On March 20, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published.
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Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Author: Redactor
“I’ve instructed my prosecutors not to charge certain low-level nonviolent offenses to avoid people being held in jail unnecessarily,” Maryland’s Attorney General Marilyn Mosby informed the state’s Republican governor. She also urged the governor “to release all inmates in state prisons who are over 60,” explains The Washington Times, “approved for parole or scheduled to complete their sentences within the next year.”
This is all to avoid a prison pandemic. Meanwhile, the “Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced Monday that it would permit states to create laboratories for designing COVID-19 tests,” Reason magazine tells us, adding that the FDA “has also decided to permit pharmacists to make their own alcohol-based hand sanitizers.”
Reason’s Robby Soave asks the obvious question: “Why do the people who are working hardest to fight the coronavirus have to ask a slow federal bureaucracy for permission to save lives?”
The New York Times reports that Dr. Helen Y. Chu, an infectious disease expert in Seattle, tried mightily to perform tests on subjects, early in the epidemic, to track how the virus was spreading. She was stymied every which way.
By bureaucracies.
The kludge of bad regulations and laws merely adds cost and annoyance during normal times; during emergencies they present major stumbling blocks to public health.
So, when our leaders make special exceptions, they demonstrate that the regulations were always bad — now just worse.
Real leadership would nix these rules, permanently.
And, for that matter, end the war on drugs — and prostitution and other victimless crimes.
One of the infractions Maryland’s AG decided to go lax on, however, is public urination. That crime has victims and ought to remain a public health violation.
Though perhaps not worth imprisonment.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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House of Lords
On March 19, 1649, England’s House of Commons passed an act abolishing the House of Lords, declaring it “useless and dangerous to the people of England.”
This was during Oliver Cromwell’s rule as Lord Protector, after the execution of Charles I. The House of Lords did not again meet until the Convention Parliament of 1660, under the Restoration of the monarchy.
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Lord Acton
Judge not according to the orthodox standard of a system religious, philosophical, political, but according as things promote, or fail to promote the delicacy, integrity, and authority of Conscience. Put conscience above both system and success. History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong.
Postscript of letter to Mandell Creighton (April 5, 1887), published in Historical Essays and Studies, by John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1907), edited by John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence, Appendix, p. 505.
Last week, I ventured into Washington for an important event, hoping not to get sick from the coronavirus swirling around the globe.
Nearly 200,000 people in 142 countries have been infected with COVID-19 and 7,866 have already died.
“Both SARS and COVID-19 . . . appear to have emerged from animals in China’s notorious wildlife markets,” explains a Vox video. “Experts had long predicted that these markets, known to be potential sources of disease, would enable another outbreak.”
In fact, I did become ill in our nation’s capital — sick to my stomach.
Not from the virus, but from a new report by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation “address[ing] the failure of institutions and governments to come to terms with 14-year-old allegations of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China.”
With the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) waging genocides against Falun Gong practitioners and now Uighurs, they are abundantly rich in such lucrative national resources.
Susie Hughes, initiator of the China Tribunal, announced its unanimous conclusion that “forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale.”
And continues to this day.
“The source of the organs for transplant are a living population,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) emphasized, “kept alive like some form of livestock until their organs are needed.”
Recently, in “All the Tyranny in China,” I tried to detail the myriad ‘crimes against humanity’ committed by the Chinese Communist Party. Sadly, I just couldn’t get to them all.
I forgot to mention that the CCP will also gladly sell you the fresh organ of some currently incarcerated prisoner of conscience. At a bargain price.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On March 18, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill enabling Hawaii to become the 50th state in the Union. The official day of statehood was set for (and became) August 21 of that year.
The statehood signing occurred exactly 85 years after The Kingdom of Hawaii formalized its treaty with the U. S. establishing exclusive trading rights.
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Tulsi Gabbard
We cannot afford to walk down that dangerous path of government overstepping its boundaries into the most personal parts of our lives.
New crisis, old reactions.
The market has failed, we are told, to handle the coronavirus pandemic . . . even though it has just begun.
We hear demands for vast public takings (California Gov. Gavin Newsom commandeering hotels to add quarantine stations and hospital beds), huge transfer programs (including gargantuan Federal Reserve quantitative easing), and even war socialism (an old staple courtesy of John Dewey in 1918 — oops, John Cassidy, 2020, in The New Yorker).
But most galling?
Complaints of medical supply shortages while cracking down on “price gouging.”
The most astounding case is of the man who scoured the countryside to hoard a truckload of hand sanitizer to sell later at higher prices — moving goods from a period of low, normal value to a time of higher value — only to discover that he was not allowed to sell them, by Amazon and eBay, not government.* The big Internet trading platforms object to normal entrepreneurial action, buying low and selling high, in times of crisis.
But how scandalous is it? In buying up a supply he sent a signal quicker to producers to ramp up production. And he took goods away — very temporarily — from early panicky buyers (who seized the same opportunity in a near-future scarcity but to hoard for personal use) to offer to truly needy people who would value the product enough to buy at higher prices.
Foolish enough to prohibit crisis pricing — or, here, kum-bah-yah prohibitions in solidarity. But then to castigate markets for being inefficient!
Banning “price gouging” and blaming the market is like taunting your victim on the ground as you kick him.
You’re the bully, not a noble savior.
And all that hand sanitizer goes unused.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* There are numerous anti-gouging laws around the country, too. The online market companies are merely mimicking very old political tropes.
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On March 17, 1780, General George Washington granted the Continental Army a holiday “as an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence.”
On March 17, 1941, the U.S. Selective Service held its first lottery for the draft, in preparation for World War II. (Image, above, from the Morning Oregonian, from that year.)
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Albert Camus
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.