Paul Jacob notes that free speech sure was in the news last week:
Author: Redactor
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Animatronic Groundhog
Paul Jacob has a lot to say about the big stories of the week. Groundhog’s Day is NOT the biggest story. But it is a way to end on a high note.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.
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Phil of It
If Punxsutawney Phil peaks out and sees his shadow, are we doomed to another six weeks of political pall?
And speaking of palls, Senator Elizabeth Warren, slipping in the polls, has unveiled YET ANOTHER PLAN.
Contemplate that very fact for a moment. The Distinguished Pocahontas Professor of Planning proposes to “combat disinformation by holding big tech companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google,” Sunny Kim regales us from CNBC, “responsible for spreading misinformation designed to suppress voters from turning out.”
Warren vows to “push for new laws that impose tough civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating this kind of information, which has the explicit purpose of undermining the basic right to vote.”
Notice her flip of America’s script?
Swapping free speech for policed speech doesn’t upgrade politicians, regulators and judges to philosopher king status, able or justified to distinguish true information from mis– or dis-.
And is our basic right to vote really being undermined by “memes”?
Give me a break.
Confusing rights with influence, or some virginal lack thereof, is pure political poison.
Or it would be if anyone took Warren seriously anymore.
Meanwhile, PETA is horning in on Punxsutawney’s celebrated Groundhog Day.
“People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is calling on the keepers of the weather-forecasting groundhog to let him retire,” CNN tells us, “and to be replaced by an animatronic groundhog.”
PETA got what reads like a Babylon Bee article into the news. “By creating an AI Phil,” the group’s letter to the Pennsylvania operation runs, “you could keep Punxsutawney at the center of Groundhog Day but in a much more progressive way.”
Is Elizabeth Warren’s notion also ‘progressive’?
Seems the opposite. But animatronics might be involved.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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W. Somerset Maugham
You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915) Ch. 23
On January 31, 1849, the Corn Laws were abolished in the United Kingdom, one of the most impressive and far-reaching anti-protectionist moves of all time. “Corn” stood for all grains, including wheat, oats, barley, etc.; the free-trade agitation by John Bright and Richard Cobden was one of the main impetuses for the reform.
On Jan. 31, 1865, the United States Congress proposed the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, submitting it to the states for ratification. The Amendment’s main section reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
On Jan. 31, 1990, the first McDonald’s fast food restaurant opens in the Soviet Union. Having once traveled to Moscow, I’m exceedingly thankful for this.
Progressives who lean socialist used to hide their worst intentions. Now they are letting it all hang out.
There have always been overt socialists in the U.S., of course. They would sometimes protest the reluctance of fellow travelers to fully embrace socialism’s moniker. But the sentiment “Ah, screw it, let’s just admit we want to destroy everything currently in existence” seems on the ascendance. Even a few major Democratic candidates for president are on board.
Exhibit 112 is the new nationwide push to stomp the gig economy.
Especially freelancing.
This follows Exhibit 111, the recent and so far successful push to stop independent contractors from engaging in voluntary transactions in California. (Many lawsuits are underway.)
After scanning the coiled legalese of 111 — I mean AB5, California’s law — many companies decided that ending relationships with California-based freelancers was prudence with a capital P. And that rhymes with G, and that stands for Golden. Which the Golden State used to, uh, B.
Not every self-employed person has been thrown out onto the street. There are carve-outs. Actually, the only known victims are taxi drivers, cleaners, nurses, comedians, writers, editors, musicians, transcriptionists, citizen initiative petitioners, etc., etc.
The crackdown on non-9-to-5 work arrangements has also resulted in much gnashing of teeth by gig-seekers of all ideological stripes.
Obviously, then, such massive destruction of economic freedom must be inflicted on the federal level too. So House Democrats put AB5’s gig-killing provisions into Exhibit 112, that is, into HR2474, pending legislation.
Democratic candidates for president Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders have endorsed the California statute, a national version, or both.
Ludwig von Mises had a word for this. He called socialism “destructionist.”
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Ludwig von Mises
Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build; it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.
Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922), Part V.
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Non-Violence … and Violent Reaction
On Jan. 30, 1948, Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi, known for his non-violent, non-cooperation struggle for freedom and national independence, was assassinated by a Hindu extremist.
On Jan. 30, 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s home was bombed in retaliation for his work on the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
On Jan. 30, 1972, British soldiers killed fourteen unarmed civil rights marchers in Northern Ireland in what came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” Soldiers shot 26 unarmed protesters and bystanders – 13 males, seven of whom were teenagers, died immediately, while another man died of his injuries nearly five months later. In the immediate aftermath, an investigation by the British Government largely cleared the soldiers and British authorities of blame. A second investigation begun in 1998, released a report in 2010 declaring that all of those shot were unarmed, and that the killings were both “unjustified and unjustifiable.”
Not quite fitting today’s “non-violence elicits violence” theme, on January 30, 1835, Richard Lawrence attempted to shoot former military leader and then-President Andrew Jackson, but failed. He was subdued by a crowd, including several congressmen. That marked the first attempt on the life of a sitting U.S. president.
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America Safe for Quagmires?
It happened: “The measure asking all foreign troops to leave . . . passed.”
We are talking about Iraq . . . and the U.S. military.
So, not much else has happened.
After that parliamentary vote, Ron Paul explains, “when the Iraqi prime minister called up Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to request a timetable for a US withdrawal, Pompeo laughed in his face.”
I am with Dr. Paul on this one. The U.S. should take this opportunity to get out . . . “before more US troops die for nothing in Iraq.”
But is it for nothing?
Once upon a time, Americans were afraid of military “quagmires.” Now somehow we’ve come to accept permanent quagmire status in multiple theaters.
Could it be that when President George Herbert Walker Bush said, following the First Persian Gulf War, that “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all,” he was speaking of its psy-op effect on the American electorate?
Pushing us into World War I, President Wilson claimed to be “making the world safe for democracy.” Perhaps Papa Bush made America safe for never-ending “regime-change wars.”
Before becoming vice president and then president, and going on to claim victory over “Vietnam Syndrome,” Bush headed the Central Intelligence Agency, the original regime modification professionals. And certainly endless, pointless foreign warfare has been the health of . . . the Deep State.
“The pressure for the U.S. to leave Iraq has been building within the country,” argues former Rep. Paul, “but the U.S. government and mainstream media is completely — and dangerously — ignoring this sentiment.”
Put American soldiers — not some secret or not-so-secret Deep State agenda — first. Bring them home.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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