Author: Redactor

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Thought

Herbert Spencer

Sympathy which, a generation ago, was taking the shape of justice, is relapsing into the shape of generosity; and the generosity is exercised by inflicting injustice. Daily legislation betrays little anxiety that each shall have that which belongs to him, but great anxiety that he shall have that which belongs to somebody else. For while no energy is expended in so reforming our judicial administration that everyone may obtain and enjoy all he has earned, great energy is shown in providing for him and others benefits which they have not earned. Along with that miserable laissez-faire which calmly looks on while men ruin themselves in trying to enforce by law their equitable claims, there goes activity in supplying them, at other men’s cost, with gratis novel-reading!

Herbert Spencer, Principles of Ethics, Vol. 2, Part IV: “Justice” (1891), Chapter 5, “The Idea of Justice.”
Categories
Today

Run for the Border

On May 2, 1989, Hungary began dismantling its border fence with Austria, allowing a number of East Germans to defect.

Categories
ideological culture media and media people

They Don’t Get It

Jerry Seinfeld, woke culture, humor, comedy, TV

Jerry Seinfeld seems so everyday-observant you get the idea that there can be nothing controversial about his comedy. But that just isn’t so. He’s had to avoid colleges for many years because the humorless young simply cannot take thoughts that lie even slightly outside their safe-space delimited comfort zones.

Right now he’s getting some viral shares for an interview he did, wherein he clarifies his position.

Comedy, he says, is something everyone needs. “They need it so badly, and they don’t get it. It used to be you’d go home at the end of the day, most people would go, ‘Oh, Cheers is on. Oh, M.A.S.H. is on. Oh, Mary Tyler Moore is on. All in the Family is on.’ You just expected, ‘there’ll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight.’

“Well, guess what. Where is it? This is the result of the extreme left, and PC crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.”

In other words, wokeness kills comedy.

“When you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups, ‘Here’s our thoughts about this joke . . .’ well, that’s the end of your comedy.”

Yet, Seinfeld went on to explain how he works around all this. Avoiding colleges is only a part of it. 

In the end, it helps being good at what you do. Work around the nonsense, most of the time, but speak out against it, as he does now and then.

And it might help to continue laughing at the woke as well as laughing in spite of them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Herbert Spencer

It is a tolerably well-ascertained fact that men are still selfish. And that beings answering to this epithet will employ the power placed in their hands for their own advantage is self-evident. Directly or indirectly, either by hook or by crook, if not openly, then in secret, their private ends will be served. Granting the proposition that men are selfish, we cannot avoid the corollary, that those who possess authority will, if permitted, use it for selfish purposes.

Herbert Spencer, “The Constitution of the State,” Part 1, Chapter XX, §2 of Social Statics: or, The Conditions essential to Happiness specified, and the First of them Developed, (London: John Chapman, 1851).
Categories
Today

Truly Antifascist

The Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, written by philosopher Benedetto Croce [pictured, above] in response to the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals by Giovanni Gentile, declared the unreconcilable split between the philosopher and the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini, to which he had previously given a vote of confidence on October 31, 1922. 

The manifesto was published by Il Mondo on May 1, 1925, which was Workers’ Day, symbolically responding to the publication of the Fascist manifesto on the Natale di Roma, the founding of Rome (traditionally celebrated on April 21). The Fascist press claimed that the Crocian manifesto was “more authoritarian” than its Fascist counterpart — a typical leftist dismissal of what used to be called “liberalism” — in Italian, liberismo — but which Croce dubbed liberism, to distinguish it from the dirigiste quasi-socialisms of self-described “liberals” of the time.

Categories
national politics & policies partisanship

Hypocrisy’s Cash Value

Donald Trump, Joe Biden, court, campaign contributions

“If these corrupt Democrats didn’t have HYPOCRISY,” the Republican National Committee explained, “they’d have NOTHING!”

After months of Biden surrogates savaging former President Donald Trump for the dastardly deed of using campaign monies to cover his mounting legal fees from the plethora of trumped-up indictments brought by partisan Democratic prosecutors, it turns out the Democrats have been doing the same thing.

The BBC noted: “Democratic donors paid at least $1.7m (£1.35m) of U.S. President Joe Biden’s legal fees during the investigation into his handling of classified documents, records show.”

“We are not spending money on legal bills or hawking gold sneakers,” Rufus Gifford, finance chair of the Biden campaign, told MSNBC only days before the news broke.

Highly questionable that Biden could sell anyone a sneaker, but the other claim was a provable lie.

“The use of party funds to cover Biden’s legal bills is not without precedent and falls within the bounds of campaign finance law,” the Associated Press article quickly informed, before adding that it “could cloud Biden’s ability to continue to hammer former President Donald Trump over his far more extensive use of donor funds to cover his legal bills.”

How unfortunate! The hypocrisy could ruin the piling on by Democrats.

“Democrats say the cases are nothing alike,” The Washington Post reported.

“There is no comparison,” offered a Democratic National Committee spokesman. “The DNC does not spend a single penny of grass-roots donors’ money on legal bills, unlike Donald Trump, who actively solicits legal fees from his supporters . . .”

Let’s get this straight: the difference is that Trump is upfront in asking his middle-class supporters for help, while Biden’s money came surreptitiously from wealthy Democrats?

This must be the proverbial dime’s worth of difference between the parties.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Mary Wollstonecraft

Rousseau exerts himself to prove that all was right originally: a crowd of authors that all is now right: and I, that all will be right.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), chapter one.
Categories
Today

Nobel Laureate Economist

On April 30, 1902, economist Theodore W. Schultz was born. His work studying the quick post-war recovery in Germany and Japan led to his development of “human capital theory” in several major papers, including “Investing in human capital” (1961) and “Transforming traditional agriculture” (1964). In a book written for a more general audience, Investing in People (1981), he invested in a wider readership by surveying the main themes of his research.

He was co-winner (with William Arthur Lewis) of the 1979 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Schultz died in 1998.

Categories
crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom regulation

Criminal Discrimination?

The Joker, Uncle Sam, racism, business, regulations, quota

It’s okay.

You don’t have to associate with criminals. You don’t have to employ them and worry how they’ll act on the job. It’s not your duty to give criminals or persons with a criminal record access to your life or property and hope for the best.

If only we could leave it at that. 

That’s not our world though. In our world, our government, working hard to rip America apart in every way possible, is suing the Sheetz chain of convenience stores because it doesn’t hire applicants with a criminal record.

The “problem” is that too many such failed applicants are nonwhite.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accuses Sheetz of “disproportionately screening out Black, Native American/Alaska Native and multiracial applicants.” The agency babbles that “employment practices causing a disparate impact because of race or other protected classifications must be shown by the employer to be necessary to ensure the safe and efficient performance of the particular jobs at issue.”

Of course, the “disparate impact” exists not because of these classifications but because the denied applicants have criminal records. Sheetz didn’t decline these applicants because of their skin colors.

Nevertheless, Sheetz is supposed to have somehow “shown” that refusing to hire applicants with criminal records reduces Sheetz’s own risks and the risks for customers.

Elon Musk, commenting on this story, has it right: “You know The Joker is running things when the law-abiding are being prosecuted by the government for not hiring criminals!”

These days Uncle Sam and The Joker do look alarmingly similar.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Theodore W. Schultz

Whereas the governments of some low-income countries are improving their economics policies, in the United States the proliferation of political movements that view economics with disdain, along with apparent general public support for government market interventions, are in considerable measure contributing to the decline in the performance of the U.S. economy.

Theodore W. Schultz, Investing in People: The Economics of Population Quality (1981), p. 143-4.