Paul reports from Michigan, where he is engaged in a huge initiative drive. He has some choice words for the politicians whose unconstitutional and lying maneuvers require us to spend time and money to oppose.
Author: Redactor
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau
To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.
On May 21, 1851, slavery was abolished in Colombia, South America.
In 2018, Jerry Brown, then California governor, signed a bill requiring corporate boards to include a high percentage of women.
Now a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has determined that the state failed to show that “gender-based classification was necessary to boost California’s economy, improve opportunities for women in the workplace, and protect California taxpayers, public employees, pensions and retirees.”
No news yet on whether the state will appeal.
In 2018, Brown had conceded that the law was probably doomed to be judged unconstitutional. But he apparently regarded questions of legality or constitutionality as irrelevant.
“It’s high time corporate boards include the people who constitute more than half the ‘persons’ in America,” he burbled in his signing message.
Fines for disobedience were to be steep: $100,000 for initial violations, $300,000 for subsequent violations.
Of course, it is neither immoral nor a crime to choose a man instead of a woman for a post. Making specific hires criminal depending upon the complexion of a business’s other hires amounts to the politicization of everything, swapping the goals of business for the goals of ideologues. It is destructive of individual rights and the requirements of conducting business profitably to compel employers choosing personnel to be guided by any considerations other than relevant qualifications. Or by any assessment but their own.
Managers of all non-government organizations should be free to use their own best judgment in hiring and contracting, whether the work involved is that of clerk, CEO, or board member.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Mill and Passy
French economist and co-winner of the first (1901) Nobel Prize for Peace, Frédéric Passy (pictured above), was born on May 20, 1822.
English economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill was born exactly 16 years earlier.
The Institute for Justice (IJ) asks a question: “Does the First Amendment protect your right to criticize public officials without being subject to frivolous lawsuits?”
Kelly Gallaher is an activist in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, who provoked the ire of Village Attorney Chris Smith.
Seeking punitive damages, Smith has sued Gallaher for inflicting “emotional distress.” Her sin is penning “hundreds of posts on social media” criticizing Smith and other officials and their policies. (Hundreds! So many scribblings by just one person?)
The issue that apparently caused him to say “By Gawd, this is the last dang straw!” is term limits.
Recently, the town’s board of trustees voted to lengthen their elective term from two to three years. Gallaher and others called for a referendum to reverse the term-fattening.
To assuage concerns, Smith claimed that changing term limits had been discussed since 2018; in other words, the change wasn’t something being sprung without prequel. When Gallaher, remembering no such previous discussion, found no evidence of it, she suggested that Smith had lied.
Smith demanded a retraction. Gallaher didn’t want to retract, but did, fearing a lawsuit. Smith sued her anyway.
“The village attorney thinks he can use his law license to bully a political opponent into silence,” says Robert McNamara, the IJ attorney assigned to defend Gallaher. “But government officials are not in charge of how members of the public talk about politics, which is something we’ll be happy to explain to him in court.”
A politician so far from the spirit of American free speech is a politician who needs something more than a withering rebuttal in court. Think: recall vote.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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In the decline of a State, of whatever nature that State be, two vices will immediately appear and grow: these are Avarice and Fear; and men will more readily accept the imputation of Avarice than of Fear, for Avarice is the less despicable of the two — yet in fact Fear will be by far the greatest passion of the time.
Hilaire Belloc, ”The Decline of a State,” in First and Last (1911).
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Wilde Released
On May 19, 1897, Irish author, playwright, and poet Oscar Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900) was released from Reading Prison, where he had finished, in ill health, his hard labor sentence for “gross indecency.” His “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” first published pseudonymously in a periodical with wide circulation amongst criminals, quickly achieved the status of a
He died less than three years later, in exile in Europe. His most famous works include the play The Importance of Being Earnest, the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the fascinating essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”
It’s easy to blame others for greed. And when prices rise, I suppose I can imagine being so upset that . . . well, if not my mind, Bernie Sanders’ mind . . . would become unhinged:
“Greed. Greed. Greed. While Americans are struggling at the pump,” the senator tweeted on Friday the 13th, “in the first three months of this year, oil and gas companies made over $41 billion in profits, more than double their profits from last year. The problem is not inflation. The problem is corporate greed.”
That’s Bernie Sanders for you. It’s not government profligacy or Federal Reserve monetary policy or the Biden Administration’s anti-fossil fuels agenda . . . or supply-line problems, persisting COVID-lockdown effects, or anything else.
Just greed.
But is greed somehow cyclical? Why were greedy corporations providing cheap gas a year ago and then able to raise it only under Democrats’ rule?
Alas, Bernie isn’t the only low-brow demagogue in the Senate. There’s Senator Elizabeth Warren pushing a new “price gouging” bill.
So, just as Bernie never answers “why is greed so successful at gouging now?,” how does Liz answer the burning question “how can we objectively define ‘price-gouging’?”
As journalist Catherine Rampell observes on Twitter, the senator’s definition in the bill is less than enlightening: “price-gouging” is “just pricing that is ‘unconscionably excessive.’”
Now that, Senator Warren, is unconscionably vague.
And incidentally, aren’t both senators on the record as demanding higher gas prices to usher in “green energy” to “save the planet”? This all seems unconscionably . . . deceptive.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Photo credits: Warren/Bernie/money
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Ultra-Dumb
A turn in rhetoric caught the attention of the attention-catchers.
On Friday, USA Today explained “Why Biden is blasting the ‘ultra MAGA’ agenda, not Donald Trump, in his midterm push.” The paper explained that Biden, seeking “to avert a midterm disaster that would all but end his domestic agenda,” is pointedly not mentioning the name of his predecessor in office.
“Instead, the White House works aggressively to paint Republicans and their policies as an ‘ultra MAGA agenda’ in a push to overcome the president’s brutal approval ratings and voters’ frustration with high inflation to help Democrats maintain control of Congress.”
Jenn Psaki, on the way out as the president’s press secretary, attributed the “ultra MAGA” epithet to none other than that genius specimen of Homo politicus himself, Joe Biden. But, as reported in the Washington Post, that’s just another whopper for the cameras and the gullible.
Actually, the Post didn’t put it like that. “The attack line followed months of testing from the Center for American Progress Action Fund,” writes USA Today, summarizing the Post’s reportage. “Democrats believe ‘ultra MAGA’ tells a story of a movement that’s no longer just about Trump.”
Democrats are right . . . in that “ultra MAGA” does tell a story.
Democrats are wrong . . . to imagine it could dissuade Republicans. Many conservatives now embrace the epithet, mocking Democrats for thinking they’ve found the key to unlocking Democratic success in the upcoming mid-terms.
While I won’t be embracing Ultra for my messaging — is Ultra Freedom or Ultra Responsibility or Ultra Accountability on the menu? No? Then: no! — I can join conservatives in shaking my head at rule by focus group.
And President Biden’s calling MAGA “the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history?”
The charge — coming from the party of riots, lockdowns, shortages, and inflation — seems ultra-suspect.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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