Category: general freedom

The Ruins

Volney, Jefferson, translation, Alien and Sedition Act, John Adams, Ruins of Empires

We have just learned something interesting about the nastiest presidential election in American history.

No, not this year’s. It’s not the nastiest . . . yet.

It is about the election of 1800, when Thomas Jefferson beat back the Federalist Party and its Alien and Sedition Acts.

The Federalists made much of fears that the freethinking Jefferson would suppress Christianity. Some folks are said to have buried Bibles in their backyards, for safe keeping.

Overkill, sure. Jefferson was quite earnest in his support for religious freedom, as he famously wrote to the Danbury Baptists. (Jefferson garnered overwhelming Baptist support.) But he was a freethinker.

So much so that, in the year leading up to the big race, Jefferson translated all but the last chapters of C.-F. Volney’s The Ruins of Empires. This secret was uncovered recently by Thomas Christian Williams, who found in the Boston archives of the Massachussetts Historical Society many chapters of The Ruins, in English, in Jefferson’s hand. Williams wrote up his discovery in the March 2016 issue of The Skeptic, Michael Shermer’s journal.

The Ruins — once infamous, now almost forgotten — is mostly devoted to advancing a very deep view of the importance of limited government. Only the last few chapters, which Jefferson left to somebody else to translate, engage in a skeptical account of religion.

But note: Jefferson thought enough of Volney’s book to translate it himself, putting his political career at risk.

Oh, it also turns out that the Comte de Volney’s very presence in 1790s’ America served to spark the widespread panic about French spying . . . and thus President John Adams’s Alien Friends and Alien Enemies Acts!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Alien and Sedition Acts, election, history, Thomas Jefferson, Volney

Accountability crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies

Inch, Meet Mile

Give ’em an inch, they will take . . . a continent.

When Edward Snowden broke the secrecy of the NSA’s illegal surveillance on innocent Americans, many folks (especially those in government) said the snooping was OK, because

it is necessary for our security, and, besides,
the collected data would only be used against terrorists, as supervised by the FISA courts.

Well, it is now known that, whatever “a.” may be, “b.” is a dead letter, swept away by broken promises and a new information practice.

Yes, the National Security Agency now shares its (unconstitutionally obtained) information with various and sundry government agencies, for a wide variety of purposes.

Last week, Radley Balko noted in the Washington Post that “the ‘sneak-and-peek’ provision of the Patriot Act that was alleged to be used only in national security and terrorism investigations has overwhelmingly been used in narcotics cases. Now the New York Times reports that National Security Agency data will be shared with other intelligence agencies like the FBI without first applying any screens for privacy.”

That didn’t take long, eh?

Many of us have opposed the NSA’s data collection on American citizens because we believed the data would not continue to be used just for the alleged purpose they were collected.

It is not a “slippery slope” argument so much as an “inch-mile” one. Government tends to grow, in size and especially in scope.

And usually at the expense of our freedoms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags National Security Agency, NSA, patriot act, surveillance, surveillance state, terrorism

First Amendment rights general freedom individual achievement obituary

A Life Too Short

One lesson from the classic film, It’s a Wonderful Life, is that “Every man’s life touches so many others.”

Every woman’s life does, too.

On Monday, I was stunned and saddened to read in my morning paper that Cornell University President Elizabeth “Beth” Garrett had died, barely a month after being diagnosed with colon cancer, at only 52 years of age.

“Being the first woman president of Cornell, just as I was the first woman provost at U.S.C., puts me in the position of being a role model — not just for young women, but also for men,” she told an interviewer.

While at the University of Southern California, Beth “was the driving force behind the Initiative and Referendum Institute becoming part of USC,” according to my friend, Dane Waters, founder of the Institute.

I met her in the late 1990s. While we certainly were not in full agreement politically, my respect for her intellectual honesty grew and grew. She produced top notch research on the initiative process

And she cared. Years ago, when the Oklahoma Attorney General unsuccessfully sought to persecute myself and two others, Beth Garrett, an Okie native, reached out to lend her moral support.

Reason magazine mourned her passing by calling her “a staunch defender of free speech on campus.”

“There isn’t any idea that ought not to be tested and questioned,” Garrett once told students. “Because that’s how we get closer to the truth. . . . So if you disagree with someone, the answer isn’t to shut them down.”

Beth Garrett lived a wonderful life, leading by example. We’ll miss her.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags ballot initiative, Beth Garrett, first amendment, Initiative Rights, obituaries, obituary

crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom moral hazard national politics & policies Snowden

Structurally Opinionated B. S.

Post author By CS Admin
Post date March 10, 2016
2 Comments on Structurally Opinionated B. S.

Edward Snowden, iPhone, First Amendment, privacy, Apple, illustration

Edward Snowden, the infamous American whistleblower now exiled in Russia, says the FBI’s claim that it cannot decode the infamous San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone is, and I quote, “Bernie Sanders.”

Oops.

He used another word-set, also sporting the initials B. S.

