On December 8, 1927, one of the United States’ oldest think tanks was founded through the merger of three organizations that had been created by philanthropist Robert S. Brookings. Called the Brookings Institution, it would provide a blueprint for future work by research and advocacy organizations in the modern era.
On this date in 1974, a plebiscite abolished the monarchy in Greece.
Once again, TIME is skipping right over you and me for consideration as the magazine’s “Person of the Year for 2020.”
What am I saying, YOU were named back in 2006!
TIME’s choice can be important recognition for someone working against all odds to make a very positive difference in this world. Lech Wałęsa in 1981, for instance, and Gandhi in 1930.*
Last year’s pick of Greta Thornburg? Not. So. Much.
While presidents often get the coveted cover, President-elect Joe Biden garnered only 3 percent of the public “advisory” vote. “Essential workers” had the most support at 35 percent. Seems too amorphous . . . a catalyst mostly for endless debate.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the federal government’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the last 36 years, was next at 31 percent of respondents. No one else had more than 5 percent.
Don’t choose Fauci, please! Despite his experience, his pandemic performance has been less than expert. Under his leadership, Americans were told for months that masks would be of no benefit, then suddenly mandated to wear them.
Last June, Sen. Rand Paul, who is a physician, tried to get Fauci to address the ample scientific data indicating it was safe to open the schools. Fauci deflected and dithered until flippantly declaring last week: “Close the bars and keep the schools open is what we really say.”
That is certainly not, Fox New’s Tucker Carlson exasperatedly explained, what Fauci was “really” saying months ago.
Forget Fauci. For leading the best national response to COVID-19, TIME should name Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen 2020’s “Person of the Year.”
It would send a powerful message about leadership. And freedom.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The magazine has also named dictators and mass murderers: Hitler served as 1938’s “Man of the Year” and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin took the top spot the next year, and again in 1942; in 1979, with Americans held hostage in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini glared at us from TIME’s cover.
Note: My biggest disappointment was in 2013, when TIME cowardly choose Pope Francis over Edward Snowden.
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On December 7, 1776, the Marquis de Lafayette arranged to enter the American military as a major general. On the same date in 1787, Delaware became the first state to ratify the United States Constitution.
The 1941 date marks, of course, “the day that will live in infamy,” when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
It is not easy to be wise for all times, not event for the present much less for the future; and those who judge the past must recollect that, when it was the present the present was future.
Gouverneur Morris to Robert Walsh (February 5, 1811).
Paul expands upon the big stories of last week:
On December 6, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, banning slavery in all states and territories.
One-hundred-and-nineteen years later, to the day, in 1984, Paul Jacob (of ThisIsCommonSense.org, LibertyiFund.org, and the Citizens in Charge Foundation) was arrested by the FBI for his refusal to register with Selective Service System (the draft people). The Government was probably not attempting to make a commemorative point about involuntary servitude.
In 1917 on this date, Finland declared independence from Russia.
Vladimir Nabokov completed his controversial novel Lolita on the Sixth of December in 1953, and would soon find himself embroiled in censorship and related publishing difficulties, though with no trouble in the United States when it was eventually published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1958.
Paul Jacob expands upon the biggest stories of the week, beginning with the all-important question of the meaning of initiative and referendum returns.
On December 5, 1933, nationwide alcohol Prohibition in the United States ended after Utah became the 36th U.S. state to ratify the 21st Amendment to the United States Constitution, thus establishing the required 75 percent of states needed to enact the amendment that overturned the 18th.
One may ride upon a tiger’s back but it is fatal to dismount.
The “lockdowns” are not how a free society would handle a contagion.
Free people might advisedly wear masks and physically distance themselves from others when they are especially vulnerable to an airborne disease, or they themselves show some symptoms.*
But free people take risks, too, and accept responsibility for risks taken. And they go about trying to improve their lives generally, in society.
In society, via commerce.
Furthermore, free people would also change their behavior based on good information freely discussed.
What they would not do is engage in bullying to suppress information, cheer on institutional debate suppression, or mandate abridgments to other’s liberties on the basis of personal or sectarian opinion.
That is, they would not do what we do now.
And, perhaps most importantly, free people would utterly condemn leaders who lied to them, or who took special privileges by flouting their own mandates, enforced on the rest of us.
We’ve sure seen a lot of this latter.
The latest case is that of Austin, Texas, Mayor Steve Adler, who has been caught in one of those grand hypocrisies that show the panic to be mostly political opportunism: he had recorded his early November message to “stay home if you can” after attending his daughter’s wedding with 20 guests and then taking a getaway trip with a party of eight.
“This is not the time to relax,” he warned, however. “We may have to close things down if we’re not careful.”
Recorded in Mexico, I guess that “social distance” allowed him the gumption to deliver a threat: if you don’t self-quarantine, I will quarantine everybody!
Except, of course, himself.
Freedom is not just something for our rulers. Liberty with an exception clause is spelled “L-I-C-E-N-S-E.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* By wearing masks and gloves these two groups would signal to others to give them some distance. Not virtue-signaling, but well-mannered responsibility signals. The healthy people, though, would take the risks of the disease because, after all, we face a million risks every day, from automobile injury to cancer.
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