Category: general freedom

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general freedom

Can Do America

Canning was revolutionary, in its heyday, soon after the process was perfected. Canned foods became an integral part of everyday American life. And still are: Canned soup, vegetables and beans, for instance — along with thousands of other items — still line the supermarket aisles, contributing to the quality of life in most American homes.

Home canning, on the other hand, became an even bigger deal early on, and during the Great Depression was the prime way many folks survived. At harvest time, housewives, grandmothers, and children — and even a few men — spent hours and hours canning enough fruits and meats and vegetables to carry the rest of the year.

But home canning went under a popularity eclipse with the rise of frozen foods and the improvements in mass production canning.

Now it’s back. Home canning is almost a craze, and has been since … the mortgage crisis implosion of 2008. It rocketed up 30 percent in the year immediately following. This is not exactly news. What’s news is that the trend continued, growing 10 percent the following year.

Hey, canning easy-​to-​prepare foods serves as insurance. Lose your income? Still have food. Lose the power grid in a possible future debacle? You still have food — and can heat something up with firewood or propane or … burning trash.

Or don’t heat it at all. Canned food is even good without re-​cooking. I’ve had some exquisite home-​canned foods, right out of the jar …

Tough times coming? We can meet them head on and survive. A “can” do attitude helps.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom national politics & policies too much government

Spice Trade

“Who knows how this got out,” one scientist mused, trying to account for how a synthetic marijuana substitute leaked out of his lab and onto … the black market.

I’ll echo that “who knows?” and raise it a “par for the course.”

The War on Drugs backfires all the time.

Take all the lying drug warriors have done (and continue to do) about illegal substances. Their job is to discourage drug use, so they engage in hype. However, once a drug user figures out that the government regularly lies to them about the dangers, they distrust everything the government says.

Our drug use educators also rarely admit that a key factor in all drug use is hormesis, the principle whereby the effectiveness (and lethality) of a drug varies by dosage. No doubt the “zero tolerance”/”just say ‘no’ rap” is easier to communicate, and sports a superficies of sense. But the downside of making drugs illegal (and thereby putting them in the black market) has a consequence: drug purity becomes almost impossible to maintain, rendering drug users unable to manage their doses — and, by long-​term adaptation, making them more and more reckless, less and less responsible.

Not a good result.

Also bad is today’s trendy (and reportedly dangerous) marijuana substitute known as “Spice.” And yes, this — along with a cabinet filled with new synthetic substances — was invented by government-​funded chemists.

To aid the War on Drugs.

No one knows who leaked the recipe onto the Net, allowing enterprising folks overseas to synthesize it and transport it here. It’s another case of outsourcing caused by an allegedly “well-​meaning” government program.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense general freedom

The Price of Liberty

Happy Independence Day!

Though I understand if you are not feeling all that exultant, today.

Last week’s Supreme Court decision allowing the unconstitutional 2,700-page monstrosity known as Obamacare to stand was, well, bracing. We can soberly see how far our great country has fallen from the Republic our Founders envisioned. And how long and hard the battle will be to restore our country.

Let’s face it: We’re headed in the wrong direction. Unless we change course, our children and grandchildren will never know the freedom and opportunity and security that we have known. Can we accept such a fate? Can we live with it? Can we even bear to go to our graves with it?

On this day 236 years ago, not only did the United States of America break away from the monarchical and mercantilist British Empire, but we did so with a Declaration of Independence that spoke to “a candid world,” firing up the hearts and minds of people everywhere.

The Declaration served, in its day, as the most eloquent expression of the equality and dignity of each individual human being … of our inviolate right to freedom. It continues to do so today.

Freedom fighters worldwide have long been inspired by the simple words of our Founders … speaking truth to power:

We hold these Truths to be self-​evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It falls to us, today, to restore some semblance of this precious freedom.

The enemies of freedom are powerful and entrenched — but remember, they were at the founding, too.

Of course, today’s situation has a somewhat different complexion. The public employee unions (basically, the government itself) are now the biggest spending and most powerful special interests in our politics. Crony phony-​capitalists (Solyndra and many more) join them to feed at the federal trough, gorging on our tax dollars, wallowing in the borrowed money that threatens collapse and catastrophe. They push ever more power into the hands of politicians and their special-​interest clients.

Though whopping majorities of citizens favor balanced budgets, limited government, and common-​sense checks on power — term limits and the right to initiative, referendum and recall — our so-​called representatives ignore the will of the people. Their spending and debt and nanny-​statism know no bounds. They sue to overturn our votes and fashion a maze of unconstitutional rules to block our political participation.

Today’s warning isn’t “the redcoats are coming!” it’s “the turncoats are in charge!”

We can’t count on politicians or judges to save us. We can only count on each other.

Benjamin Franklin said, “We must hang together or we shall surely all hang separately.”

This Common Sense program, in the spirit of Tom Paine’s famous pamphlet that inspired our revolution, is my effort to educate, to excite citizens to action, to entertain at times, and to unite us in our common cause.

From highlighting today’s grassroots freedom-​fighters to lambasting the mindless nanny-​state busybodies in high places, Common Sense is a daily shot heard ’round the world.

We don’t often ask for your financial support, but we can only continue with your support. Make a monthly pledge of $17.76 to Citizens in Charge. Or make a one-​time gift today for $25 — or $100! — or whatever you can afford to give.

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it,” Paine wrote to “the inhabitants of America.”

My goal in these commentaries is to add punch and verve to the movement, vanquishing fatigue so we can fight on.

Freedom is worth it. The only way to beat the odds is to fight.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

P.S. Just as in Paine’s day, and in his words, “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

P.P.S. Thank YOU for stepping up today and helping keep this program alive and kicking. Your monthly pledge of $17.76 or a one-​time gift of $100, $50, $25 or $15 keeps us passing the ammunition. Please contribute. Why not do it now?

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture individual achievement

Two Legacies

Two great economists died this month.

Anna Schwartz, co-​author with Milton Friedman of the classic A Monetary History of the United States, 1867 – 1960, passed away last Thursday, at age 96. For reasons known only to a few Swedes, she did not receive the Nobel along with her more famous research partner.Anna Schwartz and Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom, on the other hand, who died about two weeks earlier, at age 78, did manage to nab a Nobel.

While Mrs. Schwartz may not have received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, she had received the more popular honor of being dubbed “the high priestess of monetarism.” She knew more about the history of banking and finance than just about anyone. Tellingly, her intellectual odyssey didn’t stop when she reached retirement age.

In recent years, she attacked the politically popular notion that bailouts are a good idea during economic downturns. She also came out against the reappointment of Ben Bernanke as Fed chairman, and argued that government was the main instigator of the 2008 financial bust.

She knew how to make waves.

Elinor Ostrom focused her work not on finance but on the problems associated with managing common-​use resources. She found that government regulations tended to mismanage resources, while individuals and communities better negotiated creative and effective solutions to problems that previous economists deemed insoluble without government.

Like Anna Schwartz, she was much more than an armchair theorist. She didn’t merely draw equations on a blackboard and pontificate on how necessary it is for “government” to “fix it.” The evidence — which they collected — is in, government most often is the problem that must itself be fixed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment general freedom too much government

Robots in Amber

In 2010, Newark, New Jersey, collected more than $3 million in fines based on the watchful (and programmed) work of red-​light/​amber-​light intersection cameras. The next year there were even more violations.

Politicians love these Orwellian devices, while citizens remain extremely suspicious.

New Jersey recently suspended ticketing based on the results from 63 of the state’s 85 intersection cameras. It seems that these specific cameras (including all those in Newark) had not been properly configured according to the specifications set by the enabling legislation.Big Brother Is Watching You

A Star-​Ledger report neatly explains the calibration method, which requires intersection speed studies to set the proper duration of the amber lights. Figuring caution-​light duration based on actual intersection speeds, not on posted speed limits — that is, the average actual speed of 85 percent of drivers — would seem to have something to do with safety. The 85 percent rule is an old highway safety engineering standard, and safety is allegedly why governments are involved in this at all.

A problem, though: This compliance procedure is great for setting speed limits, but in this case, wouldn’t it punish slower, legal drivers on streets where people tend to drive faster than the limit? Were the overwhelming majority of folks to speed through intersections, that would correspondingly lower the duration of the amber lights. Consequence? The folks most likely to receive tickets would be those who drove slowly through the intersections.

Hardly a good idea. As one driver commented, “Virtually from green it turns into red.”

More telling against the cameras is the increase in infractions, suggesting that the robotic cameras do not have a net instructional effect.

That is, they don’t make intersections safer.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture

Harappan Puzzles

Civilization first emerged around rivers: In Egypt, the Nile; in the Near East, the Tigris and Euphrates; in China, the Yellow River; and in the India-​Pakistan-​Afghanistan region, the Indus River Valley. We know the least about the Indus, or Harappan civilization. Its written language is the only one of these major civilizations’ forms of writing that remains uncracked, there being no “Rosetta Stone” for the curious ancient script.Examples of Indus Valley artifacts

Harappan culture sported elaborate plumbing, but no great monuments. This leads experts to suspect that the culture was “more democratic” than in the other cradles of civilization.

Truth is, we know next to nothing about Harappan governance or politics. By “democratic,” they probably mean “decentralized.” Or at least not heavily militaristic.

And, if that is borne out in further research, that’s huge. The hand of political governance lay quite heavily upon early city folks, and is generally associated with conquest. Could it be that Harappan civilization was freer, more voluntaristic and individualistic than Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Xia and Shang Dynasty societies?

We can only guess. But on a different Harappan puzzle, there’s a new theory out, purporting to explain what happened to this largest of ancient “empires”: climate change.

The weather got warmer, their riverways dried up, and the people scattered, mainly heading east.

Too bad for the civilization. But note two things:

  1. The climate change was natural, and
  2. People reacted naturally, by moving.

If we are experiencing, today, the beginnings of a global climate change, it may very well be natural, and (natural or not) people freely moving about may be the best response to the worst of it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.