In this weekend’s podcast, Paul reviews the week’s biggest stories, which, alas, includes the above-mentioned Hillary Clinton, as well as conscription and term limits — including some history of the modern term limits movement.
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The Brookings
On December 8, 1927, one of the United States’ oldest think tanks was founded through the merger of three organizations that had been created by philanthropist Robert S. Brookings. Called the Brookings Institution, it would provide a blueprint for future work by research and advocacy organizations in the modern era.
On this date in 1974, a plebiscite abolished the monarchy in Greece.
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What a Deluge, What a Mess
Paul reviews the week’s big stories and puts the term limits for Congress in historical perspective.
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Max Stirner
Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea!
. . . What is it, then, that is called a “fixed idea”? An idea that has subjected the man to itself. When you recognize, with regard to such a fixed idea, that it is a folly, you shut its slave up in an asylum. . . .
Touch the fixed idea of such a fool, and you will at once have to guard your back against the lunatic’s stealthy malice. For these great lunatics are like the little so-called lunatics in this point too — that they assail by stealth him who touches their fixed idea. They first steal his weapon, steal free speech from him, and then they fall upon him with their nails. Every day now lays bare the cowardice and vindictiveness of these maniacs, and the stupid populace hurrahs for their crazy measures. One must read the journals of this period, and must hear the Philistines talk, to get the horrible conviction that one is shut up in a house with fools.
Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own (1844; translated by Steven T. Byington, 1907).
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Terrible Twisted Tweet
Close your eyes and imagine a young American.
Got a picture in your mind? Does the youngster have his or her hands cuffed behind his or her back?
No?
Well, clearly, you’re not the Selective Service System (SSS).
“When the threat of force is your first argument that somebody should do something,” James Leroy Wilson wrote at Medium.com, “you have no other.”
Wilson added, “And there is no reason for Selective Service to exist, as exemplified by” the agency’s “threatening, bullying” (and since deleted) tweet:
Some people don’t want to register because they think ‘laws and government suck.’ But truth be told, failure to register is punishable by a fine up to $250,000 and imprisonment up to 5 years. Also, failure to register results in a lifetime of denied benefits. #MythBusters
And what a compelling picture of coercion!
Is that supposed to be your kid?
Let’s start with some myth-busting of Selective Service’s so-called #MythBusting. For all their threats of imprisoning young men who don’t register, no one has been prosecuted in over 30 years.
I know because I remember those handcuffs quite well. Exactly 35 years ago today, three FBI agents arrested me at my home in North Little Rock, Arkansas, for my unwillingness to present myself and submit to signing a draft registration card.
My reasons — like those of only 13 others convicted of disobeying this unconstitutional demand — were more clearly articulated than the SSS tweet suggests: namely, a respect for the higher law of the Thirteenth Amendment and basic human rights, a desire to inform my government that I wouldn’t fight an unjust war, and an understanding that conscription was the way unfree countries fill their armies — anathema to the values that make America worth defending.
Today, non-registration continues to be massive. Admittedly, only half of young men in urban Washington, DC, and barely 60 percent in more rural North Dakota have complied with draft registration.
Moreover, most registrations are now passive, meaning men are registered while getting a driver’s license or applying for student aid — often without their knowledge.
Not exactly oozing with patriotism.
Last year, the agency did send over 110,000 names to the Justice Department for prosecution, but there were no prosecutions . . . which would spark public opposition to the program.
For now, draft registration continues even though former Selective Service Director Bernard Rostker contends, “My bottom line is there is no need to continue to register people for a draft that will not come; no need to fight the battle over registering women, and no military need to retain the [Military Selective Service Act].”
But Congress has empaneled the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service to investigate and provide a report: (1) whether to extend draft registration to women, in keeping with a federal court ruling, or to end the registration program altogether, as it should; and (2) whether there should be a compulsory military draft or civilian national service program.
I believe the draft violates individual freedom and makes our country less safe. We shouldn’t force young women to register or be drafted into combat along with men; we should end this conscription program for everyone.
I fought the draft 35 years ago when it was about me. I plan to double-down now that it is about my kids. And grandkids. And yours.
What say you? Please go tell the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service — HERE — to listen to your Common Sense today.
Thank you. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Tucker Carlson
It turns out, the more you know about the people you are supposed to consider impressive, the more you find out they’re not impressive at all. Actually, they’re not very smart, they have no wisdom, their personal lives are a disaster — by the way, if they’re so wise, why are they so unhappy? (Every one of them is.)
Tucker Carlson, Tucker Carlson Tonight (December 4, 2019), referring specifically to the progressive activists testifying before the House committees devoted to impeaching President Donald Trump.
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Slavery, etc.
On December 6, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, banning slavery in all states and territories.
One-hundred-and-nineteen years later, to the day, in 1984, Paul Jacob (of ThisIsCommonSense.com, LibertyiFund.org, and the Citizens in Charge Foundation) was arrested by the FBI for his refusal to register with Selective Service System (the draft people). The Government was probably not attempting to make a commemorative point about involuntary servitude.
In 1917 on this date, Finland declared independence from Russia.
Vladimir Nabokov completed his controversial novel Lolita on the Sixth of December in 1953, and would soon find himself embroiled in censorship and related publishing difficulties, though with no trouble in the United States when it was eventually published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1958.
There are few things more foolish than turning the Department of Education into a bank.
“Congress never set up the U.S. Department of Education to be a bank, nor did it define the secretary of education as the nation’s ‘top banker,’” said Betsy DeVos, Trump’s controversial Department of Education secretary, at an annual education conference in Reno. “But that’s effectively what Congress expects based on its policies.”
Secretary DeVos “recommended that Federal Student Aid (FSA) — the nation’s largest provider of financial aid — be spun off from the Education Department so student loans can be better managed and administered,” Forbes summarizes.
The FSA is a bank, but not a very good one. It makes bad bets, which Mrs. DeVos tries to make clear by asking a few rhetorical questions:
- “Is it any surprise . . . that both principal and interest are currently being paid down for only one in four loans?
- “Nearly 11 million borrowers have loans that are delinquent or in default?
- “And 43 percent of all loans are considered ‘in distress’?”
Even worse, the loans amount to an especially cumbersome form of subsidy, one that has corrupted the university system, misallocated higher education resources and inflated tuitions, and sunk generations into debt.
While DeVos’s reforms might possibly be an improvement, what if the troubles associated with the federal government’s student loan programs are not the result of how they are managed, but that the federal government is involved at all?
Centralizing consumer credit in specialized Congress-created lending institutions (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) was at the heart of last decade’s massive financial crisis. Shouldn’t a major banking reform focus on avoiding the moral hazards involved in government-run credit and subsidies?
DeVos’s plan doesn’t strike me as educated on this angle.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Thomas Sowell
Since risky investments usually pay more than safer investments, the incentive is for a government-supported enterprise to take bigger risks, since they get more profit if the risks pay off and the taxpayers get stuck with the losses if not.
Thomas Sowell, “Bailout Politics,” September 30, 2008.
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Prohibition Ends
On December 5, 1933, nationwide alcohol Prohibition in the United States ended after Utah became the 36th U.S. state to ratify the 21st Amendment to the United States Constitution, thus establishing the required 75 percent of states needed to enact the amendment that overturned the 18th.