The last person to trust with power is someone who is dying to have it. The best person to wield power is someone who is reluctant to do so, but who will do it for a while as a civic duty. That is why term limits should make it impossible to have a whole career in politics.
On October 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne became the first private craft to fly into space, thereby winning the Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight.
This weekend’s podcast has a video version, like usual. But the visual treatment is . . . not like usual. Check it out:
The innovations here were not made for reasons of artistic yearning, but out of necessity. That being said, much is said in this outing of This Week in Common Sense, and whether you watch or just listen (on SoundCloud or your favorite pod catcher), we are pretty sure you will get something out of it.
Paul Jacob pinpoints where we are at, right now, with the elites in media and government:
On October 2, 1789, George Washington sent the proposed Constitutional amendments (the United States’ Constitution’s Bill of Rights) to the States for ratification.
On the same date in 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed, preventing him from reacting to the economic downturn following the Great War in a Progressive fashion, making his response de facto laissez faire. One insider, and skeptic of Progressive hubris, cattily referred to Wilson’s incapacitation as “a stroke of luck.”
His successor in office, President Warren G. Harding, would go on to massively cut spending as well as taxes, and take on regulation as well. He also released Woodrow Wilson’s domestic war prisoners — ranging from journalists, ordinary folk to socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs — who had dissented from Wilson’s involvement in the war.
The Depression of the early 1920s, though as deep as the early 1930s, proved remarkably brief, thanks to Harding . . . and a “stroke of luck.”
Inflation’s up, and President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., thinks he knows why.
Economist Bruce Yandle, famed for his “Bootleggers and Baptists” theory of regulation, reports in Reason that the aging president blamed “the country’s three largest meatpackers” for contributing to July’s CPI rate of 5.4 percent, and the fuel industry for its part in August’s 5.3 percent annualized rate.
Profiteering!
I’ve always wondered how anyone can get away with this tired old accusation. Businesspeople aim to profit at all times and in every place. Profit is why they go into business. Are they making too much inflation-adjusted profit during an inflationary period but not when inflation is low? Seems unlikely.
But Biden’s looking into it! “There’s lots of evidence that gas prices should be going down,” the prez claimed, “but they haven’t.”
What evidence? Biden presented none.
After throwing so much money into the economy to “stimulate” it after the big hit commerce has taken from state-perpetrated lockdowns, what could we expect but rising prices? “Inflation is always and everywhere,” a great economist has said, “a monetary phenomenon.”
Bruce Yandle is on that same page. Referring to Mr. Biden’s bizarre blame game, Yandle suggested that maybe — just maybe — Biden “should look inside the halls of the West Wing.”
Specifically at all the spending, like the current “$3.5 trillion spending package.” The puppet masters pulling Biden’s strings must, Yandle asserts, “be aware that calling for more spending to calm inflation is like pouring gasoline on an already smoldering fire.”
The real problem is “too much printing-press money” backing deficit spending.
Blaming excess profits? A distraction.
A big lie.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
It is certain that if people do not understand a true political economy, they will make a false one of their own.
William Stanley Jevons, Political Economy (1878).
On October 1, 1908, Ford produced the first Model T at a plant in Detroit. The auto could travel 40 miles per hour and ran on gasoline or hemp-based fuel. (As oil prices fell, Ford phased out the hemp option.) The Model T was the first car designed for a mass market, rather than as a luxury item. By 1927, Ford had built 15 million Model T cars – the longest production run of any car model until the Volkswagen Beetle surpassed it in 1972.
On October 1, 1918, Lawrence of Arabia (T.E. Lawrence) helped lead a combined Arab and British force that captured Damascus from the Turks during World War I.
“After 40+ years of reporting,” offers John Stossel on his Facebook page, “I now understand the importance of limited government.”
“I just sued Facebook,” Stossel posted yesterday. “I didn’t want to sue. I hate lawsuits. I tried for a year to reach someone at Facebook to fix things, but Facebook wouldn’t.”
What needs fixing?
Facebook’s fact-checkers dinged him with a “partly false”/“factual inaccuracies” label for his StosselTV video “Are We Doomed?” — without challenging any specific fact. And regarding another video, “Government Fueled Fires,” Todd Spangler of Variety quotes the case, which accuses Facebook of “falsely attributed to Stossel a claim he never made, and on that basis flagged the content as ‘misleading’ and ‘missing context,’ so that would-be viewers would be routed to the false attribution statement.”
Stephen Green writes in support of Stossel’s $2 million lawsuit, demurring only to add that there’s only one little problem: “If there’s a way through the courts to change Facebook’s bad behavior, it’s going to take a judgment with a lot more zeroes on the end.”
The lawsuit in question is a defamation lawsuit.
I confess: it is for breach of contract that I am most annoyed with Facebook. The company brought us all in with an openness ethos and now relentlessly pushes progressive talking points. I suppose it’s futile to compete with Facebook’s lawyers on grounds of Terms of Use agreements, so perhaps that’s why the focus is on slander and libel and all that.
It is as liars and promise-breakers that Facebook’s ideological tyrants most grate.
What they did to John Stossel is unconscionable. But, sadly, not nearly uncommon enough.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you. If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it is still the truth that had to said in the age of the Welfare State.
Ludwig von Mises to Ayn Rand, praising her novel Atlas Shrugged, in correspondence (January 23, 1958), quoted in Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (2007).