Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect.
Author: Redactor
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Mill and Hayek . . . and bang!
On May 8, 1899, Austrian-English economist and philosopher Friedrich August von Hayek was born. He signed the bulk of his books written in the English language as “F.A. Hayek,” and is best known for The Road to Serfdom, The Constitution of Liberty, The Fatal Conceit, and many essays, several of them which are widely cited, including “Individualism, True and False” and “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”
Years earlier, on the same date in 1873, English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill died. Now best known for On Liberty and Utilitarianism, Mill’s letters to his wife were edited into book form by Hayek.
On May 8, 1946, two Estonian school girls (Aili Jõgi and Ageeda Paavel) blew up the Soviet memorial which stood in front of the Bronze Soldier in Tallinn.
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Townhall: Progressively Losing Freedom
Free speech is under attack, largely on grounds of “hate speech” charges, and backed by violent revolutionaries. Who are, it turns out, themselves backed by the former head of the Democratic Party. Click on over to Townhall to read this weekend’s Common Sense dose. Click back here to read . . .
- Fox News: Greg Gutfeld calls it “Another victory for the anti-free speech movement”
- Common Sense: Thorns in the Parade
- Portland Tribune: Saturday Rose Festival-sanctioned event canceled because of demonstration threat
- The Atlantic: The Glaring Evidence That Free Speech Is Threatened on Campus
- Fox News: Heather Mac Donald: Claremont speech cut short by protesters’ ‘brute, totalitarian force’
- Boston Globe: ‘Bell Curve’ author attacked by protesters at Middlebury College
- The Blaze: Howard Dean doubles down on ‘hate speech isn’t protected’ claims — then it backfires big time
- Wikipedia: The Cultural Revolution
- Wikipedia: The Gang of Four (band)
- Reason: Communism Killed 94M in 20th Century, Feels Need to Kill Again
- The College Fix: Columbia U. conservatives’ horror stories: Threatened, bullied, censored
- Independent Sentinel: Conservative Speaker at LA State University Threatened by Violent Fascist Students
- Fox Business: Public College Bans Conservative Speaker Shapiro After Liberals Protest
- WinstonChurchill.com: The Sinews of Peace (‘Iron Curtain Speech’)
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Belated Amendment
On May 7, 1992, the State of Michigan ratified a 203-year-old proposed amendment to the United States Constitution, thereby fulfilling the terms of amending the document, adding it as 27th Amendment. The amendment had been written by James Madison. He had presented it as part of the original twelve amendments that became the ten making up the Bill of Rights. It bars the U.S. Congress from giving itself a pay raise until after the next election, so that voters have a chance to decide whether those voting for the raise would remain in Congress to receive it.
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Instead of ObamaCare … and RyanCare
Sen. Rand Paul doesn’t think that the way out of the health care morass is more subsidy.
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Arthur Latham Perry
Arthur Latham Perry, Principles of Political Economy (1891).
Suppose for a moment, that all taxes of every name could be abolished instantaneously, and the Governments, like the Israelites, live on manna for forty years. What harm would ensue? What industry would decline? Who would be impoverished? What stimulus to work and save and grow rich would be weakened thereby? Would not wages, and profits, and rents, all be lifted thereby, with no damage to anybody? A child can see that Taxes from their very nature are a burden, are a subtraction from income, are a minus and not a plus. Who, then, except from sinister motives, can imagine and represent, that Taxes are a good in themselves, a positive blessing, a spur to the progress of Society?
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Now comes good sailing
On May 6, 1862, American author, philosopher and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau died, after many years of tuberculosis.
Aware he was dying, Thoreau’s last words were “Now comes good sailing,” followed by two lone words, “moose” and “Indian.” Bronson Alcott planned the service and read selections from Thoreau’s works, and Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at his funeral.
His remains, as well as those of members of his immediate family, were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.
His most famous works are Walden and An Essay on Civil Disobedience.
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William J. Locke
We have the richest language that ever a people has accreted, and we use it as if it were the poorest. We hoard up our infinite wealth of words between the boards of dictionaries and in speech dole out the worn bronze coinage of our vocabulary. We are the misers of philological history. And when we can save our pennies and pass the counterfeit coin of slang, we are as happy as if we heard a blind beggar thank us for putting a pewter sixpence into his hat.
William J. Locke, The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne (1905).
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Cinco de Mayo
In 1862, troops led by Ignacio Zaragoza stopped a French invasion in the Battle of Puebla in Mexico — an event leading to the popular “Cinco de Mayo” celebration.
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José Ortega y Gasset
[T]he mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. This is the gravest danger that to-day threatens civilisation: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State.
José Ortega y Gasset, Chapter XIII: The Greatest Danger, The State, The Revolt of the Masses, 1929.