This weekend, your Common Sense advocate catches up the good folks at Townhall.com with the latest clever initiative on the West Coast to give citizens what they need to restrain government growth. Click on over. Come back for the background reading:
“Private property and free trade stand on exactly the same footing, both being essential and indivisible parts of liberty, both depending upon rights, which no body of men, whether called governments or anything else, can justly take from the individual.”
Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State (1885)
On June 21, 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an Oklahoma law denying the right to vote to some citizens. In Guinn v. United States, the Supreme Court found “grandfather clauses” in effect in several formerly slave states to be little more than sneaky ways of allowing illiterate white folks to vote while disallowing illiterate black folks.
“We’re so much more rational in sports,” says Thomas Sowell, than in economic policy.
Here Sowell clarifies a major policy issue that flows from the “market failure” analysis that grew out of “perfect competition” models in modern economics. But without the math.
On this date in 1787, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, it was moved and debated to confine legislative powers to two distinct branches, and to strike the word “national” from the document.
The final wording eventually became “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.” And the word “national” does not occur anywhere in the Constitution.
“The nature of man is indivisible; you cannot cut him across, and give one share of him to the state and leave the other for himself.”
Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State (1885)
“A man can only learn when he is free to act.”
Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State (1885)
In 1941, Václav Klaus was born; other June 19 births include Salman Rushdie in 1947, Kathleen Turner in 1954, and Laura Ingraham in 1964.
“He who carries self-regard far enough to keep himself in good health and high spirits, in the first place thereby becomes an immediate source of happiness to those around, and in the second place maintains the ability to increase their happiness by altruistic actions. But one whose bodily vigour and mental health are undermined by self-sacrifice carried too far, in the first place becomes to those around a cause of depression, and in the second place renders himself incapable, or less capable, of actively furthering their welfare. In estimating conduct we must remember that there are those who by their joyousness beget joy in others, and that there are those who by their melancholy cast a gloom on every circle they enter.”
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Ethics: Data of Ethics, § 72, pp. 193-194
On June 18, 1838, Auberon Edward William Molyneux Herbert was born.
Auberon Herbert was a Liberal Member of Parliament who, after reading the writings of Herbert Spencer, became a radical individualist and author of essays such as “The Ethics of Dynamite,” “A Politician in Trouble About His Soul,” and “The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State.”