“You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”
Author: Redactor
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Prohibition Ends
On Dec. 5, 1933, the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, repealing the 18th Amendment and bringing an end to the era of national prohibition of alcohol in America. Utah became the 36th state to ratify the amendment. Pennsylvania and Ohio had ratified it earlier in the day.
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Trash Heap Economics
Andy Stern, writing in the Wall Street Journal, covers familiar ground. They do things better elsewhere. Give up, America: adopt a foreign ideology. His title/subtitle combo — “China’s Superior Economic Model: The free-market fundamentalist economic model is being thrown onto the trash heap of history” — provides a grand example of passive voice construction allowing evasion of the crucial elements: Who throws what away?
First, the what: “The conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model” described as “so successful in the 20th century” … with no discussion, absolutely none, as to what extent our business life is actually run by this “model.”
“Shareholder only”? Some of the biggest businesses in the U.S. are privately held, not publicly traded. Not a few huge and influential enterprises, like the absurdly mismanaged postal service, the disruptive Fannie and Freddie, and the morally bankrupt Federal Reserve are government-created and not public in the shareholder-model sense. Add in taxes, regulation, and a perpetual deficit government budget, backed by the inflationist Fed, and the truth pops up exactly opposed to Stern’s: America’s a very mixed “mixed economy.”
In this context, who holds to “free-market fundamentalism”? A number of people, almost exclusively on the outs. The richest and most powerful insiders work against free markets, no matter what they say. Hence bailouts, subsidies, and a whole lot of “planning.”
China may be “blessed” with a huge population aiming to get ahead and with a government that runs budget surpluses, while we are cursed, primarily, with continuous deficit financing of the federal government, and everything that entails.
The solution? Reassert the model Stern wants to chuck.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“We do not want to fritter away our short lives in chains, even if they are golden chains of prosperity and power.”
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Committee for Assistance to Jews
On 4 Dec. 1942, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz set up the underground Council for the Assistance of the Jews in Warsaw, Poland, codenamed Żegota. Providing medical care, relief money and false identity documents for those hiding in German-occupied Poland, the organization helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews.
On this day in 2005, an estimated 60,000 to 250,000 people in Hong Kong protested for democracy, calling for universal and equal suffrage, the right to directly elect the Chief Executive and all the seats of the Legislative Council, and am end to the appointed seats of the district councils.
What do you call a defense bill that allows indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay of American citizens accused but not convicted of assisting terrorists without due process? Tyranny. Unconstitutional. Rand Paul compares the now-pending legislation to the hated Egyptian Emergency Law enforced against dissidents for 30 years, which ended with the overthrow of the Mubarak regime: