“We hold that what one man cannot morally do, a million men cannot morally do, and government, representing many millions of men, cannot do.”
—ALBERT JAY NOCK
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But they rarely show us much for all the talk.
Paul Woolverton, writing this weekend in the Fayetteville Observer, noted one such lapse after the North Carolina Senate voted to create a law to let magistrates “opt out of conducting any weddings if they have a religious objection.”
The problem? “No one in the debate,” Mr. Woolverton asserts, “questioned the underlying premise that a magistrate or clergy member is necessary to seal the marriage contract.”
The involvement of the state in the marriage contract biz is unnecessarily complicated, he explains. “As fiscal conservatives,” Woolverton insists, they could have taken the opportunity to ask something more fundamental:
A man and a woman pay the government $60 to get a government-approved marriage license. Why should they then have to visit another government office and pay the government another $20, or hire a government-designated third party for a fee or “donation,” to finalize their marriage contract?
Woolverton suggests streamlining the process: “… [G]overnment should make its involvement the least intrusive it can be. It should record marriages when couples visit the Register of Deeds to buy their marriage licenses.”
And that’s it.
Betrothed couples can legally testify to meeting any and all state requirements — and officially inform the state of their pre-marriage and married names.
Those who want the services of a priest or rabbi or preacher or imam can hire one, or cajole one. Or two.
That’s just not state business.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
I don’t know if Juan Williams is right about who qualifies as America’s most influential thinker on race. But I hope he is.
In a Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed, Fox News’s liberal-leaning political analyst and author of Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (1998), argues that our country’s most important influencer of thought on race is neither some current and trendy academic writer nor our current president (or his outgoing attorney general). Instead, it is none other than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
While more famous figures of African-American descent have dominated the news talk shows and airwaves and popular consciousness, Justice Thomas has gone about “reshaping the law and government policy on race by virtue of the power of his opinions from the bench.” While previous African-American racial activists and thinkers have striven to defend the rights of black people, Justice Thomas, “the second black man on the court, takes a different tack. He stands up for individual rights as a sure blanket of legal protection for everyone, including minorities.”
Opposed to “perpetual racial tinkering,” Thomas has marshaled Frederick Douglass’s words to make his case: “What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice.” And justice, in Clarence Thomas’s judgment, does not entail a constant rescue-worker attitude towards minorities, or other disadvantaged folks. It requires nothing other than equality of rights before the law.
And perhaps some hard work on the part of the disadvantaged.
Hats off, then, to Juan Williams for recognizing the importance of Thomas’s common sense contention that “black people deserve to be treated as independent, competent, self-sufficient citizens.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The “tiny house” movement has gained momentum. More and more people — especially young people and childless people — see the virtue of very small houses. They are cheaper, can be made energy-efficient, have an almost necessarily smaller “environmental footprint,” and are mobile.
And I can see the attraction. For one thing, a tiny house would be easier to clean than what I have. For another? Snug. Many of the efforts are very cleverly designed and built. And certainly for young singles, they make a great deal of sense.
But, wouldn’t you know it, there is a problem here. Government.
Urban housing authorities, zoning boards, and the like, have not exactly been accommodating to this new development.
Which is, in its way, typical, and typically frustrating. After all, many of the reasons folks are looking to tiny houses result from government regulation in the first place. City, metro and county governments have been so poorly accommodating to diversity in housing demands that costs have risen horribly.
This is all explained over at Reason, which draws the bureaucratic environment of the nation’s capital in relation to tiny homes: “they’re illegal, in violation of several codes in Washington D.C.‘s Zoning Ordinance. Among the many requirements in the 34 chapters and 600 pages of code are mandates defining minimum lot size, room sizes, alleyway widths, and ‘accessory dwelling units’ that prevent tiny houses from being anything more than a part-time residence.”
This leaves Reason’s featured tiny home owner in yet another bad-government-induced limbo: “allowed to build the home of his dreams — he just can’t live there.”
We need tiny government. Or at least tiny-accommodating government. Really… both.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Dear Reader: This “BEST of Common Sense” comment originally aired on July 4, 2007. A longer version published at Townhall.com was picked up by Rush Limbaugh and read on his radio show. —PJ
Could Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards actually be right about something? Not where to go to get a haircut, mind you, I mean about there being two Americas.
There is the vibrant America … and the stagnant one.
There is the America of ever-increasing wealth, innovation, creativity, new products and services. Choices galore.
And there is the politician’s America: The regulated America, the subsidized America, the earmarked America. The failing America.
In one America, it is what you produce that gets you ahead. In the other, it’s who you know.
In one America, to earmark some money means setting aside funds (into savings) for a purchase — a car, house, college.
In the other America, to earmark is to grab from taxpayers to give to cronies. It is the highest rite of career politicians: Buying their votes with other people’s money. Oh, there have been reforms, sure. But a recent bill in the House had 32,000 earmark requests.
In one America, we decide what we pay for. We choose constantly about little things and big. We call the shots. Or we walk down the street and associate with someone else. So we have some faith in those we work with.
In the other America, we vote. But we rarely get what we vote for.
Maybe that’s why the new Democratic Congress just registered the lowest approval rating in poll history.
It surely isn’t because folks love the Republicans.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama gave cautious support for the anti-vaxxer cause a few years ago. No scandal.
But only now that Republican politicians Chris Christie and Rand Paul have talked about the risks of (as well as of parental rights and responsibility regarding) childhood vaccination has the issue of mandatory vaccination finally hit big.
Ronald Bailey offers a more modest proposal. “Vaccination is arguably the greatest public health triumph of the past century,” he begins. But he argues not for mandating vaccines, but for social pressure: “person-to-person shaming and shunning.”
That is one traditional (and less politically extreme) way to solve such problems.
But what is that problem, at base? Those who fear a negative personal effect from vaccination (and there are some, though the “autism” charge appears to be bogus) become “free riders,” as economists like to put it. They gain a de facto immunity without having to pay — either in money or in the small risk that vaccination does demonstrate.
This particular free rider benefit depends on the concept of “herd immunity.” That’s the conjectured level of protection for individuals who lack biological immunity by the overwhelming presence of vaccinated people in a population who are immune. (The disease can’t spread because it hits too many dead ends in healthy hosts.)
As has been often noted the last few days, though the anti-vaxxer trend has mainly tended to “infect” (as a “meme”) urban populations of left-leaning folks — epitomized by Hollywooders Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey — the new backlash against anti-vaxxer rights has come strongest from the left-leaning media.
The Republican “offenders” provide cover?
Apparently, those of the Democratic herd think they have immunity … to criticism.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.