On May 16, 1843, one thousand pioneers from Elm Grove, Missouri, set off for the Pacific Northwest, blazing what became known as the “Oregon Trail.”
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Oregon Trail
Author: Redactor
Only five people. What’s the big deal?
The Justice Department is prosecuting five recently stumbled-upon cases of illegal voting.
The Washington Times reports that the fraudsters include a Ukrainian mother and daughter, a Jamaican woman, and a Colombian man “who had been deported three times [and who] stole and lived under the identity” of an American citizen.
“I don’t think five cases is evidence of a systems-wide problem,” says Omar Nourelden of Common Cause. Surely too few to justify investigations or voting requirements that might curb voter fraud if only there were any.
One wonders how journalists like John Fund found material for investigative works like Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, published in 2004, or Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote, published in 2021.
The story quoting Nourelden mentions the Department of Government Efficiency’s referral of 57 cases of illegal aliens voting in the 2024 election. So that’s more than five recent examples. And DOGE isn’t done yet.
Willful negligence in conduct of elections is part of the problem. Specific fraud by specific persons is part of the problem.
Nourelden and others object to voter ID. They also criticize as invasive the new efforts by DOGE to find evidence of fraud, that rarity of our political life. (Of course, non-DOGE government personnel already have access to the voting and registration records.)
If there’s no big problem, DOGE won’t find a big problem. Let it hunt.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Isabel Paterson
In human affairs, all that endures is what men think.
Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (1943), p. 15.
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Virginia for Independence
On May 15, 1776, the Virginia Convention instructed its Continental Congress delegation to propose a resolution of independence from Great Britain, paving the way for the United States’ Declaration of Independence.
In the recent pandemic, we learned that government and pharmaceutical companies do not have the least bit of an antagonistic relationship. It’s all buddy-buddy, a Big Gov/Big Pharma partnership.
And an expensive mess, sadly, in which Americans routinely pay prescription prices many times higher than folks around the world.
Now that President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at “Delivering Most-Favored Nation Prescription Pricing to American Patients,” you have probably heard complaints that Trump’s plan amounts to “price controls,” which Republicans say they are against, and Trump, too, says he adamantly opposes.
But the The Wall Street Journal editorial that mounted this case, and Joe Lancaster’s argument in Reason, assume that the current order makes sense. The present system is in no way a free market in drugs. It’s the result of patent policy, massive subsidies to consumers, an insane approach to insurance regulation, and abridgements to free trade.
“There are many good reasons why we should pay more for earlier access to new medications than our trading partners,” write Darius Lakdawalla and Dana Goldman, quoted in Lancaster’s Reason article.
And then they go on to recommend an elaborate government scheme that itself is more a form of price controls than Trump’s workaround.
While I doubt that all of Trump’s boasted benefits will pan out, the status quo is a rigged market, and Congress — which could debate and fix it, theoretically — does nothing to restore a free market, thereby earning its low ratings from the public.
Leaving it to the executive branch.
Which is not supposed to legislate this sort of thing at all.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
NOTE: Jeffrey Tucker wrote a much longer piece defending Trump’s plan — arguing that in a rigged system such as ours, calling Trump’s most-favored-nation policy a form of price regulation, and the status quo not, is witless.
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Florence King
We wallow in nostalgia but manage to get it all wrong. True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories […] but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted déjà vu.
Florence King, “Déjà Views,” in Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye (1989), p. 112.
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Constitutional Convention
On May 14, 1787, delegates convened a Constitutional Convention, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to write a new Constitution for the United States. George Washington presided over the convention.
On the same day a century later, jurist and pamphleteer Lysander Spooner — author of several important treatises, including Trial by Jury, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, and an infamous pamphlet entitled “No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority” — died.
Some foreign policy issues, such as regarding Israel and Palestine, are confusing enough that many of us tend to be wary of sharing our opinions.
But no matter how reticent we may be, we can agree on this: there should be no outright lying about our positions.
Mitchell Plitnick is a progressive who is willing to confront this prevarication problem forthrightly. Of the many “disheartening moments” during the last presidential campaign, “few,” he admits, “were quite as deflating as that moment when the ostensibly progressive, leading member of The Squad, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood at the podium at the Democratic National Convention and told the audience that then-Vice President Kamala Harris was ‘working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bring the hostages home.’
“We knew she was lying,” Plitnick confesses. “AOC herself knew she was lying. But it was just the message that the crowd — who were more than eager to show their support for the Democrats despite the party’s utter refusal to allow even the most conciliatory and moderate Palestinian voice to be heard — wanted to hear, and they ate it up.”
This willingness of the few to promote a blatant lie, and of the masses to believe it, might be the most disheartening thing about modern politics.
And as for the truth, how do we know Plitnick is right about the prevarications? “The utterly shameless nature of the lie has now been confirmed by no less than nine officials from Joe Biden’s administration and reported on by Israel’s own Channel 13 news program, Hamakor. . . .”
We, the people — pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian and otherwise — may all wish for a ceasefire.
But it’s clear that the last administration wanted nothing to do with it.
And lied about it. For votes.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Joseph Heller
“The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.”
Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961).
On May 13, 1888, the Empire of Brazil abolished slavery with the passage of the Lei Áurea (“Golden Law”).