I got confused because, though the press has been fretting endlessly about the B.S. coming from Donald Trump, the real corkers of late have come from Bernie Sanders, who seems to think that white people cannot be poor or oppressed* and that the successes of free markets elsewhere serve perfectly as excuses for Big Government interference here in America.**

Mr. Snowden, who knows a lot more about encryption and decryption than I do, has given more weight to my suspicion that the whole FBI case against Apple — demanding that Apple create software to decrypt the company’s customers’ iPhones, and supply (on an allegedly case-by-case basis) the decrypted private information to the government — is a sham.

Snowden insists that there are multiple ways to do the job.

“Other technologists have explained how the FBI could have easily accessed the phone’s latest iCloud backup,” a report on Snowden’s judgment elaborated, “if agents working with San Bernardino County had not reset the iCloud password.”

Once again, a government failure leads to another push by government to correct for its failure, burdening citizens.

In this case: folks at Apple.

Interestingly, Apple’s legal defense appears to rest heavily on the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees, arguing that the demanded software is value-laden speech, is literally made up of such.

The exact term is “structurally opinionated,” which I nominate for the jargon phrase of the year.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Sanders has recently said, in one of those interminable debates that I can no longer watch in full, “When you are white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto, you don’t know what it’s like to be poor, you don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you are walking down a street or dragged out of a car.” As if “white privilege” amounts to immunity from poverty or oppression.

** Sanders, whose Tweets are as insane as his spoken pronouncements, recently lamented how Romanians in Bucharest have faster Internet speeds than Americans — without realizing they’d achieved these levels of access by wide-open, unrelenting, and wild competition. That is, Laissez Faire capitalism.

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Tags Apple, Apple Inc., Edward Snowden, first amendment, free speech, iPhone, privacy, security

Accountability ballot access general freedom ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies political challengers term limits

Adults for America

politics, immaturity, tug of war, adult, illustration

The answer to what ails us is . . . us.

Oh, we can say it is the fault of politicians — and we’re not wrong — but turning to the cause of a problem for its solution is . . . problematic at best.

Our politics is a tug-of-war, in part, between those wanting government to do ever more for us (by taking more from someone else) and those skeptical that such “solutions” supply much more than ever-more problems.

The Big Government crowd sports the opposite skepticism: Where’s the guarantee that “the private sector” will take care of folks? They assume government does provide a guarantee . . . like No Child Left Behind.

Meanwhile, advances do get made.

Throughout my life I’ve had the privilege to work with political activists whom I deeply respect. These “liberty initiators” work tirelessly to make government better, to right wrongs, to institute justice and the sort of transparent, ethical and limited government that’s consistent with a free and decent society.

Just as adults nurture their children, these citizens nurture their communities, their states, their country — as well as taking care of their children, their parents, their businesses.

Last week, an Arkansas woman took a day off work to join hundreds of fellow citizens in gathering petition signatures for term limits at the primary in Arkansas. I have a lot more faith in her and other responsible individuals than I do in far-off federal bureaucracies.

“The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished,” wrote Thoreau in Civil Disobedience, “and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo credit: Cary Bass-Deschenes on Flickr

Tags activism, big government, civil disobedience, limited government, Thoreau

Accountability general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies responsibility

Impatience as a Political Impulse

Post author By CS Admin
Post date March 8, 2016
2 Comments on Impatience as a Political Impulse

impatience, frustration, politics, radicals, balance, caution

It is not demonization to recognize a besetting sin.

Yesterday, I warned against demonization, though admittedly, I have “picked on” both Trump and Bernie here at Common Sense and in this site’s new Steal This Meme section. In my defense, to refrain from seeing only the worst in one side or the other (or both) is not to resist telling the truth about the characteristic worst aspects, right or left.

Neither the Donald nor the Bern are good party men. Trump has never been close to the GOP; Sanders has registered “independent” throughout his Senatorial career.

But Sanders is a self-proclaimed socialist, and his support is “from the left”; Trump is vague ideologically, but his characteristic blunt pronouncements seem “right-wingish” even if not obviously conservative.

Maybe this is all about frustration and impatience.

Socialism has long been associated with impatience at the “slow pace” of progress, as economist Yves Guyot made clear in The Tyranny of Socialism over a hundred years ago. The fact that, even in our bumbling age, all segments of society have gotten richer is not enough. More must be extracted from a few and given to the many. That is the Bern of it.

Trump’s supporters are obviously impatient with things “not getting done” in Washington, and upset that “we don’t win anymore.” But one reason things are hard to do, politically, is that limited government, a rule of law, and separation of powers makes it difficult. Cutting through the b.s. sometimes means destroying the bedrock of a free society.

That sort of “winning” would be a Pyrrhic victory.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Presidential campaign 2016, separation of powers, socialism

Accountability general freedom ideological culture insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies political challengers porkbarrel politics responsibility

The Age of Clinton

Hillary Clinton, email, scandal, investigation, teflon

We could call our time The Age of Teflon, but that conjures up memory of Ronald Reagan — “the Teflon President” is what Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) called the 40th Commander in Chief — and, please recall, Reagan had nothing on Bill Clinton.

