, are available not just to a politically privileged few, but to all.”
A great cause. The “eternal vigilance” required to establish and maintain a free, open society means challenging idiotic government encroachments one case at a time.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Democracy Sans Factions?
It’s worth remembering, as Democrats proceed with programs that have failed in the past and as Republican insiders strive to rig their own nomination process, that the political parties are private organizations. They are not governments.
They are groups of people working to gain control over government — and that control can only ever be temporary. Let us hope.
Over many years of activism in politics I’ve supported openness in elections and ballot access, working for a variety of reforms, including the securing of the rights to initiative, referendum and recall. I’ve also contemplated a few less simple ideas, like Instant Runoff Voting and proportional representation, both designed to break (or at least ease up on) the stranglehold that the two-party system has over American democracy.
But additional reforms are worth thinking about. One, for instance, would prohibit any mention of a party name on a ballot.
Since the parties are private groups, they ought not have special access to the public ballot. All the more because the two parties are a problem in and of themselves — their perennial clamor for power perverts political discourse, unnecessarily restricting and channeling the direction of debate.
Such rules already hold sway in many county and municipal governments throughout the country. It could be instructive to study the differences in politicking and policy.
For todays’ growing ranks of independent and unaffiliated voters, perhaps the motivations in favor wouldn’t wholly be rational, but partly vengeful.
And perhaps partisans might wish to consider the reasons for that kind of anti-partisan sentiment.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On Feb. 29, 1972, Hank Aaron signed a three-year deal with the Atlanta Braves that paid him $200,000 per year, making him the highest-paid player in Major League Baseball at the time. Two years later, Aaron became baseball’s career home run king when he broke Babe Ruth’s long-standing record.
On Feb. 29, 1988, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu was arrested along with 100 clergymen during a five-day anti-apartheid demonstration in Cape Town.
“Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”
Wikipedia surprised a lot of people, changed a lot of minds: Online collaboration can accomplish great things. Following Wikipedia, other interactive, collaborative, not-quite-commercial Web-based projects have offered more evidence that the Internet can transform everyday life.
Take Kickstarter.com. It’s really ramped up to something impressive, as Carl Franzen points out at Talking Points Memo:
One of the company’s three co-founders, Yancey Strickler, said that Kickstarter is on track to distribute over $150 million dollars to its users’ projects in 2012, or more than entire fiscal year 2012 budget for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which was $146 million.
Lots of folks around the world — including shirttail acquaintances of mine — have successfully used the Internet service to fund outré projects. Basically, they drew up proposals and placed them on Kickstarter, and people the world over chipped in to get the projects off the ground. As Franzen explains, all sorts of projects find funding that way, “everything from iPod Nano watches to children’s books on reproduction.”
While I look at this as a great development, another way in which free peoples can get good things done without government, not everyone is so positive — the above-quoted Strickler, for instance: “Maybe there’s a reason for the state to strongly support the arts.”
Or maybe not. Maybe Kickstarter is pointing towards the right way to fund projects that, before the Internet, were hard to invest in or otherwise sponsor.
Maybe it’s about time.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.