The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
Aldous Huxley, The Olive Tree (1936)
Categories
Aldous Huxley
Author: Redactor
Who should fund our public elections?
Partisan billionaires?
Last election, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, “gave $419 million to two nonprofit organizations that disbursed grants in 2020 to more than 2,500 election departments,” reports The New York Times.
The idea was to help officials deal with holding an election during a pandemic. No laws were necessarily broken. Apparently, private individuals and groups can give money to government election offices — even “with strings attached.”
“Some conservatives see this largesse of ‘Zuckerbucks,’” informs a Wall Street Journal editorial, “as a clever plot to help Democrats win.” In fact, a Capital Research Center (CRC) analysis found the liberal non-profit “consistently gave bigger grants and more money per capita to counties that voted for Biden.”
“[A] deep dive into the available data shows that the funds were largely requested for get-out-the-vote efforts, influenced voter turnout in favor of Democrats, and may have impacted the results of the election in some states,” explains the Foundation for Government Accountability. “According to currently available information, less than one percent of the funds were actually spent on PPE nationwide.”
Can you imagine the outcry if a group with “conservative ties” funded by Charles Koch was giving grants to help Republican-rich jurisdictions rock the vote?
“[E]ven under the purest motives,” the Journal’s editorial offers, “private election funding is inappropriate and sows distrust.”
That’s why 16 states have since passed laws to restrict private funding of election programs.
Mr. Zuckerberg himself sees the danger in Zuckerbucks: “To be clear, I agree with those who say that government should have provided these funds, not private citizens.” Last week, he announced he would not be providing such funding in the 2022 elections.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
Herbert Spencer
The great political superstition of the past was the divine right of kings. The great political superstition of the present is the divine right of parliaments. The oil of anointing seems unawares to have dripped from the head of the one on to the heads of the many, and given sacredness to them also and to their decrees.
Herbert Spencer, “The Great Political Superstition,” in The Man versus the State (1884).
Categories
David Ricardo
April 18 marks the 1772 birthday of David Ricardo, English political economist and one of the most influential thinkers in economic theory. An advocate for free trade and the abolition of slavery, Ricardo’s most famous work is his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817).
In America in 2022, April 18 is the date income taxes are due to be filed.
Why cannot the media print the most important stories?
Categories
Watch: Democracy without Doxxing
Paul Jacob argues for allowing anonymous political speech and activism — in the course of covering the big stories of last week.
Categories
Michael Moorcock
It is strange how all authoritarians automatically assume that the libertarian wishes to impose his own views on them when all he actually wants to do is to appeal to the authoritarian’s better nature. But I suppose you authoritarians can only see things in your own terms.
Count von Bek to the narrator of The Warlord of the Air: A Scientific Romance (1971), the first novel of A Nomad of the Time Streams series by Michael Moorcock (2013 Titan Books edition, p. 149).
This is about major media being unable to do the news right — not about paneling and popular architecture. Don’t let first few minutes put you on the wrong track.
Categories
Herbert Spencer
[T]here lie before the legislator several open secrets, which yet are so open that they ought not to remain secrets to one who undertakes the vast and terrible responsibility of dealing with millions upon millions of human beings by measures which, if they do not conduce to their happiness, will increase their miseries and accelerate their deaths?
There is first of all the undeniable truth, conspicuous and yet absolutely ignored, that there are no phenomena which a society presents but what have their origins in the phenomena of individual human life, which again have their roots in vital phenomena at large. And there is the inevitable implication that unless these vital phenomena, bodily and mental, are chaotic in their relations (a supposition excluded by the very maintenance of life) the resulting phenomena cannot be wholly chaotic: there must be some kind of order in the phenomena which grow out of them when associated human beings have to cooperate. Evidently, then, when one who has not studied such resulting phenomena of social order, undertakes to regulate society, he is pretty certain to work mischiefs.
Herbert Spencer, “The Sins of Legislators,” in The Man versus the State (1884).
Categories
From Birmingham Jail
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., penned his Letter from Birmingham Jail while incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama, for protesting segregation, on April 16, 1963.