Reason does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order to gradually progress from one level of insight to another.
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Immanuel Kant
Author: Redactor
“California this week declared its independence from the federal government’s feeble efforts to fight Covid-19 — and perhaps from a bit more.” So begins a hyper-partisan, slightly unhinged Bloomberg opinion piece.
“Governor Gavin Newsom said that he would use the bulk purchasing power of California ‘as a nation-state’ to acquire the hospital supplies that the federal government has failed to provide,” writes one Mr. Francis Wilkinson. “If all goes according to plan, Newsom said, California might even ‘export some of those supplies to states in need.’”
Highlighting two concepts, “nation-state” and “export,” Wilkinson makes much of California’s governor contracting with manufacturers to deliver face masks to his state, arguing that the Trump administration had failed to deliver.
“John C. Calhoun, who used the theory of states’ rights to defend the institution of slavery, is not generally a philosophical lodestar for liberal Democrats such as Newsom,” Wilkinson plunges ahead. He suspects Republicans are hell-bent on subverting democracy come November, making “Calhoun’s theory of nullification . . . ripe for a comeback on the left coast.”
Calhoun’s “theory” of nullification, as Wilkinson puts it, was called by James Madison “interposition,” and flows directly from the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. It has been used by states for reasons other than defending slavery — most often defending states from unconstitutional taxation.
Indeed, it was used by Northern states to resist federal attempts to reclaim fugitive slaves.*
While it is instructive to watch advocates of huge government flirt with federalist ideas, and the compact theory of the union, one has to wonder how nullification fits with resisting a lack of federal action on face masks.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* And free people who merely looked like slaves. For the slavery issue, and more on nullification, see Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century (2010).
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David Ricardo
The demand for money is regulated entirely by its value, and its value by its quantity.
In late February, ABC News suspended a veteran correspondent, David Wright, after Project Veritas released video in which the reporter acknowledged he was a socialist and criticized his network’s political coverage.
“Oh yeah,” Wright responded, when asked if he were a democratic socialist. “More than that I would consider myself a socialist.”
He also critiqued his network: “We don’t hold [Trump] to account. We also don’t give him credit for what things he does do.”
“David Wright has been suspended,” ABC said in a statement, “and to avoid any possible appearance of bias, he will be reassigned away from political coverage when he returns.”
But what if ABC’s removal of the reporter were more about hiding bias than combating it?
That story came to mind while considering Sen. Bernie Sanders’ suspension of his presidential campaign. I was amazed at how — just when it seemed the Vermont senator might have an actual shot at capturing the Democratic nomination — a whirlwind of harsh media coverage was unleashed. Simultaneously, other candidates rushed to end their campaigns in a coordinated coronation of former Vice-President Joe Biden.
“Many of Sanders’ allies believe he was inundated with unfair attacks after his Nevada win,” The Boston Globe reported, with “some Democrats and pundits warning he would lose to Trump because he’s too far to the left.”
Meanwhile: “The Biden campaign is expected,” noted The New York Times, “to highlight a series of policy positions that show how he has moved closer to Mr. Sanders on health care and other issues.”
For Democrats and uber-progressive major media outlets, was Bernie’s problem that he’s a socialist? Or his openness and honesty about it?
Seems winning trumps everything. Pun intended.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Alexis de Tocqueville
They [socialists] unceasingly attempt to mutilate, to curtail, to obstruct personal freedom in any and all ways. They hold that the State must not only act as the director of society, but must further be master of each man, and not only master, but keeper and trainer. For fear of allowing him to err, the State must place itself forever by his side, above him, around him, better to guide him, to maintain him, in a word, to confine him. They call, in fact, for the forfeiture, to a greater or less degree, of human liberty, to the point where, were I to attempt to sum up what socialism is, I would say that it was simply a new system of serfdom.
Alexis de Tocqueville, September 12, 1848, a speech in front of the Constituent Assembly.
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Independence Maintained, Gained
Despite being outnumbered 16 to one, forces of the Old Swiss Confederacy proved victorious over the Archduchy of Austria in the Battle of Näfels, April 9, 1388.
On this date in 1991, Georgia declared its independence from the Soviet Union.
Various models and curves and soothsayers predict that the coronavirus will lay off as the summer sun waxes. And then rush back in the autumn.
So we should not look at just near-term threats, but also look at cycles of contagion month-to-month, year-to-year.
Yet, it is not just the dreaded coronavirus that must be seen over time. “Crisis measures are often ineffective,” writes Matthew Feeney, at Cato Institute, “and can survive the crisis they are implemented to counter.”
Because government power and interference tend to ratchet up with each crisis, there is a whole lot of reason to suspect that we will not go back to normal. Indeed, “the new normal” is now a catchphrase.
The quarantine shutdown has been, if not total, totalistic. Feeney acknowledges such extremist (he didn’t use that word) measures may sometimes be justifiable. But warns of that ratchet, of new powers given to government not devolving after the crisis.
Ted Galen Carpenter, also at Cato.org, draws a “fundamental lesson” from the panic: “Americans need to resist the casual expansion of arbitrary governmental power in response to the current coronavirus crisis.”
The extreme measures of the shutdown — called by economist Gene Epstein “The Great Suppression” — should have been widely discussed before the contagion hit. Instead, they were discussed in meetings behind closed doors.
But most of us were already up to our necks in the political muck fighting off the everyday kludge of the old normal level of too-much-government.
You know, from the previous turn of the ratchet.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Frank Knight
Goods move in response to price differences from points of low to points of higher price, the movement tending to obliterate the price difference and come to rest.
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17th Amendment
On April 8, 1913, the 17th amendment to the Constitution, providing for the popular election of U.S. senators, was ratified.
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Another Contagious Disease
“When Republican Sen. Tom Cotton speculated that the coronavirus outbreak might have come out of a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan,” Timothy Carney wrote for the Washington Examiner on Friday, “he was roundly pilloried, mocked, and chastised by politicians and journalists.”
“Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked,” declared a Washington Post headline. Only problem? What the Post’s “experts” debunked, if anything, was that COVID-19 was man-made.
That’s not what Sen. Cotton said at all. Cotton simply noted that the Wuhan lab did work with bats and coronaviruses and that this contagion may have come from that lab, possibly by accident.
“[I]t turns out that Cotton might have been correct,” informs Carney, “and the very expert the media used to attack Cotton as some kind of conspiracy theorist now admits as much.”
In his column last week for The Washington Post, David Ignatius quoted Rutgers University microbiologist Richard Ebright, the “biosafety expert” used in earlier stories blasting Sen. Cotton, explaining that “the first human infection . . . could have occurred as a laboratory accident, with, for example, an accidental infection of a laboratory worker” — even noting that the Wuhan lab “provides only minimal protection” against such a dangerous event.
As Carney points out, “the idea that the virus accidentally came out of that lab may seamlessly move from ‘fringe opinion’ to respectable — even to consensus.”
“The first question,” argues Carney, “should be whether the folks who attacked that notion in February” — including The Washington Post and the Huffington Post — “will explain why they were unwilling to consider it.”
Media narratives — which Carney skewers regularly — are easy to come by.
Objective news? Not so much.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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