This Week in Common Sense, focusing on the notion of a “Universal Basic Income”:
Note: the sound isn’t as good as usual. Next week we will be up to snuff.
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Democrats & the Dream
Author: Redactor
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A Prohibition Overturned
On August 4, 2010, in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Judge Vaughn Walker overturned California’s Proposition 8, the ballot initiative prohibiting same-sex marriage that had passed two years earlier by the state’s voters.
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
On August 3, 2008, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died at age 90. His novels, such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward, explored life under totalitarian Communism, and remain classics of modern literature. His huge survey of Soviet concentration camps, The Gulag Archipelago, was an important contribution to the demise of Communism as a popular ideology, showing just how horrifying the repression in the Soviet Union had become.
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Theodore Parker
Justice is moral temperance in the world of men. It keeps just relations between men; one man, however little, must not be sacrificed to another, however great, to a majority, or to all men.
Theodore Parker, Ten Sermons of Religion (1853)
Yesterday I referenced “pigs
Today, it’s just about the muck.
Now, I am on the road and definitely not catching every word of the Democratic debates. But amidst much nonsense and embarrassment — and there was a lot of it, from what I can tell, not excluding the much-googled New Agey blather of Oprah’s favorite guru, Ms. Marianne Williamson — one exhange stood out: Representative Tulsi Gabbard’s takedown of Kamala Harris’s shockingly punitive and ugly career as a prosecuting attorney.
Now, Rep. Gabbard snuck in her attack* on Harris in place of answering a question about Harris’s own sneak attack, in the previous debate round, on former U. S. Senator and Vice President Joe Biden’s 1970s’ opposition to mandatory bussing. Gabbard ably shifted away from dealing at all with Sleepy Joe — who is a buzzkill and soon-to-be buzzard lunch. She deflected, addressing, instead, a real issue, Kamala Harris as callous crime-fighter.
This shows that Gabbard is developing real politicians’ chops — if you cannot carefully answer a question different from the one asked, you aren’t a true [sic] politician in America.
After the debate, the two candidates took further whacks at each other. The Jezebel article I consulted used the metaphor of “wrestling match” rather than my pigs-in-muck figure, but we are talking about the same thing.
But note, Rep. Gabbard is always calm and well-spoken. She seems able to descend into the muck and coming out without too much stink.
Does this give her an advantage over Donald Trump?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* “Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president. But I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite, but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana: she blocked evidence . . . that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so; she kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California. . . .” etc.
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Declaration signed!
The Declaration of Independence was signed by members of the Continental Congress of the United States, on August 2, 1776.
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Marcus Aurelius
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Imperator and Pontifex Maximus Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
What should we “fight for” in politics? The readily obtainable, the remotely possible, or the obtainable only when the proverbial pig flaps its muddy wings?
You might think this would be a pressing concern for Democrats running to oust Donald Trump from the presidency. You know, practical politics being something established political parties actually do. Yet, in Tuesday’s Democratic candidates’ debate, some of the night’s loudest applause went to Senator Elizabeth Warren, for her response to all the . . . negativity . . . from John Delaney.
“You know,” she said sternly, stridently in that tone only some of us find grating, “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.”
Really?
She is not running under the Green or Libertarian Party banners. Green candidates can talk about getting rid of all internal combustion engines, and Libertarians can talk about their opposition to drivers’ licensing.
They have license.
Because flightless pigs give them license.
But Senator Warren has a chance.
At some point, you’d think, she has to take seriously what American voters can tolerate, not just what will make progressive activists in the debate audience “erupt,” as CNN put it. Or what Democratic primary voters will demand.
It is worth noting that Delaney, a former U.S. Representative from Maryland, was mostly concerned about the Sanders-Warren healthcare plan that, he says, would take away from workers benefits they now possess.* The fact that Senator Warren is willing to risk union worker support to play for the utopian vote is . . . interesting
And Delaney’s right — it has to be good for Trump.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Delaney’s argument that Warren found so offensive: “I think Democrats win when we run on real solutions, not impossible promises, when we run on things that are workable, not fairy tale economics. Look at the story of Detroit, this amazing city that we’re in. This city is turning around because the government and the private sector are working well together. That has to be our model going forward. We need to encourage collaboration between the government, the private sector, and the nonprofit sector, and focus on those kitchen table, pocketbook issues that matter to hard-working Americans: building infrastructure, creating jobs, improving their pay . . . creating universal health care, and lowering drug prices.”
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William J. Locke
William J. Locke, The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne (1905), p. 50.
Truth is the enfant terrible of the Virtues.
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No Exceptions
“It’s time to bring the country together,” says Rep. John Delaney (D-Maryland), aspiring to be our next commandeer-in-chief, “restore our sense of shared purpose and a common and inclusive national destiny.”
How?
Forcibly: “John Delaney’s Plan for National Service” states that “Every American will complete a minimum of one year and a maximum of two years of mandatory national service when they graduate high school, or turn 18.”
Delaney joins other glassy-eyed statists in hallucinating that “mandating national service” will “build a future where young people begin their adult lives serving their country and working alongside people from different backgrounds.”
That is, he explains, “Where people . . . who grew up in the suburbs, in farm towns, in coal country, in urban communities get to know each other, get to learn from each other, and get to see firsthand that we still have a lot in common.”
Except that young people won’t “get to,” they’ll “have to.”
As a Delaney news release emphatically emphasizes about his forced national conscription: “No exceptions.”
If you’re a LeBron James type NBA prospect, forget that multi-million dollar contract for a year or two. You have streets to sweep.
If you’re pregnant? Have a terminal disease? This time isn’t yours but the government’s.
And why is it always young people who “get to” be shanghaied?
Never the politicians.
No matter how many fifty-something politicians such as Delaney find their fellow middle-aged cohort to be disunited and non-cohesive, no one ever suggests that his own age group — that he himself — be enslaved into government service.
For their own good, of course.
And the nation’s destiny.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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