Nicknamed “Slick Willie,” Clinton was the politician who really demonstrated what slipperiness is all about. Prez 42 had what it takes to get out of any scandal whatsoever, even criminal:

Bluster (never admit anything);
Lexical tomfoolery (convolve the epistemics with feints to metaphysics, say, about the meaning of “is”);
Distraction (bomb a foreign country to deflect attention):
Ad hominem (deny the charges because of the nefarious conspiracy of opponents); and
Relying upon followers, especially in the media, to deny all substance outright.

We have lived in the Age of Clinton ever since. Even the grossest enormities fail to fall heavily upon a politician who is, somehow (usually because of partisanship, but not always), impervious to the blemish of a crime. The accusations (even charges) don’t stick.

Now that American voters have the chance to anoint another Clinton to office, making a dynasty out of a done deal, we sort of just assume — by political inertia — that the Age of Clinton will continue, with invulnerability the only thing adhering to the most corrupt politician of our time, the Mrs. of the Age.

Yet, the FBI is investigating former Secretary of State Hillary “Smart Power” Clinton’s email server scandal. One of her subordinates, a tech guy, has been given immunity after extensive pleadings of the Fifth Amendment.

Could the Age of Clinton end with her prosecution?

Unlikely, given how partisanship now routinely trumps the rule of law.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, Hillary Clinton, Presidential campaign 2016, teflon

Accountability crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy too much government

Breaking the Safe

surveillance, privacy, iphone, security, NSA, CIA, FBI, terrorism, illustration

As we tromp repeatedly to the polling booth this year, we should wonder: are we being played?

The answer: yes . . . at least on the issue of Apple’s iPhone security.

I’ve written about this before. Our politicians and government officials are playing demagogue, trying to convert (too successfully?) the electorate into a mob bent on destroying privacy and private property — out of unwarranted fear.

The case for terrorist worries in this case is not even plausible: the FBI waited too long to be convincing, and the NSA supposedly has the metadata anyway. The government doesn’t need the info. It’s after something else.

As former congressman Bob Barr put it, the government’s case is “pure applesauce . . . simply the latest chapter in a decades-long push by Uncle Sam to gain access to Americans’ digital technology and place this booming sector of our economy under its thumb.” He goes on:

[T]he government is for the first time demanding that a company actually invent a way to defeat the very encryption safeguards it builds into the devices it sells. Attorney General Lynch has taken to citing an obscure law, the All Writs Act of 1789, to justify this unprecedented exercise of power to compel companies to do the government’s work for it.

To my knowledge, the government has never demanded that Allied Safe and Vault, or any of its competitors, go out of its way to cook up “a way in” to its security systems.

Government is just trying to retain its old relevance. Folks in power see it slipping. And it is, as Americans outsource their privacy and security not to governments, but, increasingly, to private providers.

That’s a good thing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Internet privacy, privacy, security, terrorism

folly general freedom ideological culture meme moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies

You Asked For It America!

And now you’re going to get it!

Click below for a high resolution version of the image:

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, meme, Presidential campaign 2016

Accountability general freedom government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall Regulating Protest responsibility too much government

Fake Emergencies & Genuine Democracy

Post author By CS Admin
Post date February 25, 2016
1 Comment on Fake Emergencies & Genuine Democracy

initiative, legislature, Colorado, Oregon, emergency, emergency clause

Legislators aren’t honest.

Or maybe in Colorado and Oregon they just don’t understand the meaning of words . . . like “safety” and “emergency.” (Heck, there was once a politician unsure of what the meaning of the word “is” is.)

“The state constitution gives Coloradans the power to challenge news laws through citizen initiative,” explains the Independence Institute’s Mike Krause in a recent Freedom Minute video.

In order to force a popular vote, the referendum process requires citizens to submit petitions before the “effective date” of the new law. If a law is deemed truly “vital to public peace, health and safety,” however, the legislature may add what’s known as a “safety clause.” That puts the law into immediate effect . . . thereby blocking the people’s referendum power to petition that new law to the ballot.

Krause discloses that a majority of 2015 bills passed in Colorado contained so-called safety clauses — 68 percent in the Senate and 55 percent in the House.

In Oregon, the tactic is referred to as an “emergency clause.” There, too, most bills are passed as emergencies to block any citizen response.

Tired of legislators using fake emergencies to disenfranchise voters, attorney Eric Winters drafted an initiative mandating a two-thirds vote of both House and Senate for legislation with an emergency clause. Now a grassroots coalition has formed to petition his “No More Fake Emergencies Act” onto the ballot.

Last year, The Oregonian warned that by “abusing the emergency clause” and “attacking the prerogatives of voters,” legislators were inviting “a backlash.”

Taking the initiative, citizens will stop fake emergencies with genuine democracy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags ballot initiative, Colorado, emergency clause, Initiative Rights, initiatives, law, Oregon