Author: Redactor

Ultra-Absurd?

minimum wage, coins, Walking Liberty, freedom

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) is oh-so-ultra.

USA Today dubs him a “conservative” in the title of a recent article on a proposed minimum wage hike, and then an “ultraconservative” (emphasis added) in the first word of the article itself.

Why does this “ultraconservative” join a Democratic senator in raising the federal minimum wage to $15? They both seem to assume that minimum wage laws raise wages.

For hundreds of years, economists have argued they don’t. On the face of it, these laws merely prohibit jobs paid below a certain rate. They disemploy.

When the government prohibits low-wage compensation, businesses shift productive processes to keep afloat; when a factor is suddenly made more expensive, they adjust. With more automation, for example.

At least, the USA Today article mentions, briefly, that the Congressional Budget Office forecasts that some individual workers and families would see their livelihoods diminished by the higher minimum — which is the only part of the coverage of the new, more restrictive (higher) minimum wage regulation that gets to the meat of the issue: what minimum wage laws actually do.

A related article back home in the Springfield News Leader (a member of the “USA TODAY NETWORK”) explores the question of Missouri’s minimum wage and what activist economists call the state’s “minimum living wage” — and it is relevant at least to this extent: states have different economic climates, and wage rates differ region to region in the United States, so it’s very relevant to a senator from his state affecting his state’s economy with a regulation applying equally to all states.

Which is to say that the minimum wage issue should be a state issue.

If an issue at all.

“Ultraconservative” Hawley’s bill is ultra-misguided.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

William Henry Harrison

The strongest of all governments is that which is most free.
William Henry Harrison, letter to Simon Bolivar (September 27, 1829).

Today

The Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbor on June 17, 1885.

On the same day in 1930, progressive Republican President Herbert Hoover — eager to please agricultural states and confident that protectionism would yield greater wealth — signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. It did not help get the country out of the Great Depression.

Three years later, investment author and two-time Libertarian Party presidential candidate Harry Browne was born

On June 17, 1944, Iceland declared independence from Denmark.

On this day in 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs,” which steadily decreased civil liberty and the rule of law in America.

Exactly one year later, five men were arrested for attempted burglary on the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., igniting the Watergate scandal that ultimately led to the resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon more than two years later.

incumbents term limits

The Mad-Libs Incumbency

In late April, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s delegate to the U.S. House for these last 35 years, “stumbled through a short speech in which she appeared to struggle with both reading and comprehension, unable to deliver more than a garbled, Mad Libs-style version of her intended remarks,” according to a report in Washingtonian magazine and confirmed by an audio recording.

Annie Karni’s story last week in the The New York Times discloses concerns among Norton’s “colleagues and friends” of “a notable decline . . . that has quieted her voice, leaving her vastly diminished and struggling to fulfill her congressional duties.”

Karni’s other tidbits?

“In hearings, she often sits quiet and alone, sometimes relying on staff aides to remind her where she is.”
“She sometimes does not seem to recognize people she has known for years.”
“Ms. Norton is unable to function independently.”

That means she is unable to function as an effective representative of the people of Washington, D.C.

“In Ms. Norton’s case, the signs have been evident for years,” explains The Times article. Her activity on the House floor has dwindled precipitously.”

Still, when questioned earlier this week about possible retirement, Norton declared, “I’m going to run. I don’t know why anybody would even ask me.”

The 88-year-old non-voting delegate from our nation’s capital would be 90 if reelected next year and able to complete a 14th term. When of course she might yet run again.

“Ms. Norton’s story is a familiar one in Congress,” acknowledges The Times reporter, “an institution littered with towering figures who have stayed around well past the prime of their lives.”

Yet this is not really about age. It’s about incumbency. Politicians leveraging their positions for unlimited rule . . . resulting in rule by the old, the doddering, the feeble.

We all know — ’cept for incumbent politicians — that the answer is term limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

John Tyler

Popularity, I have always thought, may aptly be compared to a coquette — the more you woo her, the more apt is she to elude your embrace.
John Tyler, Message to the House (December 18, 1816), in his early days in politics, before becoming the tenth president of the United States.

Today

Bloomsday

On June 16, 1961, dancer Rudolf Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union.

The great Scottish moral philosopher, political economy pioneer, and Enlightenment intellectual Adam Smith (1723-1790), best known for authoring the 1776 masterwork The Wealth of Nations, was born on June 16.

On June 16, 1858, Abraham Lincoln delivered his “House Divided” speech in Springfield, Illinois.

On this date in 1963, the Soviet Space Program achieved a first with the Vostok 6 mission, placing Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova into orbit as the first woman in space.

