Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.
On March 6, 1967, Soviet Premiere Joseph Stalin’s only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defected to the United States. She later took the name Lana Peters, upon marriage to William Wesley Peters. The marriage was short-lived.
The March 6 date also marks term limits advocate and initiative organizer Paul Jacob’s birthday. He was born on the anniversary of the births of Michaelangelo, Cryano de Bergerac, and Alan Greenspan. He is also, obviously, the reason this site, ThisIsCommonSense.com, exists. (It continues, however, only through the continued support of readers like you.)
The Democratic Insider Machine’s pushing of sorta senile Biden against socialist Sanders is quite breathtaking.
But that isn’t even the entirety of the Machine’s anti-democratic agenda.
“The establishment narrative warfare against [Representative Tulsi] Gabbard’s campaign dwarfs anything we’ve seen against Sanders,” writes Caitlin Johnstone on her popular blog, “and the loathing and dismissal they’ve been able to generate have severely hamstrung her run.”
No kidding. But why would the Machine prefer Sanders over Gabbard?
“It turns out that a presidential candidate can get away with talking about economic justice and plutocracy when it comes to domestic policy,” Ms. Johnstone goes on, “and some light dissent on matters of foreign policy will be tolerated, but aggressively attacking the heart of the actual bipartisan foreign policy consensus will get you shut down, smeared and shunned like nothing else.”
This pro-war, anti-Tulsi agenda was seen right after SuperTuesday.
You see, Representative Gabbard got a delegate, from American Samoa (where Michael Bloomberg’s vast fortune also nabbed a delegate). And, by the rules that have been followed so far, a delegate gets you onto the big debate stage.
But almost immediately, word from the Democratic National Committee hit the Twittersphere: “We have two more debates — of course the threshold will go up. By the time we have the March debate, almost 2,000 delegates will be allocated. The threshold will reflect where we are in the race, as it always has.”
The DNC — the Machine — is rewriting the rules.
Tulsi must not speak.
Even if her competence and ecumenical appeal might actually save the Democratic Party, were her name to replace Biden and Sanders in the second or third voting round of a contested convention.
Such a fierce opponent of regime-change wars is obviously unacceptable to the Machine.
On March 5, 1616, Nicolaus Copernicus’s book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. This censorship notwithstanding, the Earth continued to revolve around the Sun. The book had been first published in 1543 in Nuremberg.
| In 1770, the Boston Massacre took place on March 5.
| Joseph Stalin, the longest serving leader of the Soviet Union, died at his Volynskoe dacha in Moscow on this date in 1953, after a cerebral hemorrhage.
| March 5 is magician Penn Jillette’s birthday. He turns 64 today, beginning his 65th year of life.
Lord Acton’s Law of Power states the chief problem of government: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
It has broad application.
Take traffic lights. They are there to prevent accidents and make navigating roads a better experience for all. The basic idea is to establish and enforce a few basic rules and then let civilization proceed at the pace set by the people themselves. It won’t be perfect, but it won’t be tyranny, either.
But controlling traffic lights is a kind of power.
And thus open to corruption.
Just ask Mats Järlström. After his wife got a “running a red light ticket” in Beaverton, Oregon — a town characterized on the show Veronica Mars as completely wholesome and innocent of guile — Mr. Järlström researched the yellow light timing system.
Using a sophisticated “extended kinematic equation,” obtained from his work background in Sweden, he sought to right the wrong that led to his wife’s ticket and found himself mired in government overreach.
You see, the Oregon Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying objected to his practicing engineering without a license.
The board sought to bury his findings about how yellow lights have been calibrated in Oregon — which he had shown encouraged behavior that would allow governments to maximize revenue . . . not safety.
That’s corruption. The intersection lights’ setup turned a safety measure into a means to fleece motorists — and the engineering board corruptly twisted its mission to suppress the truth.
Thankfully, the Institute for Justice stepped in, and Järlström won in court.
Oregon now has new intersection lighting standards, and the power of the government professional board has been curbed.
There are ways of cultivating community standards without resorting to zoning and similar regulatory regimens by state and local governments. They have been studied, written about, and they can be found here and there around the country, though most famously in Houston, Texas.
But zoning’s the norm in urban and suburban communities.
Ask Marietta Grundlehner.
She had been running an online clothing boutique from her home in Fairfax County, Virginia, and has been forced to shut it down.
Well, a court has ruled that she must remove all her inventory from her home. You can have a home business in Fairfax, but not inventory of goods for sale.
Ms. Grundlehner had been earning, she said, about $30,000 a year as a “LulaRoe Fashion Retailer” in an industry billed by its online organizer as “social retail.” The ecommerce hub, lularoe.com, makes an enticing pitch for its business model: “Find your joy and fulfillment by creating a positive impact in your community.”
But it was a neighbor who turned her in and sicced the local government on her.
That Fairfax resident sure did not think she was having a “positive impact” in their community.
Grundlehner hopes for a regulatory change to save her business, but Christian Britschgi of Reasonhas a word for that battle: “uphill.”
Still, online businesses are on the ascendency. Too many run afoul of zoning laws. And online entrepreneurship being the wave of the future, local governments might want to forget their old gentrification utopianism and meet the real world, the place where people actually live.
On March 3, 1924, the 407-year-old Islamic caliphate collapsed when Caliph Abdülmecid II of the Ottoman Caliphate was deposed. The last remnant of the old regime gives way to the reformed ofKemal Atatürk.
On the same day, the Free State of Fiume was annexed by the Kingdom of Italy.
On March 3 of 1931, the United States adopted The Star-Spangled Banner as its national anthem.
Mohandas K. Gandhi began his hunger strike in Bombay to protest at the autocratic rule in British India on this day in 1939.
Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari (pictured above) was born on March 3, 1819. Associated with French laissez-faire economists Frédéric Bastiat and Yves Guyot, he was the longest-serving editor of Guillamin’s Journal des économistes. Today chiefly known in the English-speaking world for his authorship of one article, “The Production of Security” (1849), he was, as Ludwig von Mises described, the most productive economist in his school. Despite this, and his worldwide recognition, only one of his many books was translated from the French into English during his lifetime, The Society of To-morrow (1904), his final book.
In the book he advanced the idea of “the free constitution of nationality.”
