Author: Redactor

Categories
general freedom too much government

Les Climate Lockdowns

France, ban, heat, freedom

It’s hot outside. In southern France, very hot. Obviously (?), then, regional governments there are justified in prohibiting various outdoor activities.

Following the pandemic-lockdown model, it is apparently now acceptable to annul the rights of French citizens if some persons may be hurt by the heat. Once again, adults are being treated as if not responsible for making their own judgments about personal risks.

In the Bordeaux area of France — the Gironde department, a “department” being a sort of county — officials recently banned various outdoor events, including concerts and commemorations of resistance to Germany during World War Two.

The department also prohibited indoor events in places that lack air conditioning.

“Everyone now faces a health risk,” one official explained, as if summer were a new thing.

We care about weather when deciding whether to proceed with events we have planned. We think nothing of calling off a parade on account of rain. By “we” I mean the organizers, who may or may not be a government entity.

But there’s a big difference between deciding oneself to cancel an event one is responsible for and a government’s decision to outlaw events produced by others.

Summer is just starting. Next comes winter. Cold.

Governments seem to be regarding the COVID-19 lockdowns as evidence of just how much pushing around we’ll accept in the name of eliminating all risk but the risk to freedom.

A lot, seems to be the conclusion. 

We must show them otherwise. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

J. H. Levy

Socialism has its black sheep. What cause has not? But that which fills me with grief is that it has so many white ones. The most miserable circumstance of our time is that much of its devotion and self-denial is running into Socialistic channels. It is this misdirected self-abnegation, characteristic of the Dark Ages, which is carrying us back to them.

Joseph Hiam Levy, The Outcome of Individualism (Third Edition, 1892).
Categories
Today

Bitter Bierce

John Cabot landed in North America at Newfoundland on June 24, 1497, leading the first European exploration of the region since the Vikings.

In 1535 on this date, the Anabaptist state of Münster wa conquered and disbanded.

June 24 birthdays include Henry Ward Beecher, clergyman and reformer (1813); Ambrose Bierce [pictured], author of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and The Devil’s Dictionary — his dark, cynical wit earned him the epithet “Bitter Bierce” (1842); Richard Timberlake, American free-market economist (1922–2020).

Categories
education and schooling judiciary

The Choice in School Choice

private school, students, religious

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that state programs which help parents pay for private schooling may not discriminate against parents who want to send their kids to a religious school.

The court relied on its 2020 ruling that state programs subsidizing private schooling “cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”

The present case pertains to a Maine program. The court determined that “Maine’s ‘nonsectarian’ requirement for otherwise generally available tuition assistance payments violates the Free Exercise Clause.”

It adds that a state government’s interest in not establishing a religion “does not justify enactments that exclude some members of the community from an otherwise generally available public benefit because of their religious exercise.”

Maine’s tuition program is for families who live in regions without any secondary public school. Qualifying families can use the subsidy to pay for either public or private schooling in another part of the state. Before 1981, Maine had no problem with students going to religious schools under the program. In that year, the rule changed.

So-called sectarian schools are, of course, often the major and sometimes the only private secondary-school alternative to public schools in an area. According to the Council for American Private Education, 78 percent of all students who attend private schools in the U.S. attend schools that are religiously affiliated.

Proponents of keeping kids trapped in public schools are in an uproar over the court’s decision.

But it only stands to reason that school choice programs must permit choice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Charles Dickens

Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; — the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Book III – “The Track of a Storm: Chapter V – The Wood-Sawyer.”
Categories
Today

Victory Day

Today is Estonia’s Victory Day, which has been celebrated on June 23 every year since 1934. The date recalls the victory in the 1919 Battle of Vonnu of the Estonian military forces (and Latvian North brigade) and their allies over German forces (Baltische Landeswehr) who sought to re-assert Baltic-German control over the region. The battle was part of the 1918-1920 Estonian War of Independence, where the main adversary of the newly independent Estonia was Communist Russia.