June 16th is Bloomsday, a celebration of the life and work of Irish expatriate author James Joyce (1882-1941). The date was selected because June 16, 1904, was the date in which Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses was set. The ceremonial day is named after the character Leopold Bloom.

Update

Deep State Confesses?

“Is it funnier,” asked Paul Jacob regarding a Rand Paul critic who had mocked the senator and called the whole picnic episode funny, “than the Deep State admitting that it had been faking and fanning the flames of the UFO craze all along?”

It is worth taking a few moments and digesting that UFO story, apart from the picnic invitation kerfuffle. The new spin on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) issue was provided by the first of a two-parter by Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha in the Wall Street Journal [link above]. The title and blurb provide an adequate précis:

The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology: U.S. military fabricated evidence of alien technology and allowed rumors to fester to cover up real secret-weapons programs
Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2025.

Now, Paul Jacob, on this site, has been covering the drip-by-drip UAP disclosure for a number of years now [feel free to use the search bar, above]. It has been obvious that the government has been lying to us. For a long time.

But about what? And how much?

The Wall Street Journal story is that the government made the whole thing up, or nearly so. “The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames [of the UFO craze], in what amounted to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens with disinformation.”

Unfortunately, we knew this was true from before the New York Times debut of the disclosure story in 2017. The sad, strange case of Richard Doty, who fed a hapless citizen who had stumbled upon a secret military operation a wild story of aliens and extra-terrestrial civilizations, was covered in the 2013 documentary Mirage Men.

But the wrinkle on the story is that Doty has gone on to push UFO stories publicly. Look for him on YouTube. Very odd, to say the least — and Doty is just one liar among many.

Speaking of liars, the CIA was created during the same summer that the modern UFO story started, 1947. That year featured multiple UAP reports (over Mount Rainier, most famously) and an alleged UFO crash (near Roswell, New Mexico). But the story had at least one strange precursor: the foo-fighters in World War II.

To what extent did the Deep State (and that freshly-debuted CIA, specifically) create a craze? Or, on the other hand, direct it and capitalize on it? Control it?

And what part was played by the pulp literary movement of science fiction? That is a question rarely asked, much less answered.

No answers here. But it is worth digesting how ufologists have handled the Wall Street Journal article. Here are two:

The thing is, if the UFO/UAP subject is almost completely a government psy-op, what does that tell us about our government?

To say that the government lies to us would be to understate the enormity of this.

Thought

Josephus

And, to speak in general, we can produce no example wherein our fathers got any success by war, or failed of success when without war they committed themselves to God.
Flavius Josephus (A.D. 37–100), De Bello Judaico (The War of the Jews), Book 5, Chapter 9.

Today

Pig War!

The Oregon Treaty, signed June 15, 1846, established the boundary between Great Britain’s Canadian territory and the United States of America, from the Rocky Mountains to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, using the 49th Parallel as the handy marker. However, the treaty was not exactly clear on the territorial status of the San Juan Islands, so exactly 13 years later, to the day, a war erupted . . . over a shot pig.

An American farmer shot a pig rooting through his garden. The pig belonged to an Irishman. The two did not agree upon compensation, so “the authorities” were called in, with infantry mustering from the south and the Governor of Vancouver Island instructing marines to land on San Juan Island — though the rear admiral in charge refused to comply with the order, on the reasonable grounds that war over a pig was not worth it. Local troops from both sides lined up against each other, each commanded to defend themselves only, not shoot first. All that resulted? Insults. It turned out to be a bloodless war, discounting the pig, so it might qualify as the best war in American history.

Update

The $37 Trillion: When?

Yesterday, Paul Jacob implied that Senator Rand Paul and Representative Tom Massie, both of Kentucky, could have observed the turning of the federal debt to from thirty-six point-something trillion to $37 trillion at the White House picnic. Considering that the picnic is already over, and the debt, as calculated by USDebtClock.org, still lingers under $36.98 trillion, that was obviously not possible. Of course, with such ritual observances, exact markers of the exact moment are hardly required.

But it does call attention to a mildly interesting question: when?

A quick consultation with the artificial intelligence called Grok3, supplied by X, suggests that the $37 trillion mark will be reached around June 19th, with June 15th or 16th well within the realm of possibility. But Grok also adds some caveats as well as this piece of useful information:

The Congressional Budget Office and other sources estimate the federal debt will reach $37.1 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2025 (September 30, 2025). However, real-time data from USDebtClock.org and posts on X indicate the debt is growing faster than some projections, with some analysts predicting $37 trillion well before the fiscal year-end. A Joint Economic Committee report specifically projects $37 trillion by approximately October 31, 2025, based on a three-year average daily growth rate, but current trends suggest it could happen sooner.
Grok3, consulted June 13, 2025.

A fact to bring up at this summer’s family picnic, no? Be the life of the party. We dare you.