Were all men equal to-night, some would get the start by rising an hour earlier to-morrow.
Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848), ch. 37.
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Elizabeth Gaskell
Author: Redactor
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Bitter Bierce
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); Karin Pilsäter, Swedish politician of the Liberal People’s Party (1960).
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Alison Morrow
If I had not quit TV news before COVID, it’s highly likely I would have quit during COVID. ’Cause I would have had a really hard time. TV news, and just news in general, (a) went bonkers under Trump and then [b] went like double bonkers under COVID.
Alison Morrow, on her YouTube interview with Bill Dorris, “‘I was wrong about Ivory Hecker,’ says former TV news journalist,” discussing the case of a TV journalist who ran afoul of her TV news station for her covering of HCQ (June 20, 2021).
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Watch: Bad Folks
The vlog version of the weekend podcast:
This Week in Common Sense, June 18, 2021.
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Thomas Kyd
“Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (1592).
Oh life, no life, but lively form of death;
Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,
Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds.”
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The 400 Million
“More than 50 million total deaths,” writes Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle, summing up the cost of Communist Mao Zedong’s decades of re-making Chinese society from the “Great Leap Forward” to the “Cultural Revolution.”
“. . . entirely self-inflicted,” Von Drehle adds.
“A free market of ideas would never have settled on such terrible policies,” he declares, “and a limited government could not have enforced them.”
Exactly! Is it finally morning in Washington?
The columnist articulates two principles: (1) “a free society is a great solver of problems and finder of answers because more brainpower is better than less,” and (2) “while a big government can certainly give a great boost to a good idea, it can also put enormous force behind a bad idea — and when it does, the effects can be catastrophic.”*
He highlights China’s brutally enforced One Child policy, instituted in 1979, whereby the government, according to One Child Nation documentarian Nanfu Wang, bragged it had “successfully prevented 400 million babies from being born.” Through forced abortions and infanticide!
“This draconian, ill-considered measure,” Von Drehle charges, “has brought China to the brink of population decline at a time when the rising nation is still too poor, on a per capita basis, to support swelling ranks of elderly pensioners on the backs of a dwindling number of young workers.”
So, in 2016, “the all-powerful government permitted couples to have two children,” he explains. “Birthrates have continued to drop, moving the Central Committee to raise the cap last month to three children.”
Regardless of the number, what could be more totalitarian than the government deciding how many children you may have?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Like covering up a virus outbreak that turns into a pandemic killing almost 4 million people worldwide — and over 600,000 Americans?
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How About That?
The G7 summit provided much-needed comic relief.
Biden’s mumbling and stumbling elicited titters and gasps. (His slip in constantly referring to Libya when he meant Syria was, if not funny, at least revealing.) But maybe the greatest moment of pandering silliness came from Britain’s Boris Johnson.
“We’re building back better together,” Johnson said. “And building back greener and building back fairer and building back more equal and how shall I — and in a more gender-neutral and perhaps I — a more feminine way! How about that?”
A naked appeal to feminists. Which the “conservative” politician does not seem to understand isn’t the same thing as appealing to women in general.
His answer got play mainly because he mouthed a slogan with aesthetic stickiness: “build back better.”
But the opportunity to “build back” at all is the result of governments first destroying so much of commercial and civil life. Maybe politicians are the last people we should trust to do that.
The big news out of the summit was the idea of a “universal 15 percent corporate tax,” to establish a “level playing field.”* And prevent what Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen calls “a race to the bottom” — by which she means the escape of international corporations to lower-tax areas overseas.
MSNBC puts this notion in context: “the average corporate tax rate across 177 different jurisdictions in 2020 was just under 24%.”
Instead of trying to maximize revenue by raising taxes, high-tax governments could simply reduce taxes. That would keep corporations within territory, and over time keep revenue flowing.
That would be a “race to a level playing field” without all the political hoopla.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* And somehow this new this new “universal” tax is said to exclude China!
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The Group of Seven (G7) is an annual meeting at which leaders of seven major countries hobnob about international matters and how they might coordinate policies.
This year, the pandemic was high on the agenda. Also on the agenda, if lower and less conspicuous, was muzzling dissidents.
Dissidents being defined, in current style, as people who spread “disinformation.”
At the meeting, Joe Biden and Boris Johnson endorsed a revised version of the 1941 Atlantic Charter that includes a seemingly minor provision: “We oppose interference through disinformation or other malign influences, including in elections . . . .”
That’s it — just an ominous hint.
But the Biden administration has been more open in other contexts. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki says that according to Biden, more should be done by “major platforms” to prevent “misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life-threatening information” from going out to the public.
Throughout history, people have disagreed about facts and their interpretation. It’s nothing new. And pretending it is new provides no justification for preventing the exercise of freedoms that are the only means of reaching and communicating truths — and of correcting the honest or dishonest errors that government officials are as capable of committing as the rest of us.
The UK is considering an Online Safety Bill to block social media sites that fail to remove “legal but harmful content” — which opens up wide vistas of . . . illegal legal content?
Even if our government doesn’t follow Her Majesty’s (yet), our current administration is pressuring social media firms to impose censorship on its behalf.
That’s violation-by-proxy of the First Amendment.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Watch: Bite!
Paul Jacob expands upon the biggest stories of the week as treated more concisely on this site, in the second week of June 2021.
If you are being fed by politicians or bureaucrats, you know what to do: