From the day when the first members of councils placed exterior authority higher than interior, that is to say, recognized the decisions of men united in councils as more important and more sacred than reason and conscience; on that day began lies that caused the loss of millions of human beings and which continue their unhappy work to the present day.
Leo Tolstoy, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence
On October 2, 1789, George Washington sent the proposed Constitutional amendments (the United States’ Constitution’s Bill of Rights) to the States for ratification.
On the same date in 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed, preventing him from reacting to the economic downturn following the Great War in a Progressive fashion, making his response de facto laissez faire. One insider, and skeptic of Progressive hubris, cattily referred to Wilson’s incapacitation as “a stroke of luck.”
His successor in office, President Warren G. Harding, would go on to massively cut spending as well as taxes, and take on regulation as well. He also released Woodrow Wilson’s domestic war prisoners — ranging from journalists, ordinary folk to socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs — who had dissented from Wilson’s involvement in the war.
The Depression of the early 1920s, though as deep as the early 1930s’, proved remarkably brief, thanks to Harding . . . and Wilson’s “stroke of luck.”
On what media covers. Don’t miss it — at Townhall.com.
. . . so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
Voltairine de Cleyre
On October 1, 1908, Ford produced the first Model T at a plant in Detroit. The auto could travel 40 miles per hour and ran on gasoline or hemp-based fuel. (As oil prices fell, Ford phased out the hemp option.) The Model T was the first car designed for a mass market, rather than as a luxury item. By 1927, Ford had built 15 million Model T cars – the longest production run of any car model until the Volkswagen Beetle surpassed it in 1972.
On October 1, 1918, Lawrence of Arabia (T.E. Lawrence) helped lead a combined Arab and British force that captured Damascus from the Turks during World War I.
Dave Rubin interviewed John Stossel and “Red Pill Black,” this week. What is interesting is to compare their similar changes of heart and mind regarding politics and towards more limited government perspectives.
Unless you are following new media, you may never have heard of Candace Owens (“Red Pill Black”), but Stossel is a well known consumer reporter who moved from ABC to Fox Business . . . and now to that aforementioned new media.
Progress is in inverse ratio to the coercive action of man on man, in direct ratio to his command over things. The Protectionist, by trying to prevent his countrymen from consuming what they choose, wishes to remove them from the effects of all external progress, and when he gains his ends he may indeed find the most extravagant conceptions of Swift pale before the irony of his creation.
Yves Guyot, The Comedy of Protection, 1906, viii.
September 30 has served as Blasphemy Rights Day since 2009, when it was initiated by the Center for Inquiry.
Botswanans celebrate their independence from Great Britain with an official day on September 30.
On September 29, 1789, the first Congress of the United States under the new Constitution adjourned.
On the same date in 1881, economist Ludwig von Mises was born in Lemberg, Galicia, of the Austria-Hungary Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine).
Nothing can serve as a substitute for an ideology that enhances human life by fostering social cooperation — least of all lies, whether they be called ‘tactics,’ ‘diplomacy,’ or ‘compromise.’ If men will not, from a recognition of social necessity, voluntarily do what must be done if society is to be maintained and general well-being advanced, no one can lead them to the right path by any cunning stratagem or artifice.
Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism, first published in German as Liberalismus, 1927, and in English as The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth, 1962.