Some special effects in this week’s podcast:
Author: Redactor
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Charles Mackay
Dissatisfaction with his lot seems to be the characteristic of man in all ages and climates. So far, however, from being an evil, as at first might be supposed, it has been the great civiliser of our race; and has tended, more than any thing else, to raise us above the condition of the brutes.
Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852).
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Rights, Wets, and Whites
On December 15, 1791, the United States Bill of Rights became federal law when ratified by the Virginia General Assembly.
On December 15 in 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution officially became effective, repealing the Eighteenth Amendment that had, by enabling the Volstead Act, prohibited the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol for any other than medical and industrial uses.
December 15 birthdays include that of Pehr Evind Svinhufvud af Qvalstad [pictured above], 1861, first Head of State of independent Finland, serving in this capacity first as leader of the Senate and then as Protector, or Regent. In 1930 he became Prime Minister, and in 1931 was elected President, leaving office in 1937.
During the Civil War of 1918, his anti-socialist refugee government, Valkoiset, or “Whites,” opposed the “Reds,” a Social Democrat Party faction, for control of the government as it transitioned from Russian rule as a Grand Duchy, to independent status.
He died in 1944.
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Plunger Protest!
Paul has the symbol for our activism, right there in his hand.
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A King Resigned
On December 14, 1819, Alabama became the 22nd state of these United States.
On the same December date in 1918, Friedrich Karl von Hessen, a German prince elected by the Parliament of Finland to become King Väinö I, renounced the Finnish throne.
In 1939, the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations for invading Finland and starting the Winter War.
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Herbert Spencer
The present social state is transitional, as past social states have been transitional. There will, I hope and believe, come a future social state differing as much from the present as the present differs from the past with its mailed barons and defenseless serfs. In Social Statics, as well as in The Study of Sociology and in Political Institutions, is clearly shown the desire for an organisation more conducive to the happiness of men at large than that which exists. My opposition to socialism results from the belief that it would stop the progress to such a higher state and bring back a lower state. Nothing but the slow modification of human nature by the discipline of social life, can produce permanently advantageous changes.
Herbert Spencer, “From Freedom to Bondage,” in Thomas Mackay (ed.), A Plea for Liberty: An Argument Against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation (1891). The three works cited are Social Statics; or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (1851), presented in 1892 in an Abridged and Revised form; The Study of Sociology (1873); and Political Institutions (1882), which appeared as Part V in the second volume of his Principles of Sociology.
“It’s a government-on-government fight,” reports Seattle-based KOMO News, as the Pierce County Council voted 4-3 to provide assistance in defending Initiative 976 in court.
The ballot measure, which limits car license fees among other provisions, passed 53 to 47 percent statewide last month, including a whopping 66 percent affirmative vote in Pierce County. And — you guessed it — I-976 was immediately swarmed by life-devouring locusts — er, I mean, sued by “a handful of counties, cities, transportation agencies, and one transit rider.”
In short, many governments seek to undo a vote of the people . . . along with a lone citizen to serve as fig leaf.
Against only one government, Pierce County, now joining the voters.
Late last month, a judge in King County, one of only four counties (out of the state’s 39) to vote against I-976, issued a preliminary injunction blocking implementation of the initiative, while the case is being adjudicated.
The voter-approved measure does have Attorney General Bob Ferguson lawyering on its behalf. But Mr. Ferguson has been engaged in a multi-year civil lawsuit against Tim Eyman, the sponsor of 976. The two aren’t friends. And the AG is no friend of lower taxes, either. No surprise, then, for Eyman to talk of “sabotage” and Ferguson’s mere pro forma defense: “he truly doesn’t want it to succeed.”
This isn’t a government-on-government fight, but governments-versus-voters. With the wonderful exception of Pierce County, where political representation still lives.
“This is the first time a government has ever actually done something to defend a citizen initiative,” remarked Eyman at a Tuesday news conference.
“It is really extraordinarily unusual,” he added.
That’s how out-of-control government in our “democracy” is.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The 1636 Militia
On December 13, 1636, the Massachusetts Bay Colony organized three militia regiments to defend the colony against the Pequot Indians.
The National Guard of the United States traces its heritage back to this event.
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J. H. Levy
Socialism has its black sheep. What cause has not? But that which fills me with grief is that it has so many white ones. The most miserable circumstance of our time is that much of its devotion and self-denial is running into Socialistic channels. It is this misdirected self-abnegation, characteristic of the Dark Ages, which is carrying us back to them.
“All around the world, earnest fans of socialism insist it has never failed, as critics claim, since ‘true socialism has never really been tried,’” the New York Post editorial board wrote on Tuesday. But socialism has been tried. It just doesn’t turn into the utopia socialists promise.
And the State certainly does not do under socialism what Karl Marx said it would: wither away.
In Venezuela, “Bolivarian” dictator Nicolás Maduro sure isn’t withering away. In defiance of terms as well as term limits, he is not stepping down even as his country spirals downward into starvation and squalor.
His method and madness are not mysteries: he keeps power the old-fashioned way, sheer force.
The Post’s editors note his latest stay-in-office procedure: “He’s going to expand his massive private army to 4 million gunmen by the end of 2020.”
He might be able to do it, since his ruthless regime is supported not only by a well-stocked military, but also boasts an alleged 3.3 million gang-members in the “Bolivarian militia,” exempt from the gun confiscation of 2012.
It turns out (to neither your shock nor mine) that key to making socialism work is the threat of confiscation, control, murder. “Maduro is showing that the sure way to make it ‘succeed,’” says the Post, “is for the self-proclaimed socialists to have all the guns.”
By definition, socialism is the “public” ownership and control of the means of production. By necessity, socialism requires the governing class’s ownership and control of the means of destruction.
And we see that now being used to destroy any opposition.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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