Today, Victory Day also marks the contributions of all Estonians in their fight to regain and retain their independence. Estonian celebration of June 23 is ceremonially tied to the following Midsummer Day celebrations on June 24.

According to Estonian laws, the state flags are not to be lowered during the night between days.

Categories
tax policy too much government

For a Thousand Years

government, monster, politics

Time for a gas-tax holiday. 

When the people lie prostrate, when the people groan under heavy burdens, when the people just can’t take it anymore — and when an election is coming up — that is the time for politicians to relieve everyone’s burden.

A bit.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen favors considering a temporary gas-tax holiday to emulate some of the states. Reviving the Keystone oil pipeline — no, not something to consider, she says. But she’s okay with a brief gas-tax break.

Let’s do better.

I propose a millennium-long gas-tax holiday, government-barriers-to-drilling holiday, regulation-of-all-industries holiday. Under my plan, government gets all the way out of the way of all markets so we can all be as prosperous as possible, whether or not a big economic crisis is underway.

But would there be any such crises — long-term and intractable economy-wide crises, I mean — if my plan were enacted?

When government does everything possible to injure the economy and prevent recovery, it takes a long time for markets to bounce back from shocks. If ever.

Un-fetter the markets, though, and economic actors would be able more rapidly to adjust to major jolts. If gas imported from overseas plummets, producers could then quickly adapt by expanding production. They cannot readily do so now because government imposes so many barriers.

The politicians’ preference for modest, namby-pamby reprieves are not only substantially weak, they send the wrong signals. They get doled out as if government were doing us a special favor . . . by not beating us up so badly for a very little while.

We need freedom. On an ongoing basis.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Isaac Newton

Amicus Plato — amicus Aristoteles — magis amica veritas

Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but my greatest friend is truth.

Sir Isaac Newton, Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae [Certain Philosophical Questions] (c. 1664).
Categories
Today

Giants

On June 22, 1633, astronomer Galileo Galilei recanted his belief in heliocentrism, the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun. He didn’t do this based on scientific research, but under pressure from the Holy Office in Rome.

Three hundred forty-five years later, to the date, American astronomer James W. Christy discovered Charon, a moon for what was then called “the ninth planet,” Pluto. This put Christy in an august company of satellite discovers, including Galileo, who had discovered four of Jupiter’s moons in 1610.

When Pluto was later “demoted” to “dwarf planet” status, in 2006, no one was put under house arrest for objecting, or for not changing his or her mind, as had Galileo been centuries before.

Categories
education and schooling ideological culture

Some Scandal

drag show, education

Why do public schools and libraries expose their charges to drag queens and cross-dressers but not to strip-club “artistes”?

Both are overtly sexual and “kinky” and contra traditional family values. But “drag” is where men (and now boys) dress up in parodic feminine clothing. Milton Berle did it as comedy while the “Drag Queen Story Hours” held these days in schools and libraries around the country play for something else.

In late May, in Iowa, “Ankeny’s Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) club hosted a drag event as part of the club’s end-of-the-year meeting,” explains KCCI Des Moines. “The event was not for the whole school.”

Thankfully. 

“Drag event at Ankeny High School,” ran the headline, “draws criticism from some parents” — why the “some”? Normally, wouldn’t it read “draws criticism from parents”? Could the editor have used it, here, to weaponize this as a divisive issue rather than a public scandal?

Before you can say “Sodom and Gomorrah,” the real problem with allowing drag shows in schools reveals itself: this is not unlike a religious issue, except the religion is irr-. 

A tent revival meeting in a public school should be scandalous, too, if with a different “some.” While prayer groups and LGBTQ+ clubs are both fine on public school campuses, as part of normal student activities allowed outside the curriculum, a mass baptism would not be fine, and neither are . . . drag shows.

Behind all this I catch a whiff of something worse than the push to normalize (rather than merely legalize) “sex work”: anti-natalism. Not having babies. All of this fits the population reduction ideology that has been pushed since the Sixties.

A tax-funded movement against the basic task of humanity. 

That’s the most scandalous.

The opposite of Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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