Governmental regulations all carry coercion to some degree, and even where they don’t, they habituate man to expect teaching, guidance and help outside himself, instead of formulating his own.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, as quoted in David Sidorsky, The Liberal Tradition in European Thought (1971), p. 73.
Want to know how Washington works?
Or doesn’t work?
Drafting legislation to provide COVID (and COVID lockdown) relief, President Joe Biden and Congress contemplate just how big to make the next round of government checks sent to “the inhabitants of America.”
And which folks to send the freshly printed moolah.
“Something very weird is happening,” explains Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman. “On one side you have Republicans and conservative Democrats saying people at higher incomes don’t deserve this government help. On the other side you have liberals advocating that higher-income people should share in this largesse.”
Including socialists Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“So if I were Biden,” Waldman advises, “this is the argument I’d make to [conservative Democratic Senator] Manchin:
1. People like it when you give them money. A lot.
2. The more people we give money to, the more people will be pleased with us.
3. That will improve our chances of keeping control of Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024.
4. If we keep control we’ll be able to do more of the things you want to do. If we lose control, we won’t be able to do anything. . . .”
Translation? Stay in power by buying votes.
Seems the advice you’d get from a sleazy political consultant, not a newspaper columnist.
Biden and senior Democrats have also unveiled a plan to pay parents up to a certain income over $50,000 per child from birth to 17 years of age.* One obvious benefit? “Its execution could also prove crucial to deciding Democrats’ ability to maintain control of Congress,” informs The Post, “given its likely direct impact on the lives of tens of millions of voters.”
This is our direct-deposit Republic.
But not Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The Democrats’ plan came just “days after Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) surprised policymakers with a proposal to send even more in direct cash per child to American families.”
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On Feb. 10, 1967, the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified by Nevada, the necessary 38th state to do so. The amendment sets the process for presidential succession, and reads:
Section 1. In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.
Section 2. Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.
Section 3. Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.
Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.
“Bruce Springsteen issued a call for common ground, unity and political centrism,” CNN reported, “in a 2-minute long ad for Jeep [that ran] during the Super Bowl on Sunday.”
The Detroit Free Press called the commercial a “healing message.”
Not so much over at The Federalist, a conservative outlet, where Mollie Hemingway listed three main problems:
1. The Messenger Is Known For Hating Republicans
2. The Images Were All Off
3. The Argument For Unity Was Not Made Well
I don’t disagree with her. Springsteen, after all, said he would leave the U.S. if President Trump were re-elected; he has long supported Democrats and bashed Republicans.
But, nevertheless . . . I heard something that rang true.
“Now fear has never been the best of who we are,” spoke Mr. Springsteen. That’s a truism.
But the Boss added, “And as for freedom, it’s not the property of just the fortunate few; it belongs to us all. Whoever you are, wherever you’re from, it’s what connects us. And we need that connection.”
Yes. We. Do.
Freedom unites us . . . because we can do our own thing.
Whether Born in the USA or recent arrivals to these shores, let us celebrate not what government can legislate, mandate, or make us do, but what those in power cannot make us do, that we are free to speak truth as we see it and to dream, build and achieve a better tomorrow of our own making.
It all sure fits with Jeep’s “Go Anywhere. Do Anything” slogan. And I have no doubt they mean “anything” as long as you don’t impinge on anyone else’s rights.
Just note that the slogan applies to us, not our politicians.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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“Free as a bird,” we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But, alas, we forget the dodo. Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded. Something analogous is true of human beings. If the bread is supplied regularly and copiously three times a day, many of them will be perfectly content to live by bread alone — or at least by bread and circuses alone.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958).
“See something, say something.” Reasonable enough advice, most times. But what if the scary thing you are supposed to report is someone’s heated political opinion?
A bill called the “See Something, Say Something Online Act of 2020” — just reintroduced last week — would require websites and interactive service providers to report “suspicious” activity that may later be connected with “terrorism, serious drug offenses, and violent crimes.”
If a provider fails to exercise “due care” in reporting major crimes and “suspicious transmission activity,” the company’s liability protections would be at risk.
Suspicious transmissions would have to be reported to the Justice Department within 30 days. Though, reporting at the end of that window wouldn’t do much to stop an imminent crime committed, say, five days after a dubious text message.
What the legislation would do, notes Reason magazine’s Elizabeth Brown, is “set up a massive new system of intense user monitoring and reporting that would lead to more perfectly innocent people getting booted from internet platforms” and give government another way to clobber “disfavored tech companies.”
Of course, neither hyperbolic opinions nor gleeful snitching are rarities on the Internet. So if such legislation leads to instituting easy and anonymous ways to complain to the government about somebody’s online opining, we can expect false positives to skyrocket. Time and energy wasted harassing innocent people would not be used to catch actual thugs and terrorists.
And we’d have yet another chilling effect on our freedom of expression.
Back to the drawing board, Senators Manchin and Cornyn. On second thought, please step away from that drawing board.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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[T]here is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side.
George Orwell, letter to H. J. Willmett (May 18, 1944), published in The Collected Essays, Journalism, & Letters, George Orwell: As I Please, 1943-1945 (2000), edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus.
Under a system of perfectly free commerce, each country naturally devotes its capital and labour to such employments as are most beneficial to each. This pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the with the universal good of the whole. By stimulating industry, by rewarding ingenuity, and by using most efficaciously the peculiar powers bestowed by nature, it distributes labour most effectively and most economically: while, by increasing the general mass of productions, it diffuses general benefit, and binds together, by one common tie of interest and intercourse, the universal society of nations throughout the civilized world.
Reliable Sources, CNN’s media watchdog program, is hard to watch. It should be retitled Pot Calls Kettle to match host Brian Stelter’s teapot head, so often skirling from a full steam. To avoid all that, I read the transcript of his Sunday episode to take in his much-quoted tear defending Big Tech’s deplatforming of alternative media and attacking the three news channels he hates so much — OAN, Newsmax, and, especially and always, Fox.
You see, they’re liars!
He’s not, of course; CNN’s not, he says — without ever managing to acknowledge his job at CNN, deliverer of the Official Spin.
And ignorer of the laundry list of whoppers espoused by his own network.
Which Glenn Greenwald made clear in his response: “CNN lies and spreads conspiracy theories constantly. They’re a pro-Democratic Party outlet that barely airs any dissent from the DNC line. If @brianstelter’s standards for banishing Fox were applied equally, it’d affect all cable news outlets, not just one.”
Asserting that “disinformation” about the pandemic is “harmful” — while CNN’s slavish towing of the government’s incoherent, shifting line on COVID has not been??? — Stelter offers a “harm reduction” model. Deplatforming people he disagrees with? Why, that’s not an abridgment of “freedom of speech.”
All he itches for is to cripple his competitors’ “freedom of reach.”
But take a breath: extending the reach of one’s speech is why we have “the press.” This freedom of the press (“reach”) is also protected from government, to be valued even when we disagree with our opponents.
The idea that a few CNN hosts get to determine The Official Truth for everybody else, and that this should be institutionalized in some broad, society-wide way, would toll the death knell of America.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On February 4, 1789, George Washington was unanimously elected as the first President of the United States, under the new Constitution, by the U.S. Electoral College.
On the same date five years later, the French legislature abolished slavery throughout all territories of the French Republic.