Category: ideological culture

Sans Champion, Again?

Rep. Justin Amash, democracy, presidential race,

For a moment there — a few weeks — a comparatively youthful candidate with a gentle, conscientious and respectful temperament seemed poised to challenge the major parties’ sausage-twisting septuagenarians,The Donald and Sleepy Joe. A congressman from Michigan had entered the Libertarian Party’s hat-strewn ring, offering us something serious for Death Race 2020.

Then, Saturday, Rep. Justin Amash sent a series of tweets announcing that he was ending his presidential bid.

Presidential campaigns aren’t easy. And between outrageous anti-democratic ballot access hurdles and the pandemic, it has gotten even more difficult.

Win or lose — and Amash was going to lose — I’ll miss what the Great Lakes State representative might have gotten a chance to say to audiences across the country.

About partisanship.

About political control.

In Washington.

“That’s why we have so much discord,” Amash told constituents at a 2019 town hall, “because members of Congress are just following the party line all of the time.”

Party bosses?

“Right now, you have a system in which the Speaker of the House controls the entire process,” charges Amash. “That was true under Republicans and it’s true under Democrats. Under [Speaker] Paul Ryan, for example, we had for the first time in Congress’s history an entire term where we weren’t allowed to amend any legislation on the House floor.

“And so far under Speaker Pelosi the same thing has happened,” he added. “No amendments have been allowed on the House floor.”

“You need the House to be a deliberative body where everyone participates,” Amash declares, “and everyone has a chance to offer their amendments, to offer their ideas.”

Great point.

We sure could use a champion for it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags democracy, presidential race, Rep. Justin Amash

ideological culture political economy

Cash Machine Cachet

Shutting down capitalism almost worldwide may prove to be the grandest disaster of all time. Folks on the margin of poverty in poor countries are already starving. Though scads of people seem to think we could ride out a lockdown indefinitely just by cashing government checks, the problem is that if we don’t produce, we cannot buy and consume products.

It’s not about money, or profits as such: “It’s the productivity, stupid!”

Elon Musk put it this way: “If you don’t make stuff, there’s no stuff.”

A “universal basic income” won’t help if the re-distributed money chases few-to-no goods.

So how did we come to believe that we can just shut down most business activity and still survive?

Maybe the idea seems plausible because many people already do not work to survive. As their numbers have increased, our civilization has forgotten that they survive upon the work of others.

We guffaw at young children who, when their parents say something they want is too expensive, they innocently respond, ‘well, just go to the cash machine!’ But the more people rely upon checks and bank deposits from the government — for any reason — the harder it is to remember that the power to buy stuff doesn’t ultimately come from government. With taxation, redistribution and inflation thrown into the mix, even adults think of government as Cash Machine.

And the Cash Machine as a model for the economy.

To fight a virus, the world has shut down production — as if we do not survive by producing goods in order to consume them.

Government has reduced capitalism — and us — to absurdity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Photo by Tax Credits

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags ATM, money, wealth

Accountability ideological culture national politics & policies

Believe Biden?

“Women should be believed.”

That’s what Joe Biden said when Justice Brett Kavanaugh faced allegations of sexual assault during his 2018 Supreme Court confirmation process. While former Vice President and presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Biden is still for “taking the woman’s claims seriously,” now that he’s been accused, he wants us to “vet it, look into it.”*

Biden wasn’t alone then — “believe all women” became something of a rallying cry — and now his new procedural caution also echoes across the land.

“Allegation against Biden prompts reexamination of ‘Believe women’” The Washington Post headlined its report. “The inconvenient truth is that this story is impacting us differently,” the creator of the MeToo expression, Tarana Burke, told The Post, “because it hits at the heart of one of the most important elections of our lifetime.”

“Compared with the good Mr. Biden can do,” Linda Hirshman writes in The New York Times, “the cost of dismissing Tara Reade — and, worse, weakening the voices of future survivors — is worth it.”

“I don’t want an investigation. I want a coronation of Joe Biden,” Martin Tolchin explained in a letter to the Times, where he once worked as a reporter before becoming editor-in-chief of The Hill. “I don’t want justice, whatever that may be. I want a win, the removal of Donald Trump from office, and Mr. Biden is our best chance.”

Thus principle loses to expedience.

As important as fighting sexual predators is, the old principle of trusting accusers only by sex is no better than the new principle of trusting the accused by party.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* As for vetting? “We found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Biden, beyond hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them feel uncomfortable,” The New York Times tweeted, quoting from their story. Citing “imprecise language,” the tweet has been removed and that last phrase scrubbed from the online story without explanation.

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags #metoo, hypocrisy, Joe Biden

general freedom ideological culture media and media people

Lockdown and Shut Up

John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, free speech, 1st Amendment, First Amendment,

“I think it’s a shame,” HBO comedian Bill Maher told Dr. David Katz, “that people like you who sound reasonable — maybe it’s not the exact one true opinion you hear somewhere else — has to go on Fox News to say it.”

For years, I have told liberal friends that they miss important stories by not paying attention to Fox, because most other TV media eschew non-progressive perspectives they oppose (but perhaps fear we might support).

Last month, Katz wrote a New York Times op-ed, entitled, “Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease?” Rather than the current lockdown strategy, the physician advocates “a middle path” where “high-risk people are protected from exposure” and “low-risk people go out in the world.”

Once upon a time, social media promised regular folks a chance to communicate and even organize without government interference or media filters.

Not so much these days.

Last week, I decried Facebook removing posts informing people about planned anti-lockdown protests, reportedly “on the instruction of governments” in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska because those protests might violate “stay-at-home orders.”

This week, YouTube removed a video that you and I must not see, with California Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi explaining why they think the lockdowns are bad policy.*

“Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations,” clarified YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, “would be a violation of our policy” — and will be blocked.

Our society’s first principle is freedom of expression.

The idea? Unfettered information will best lead us to the truth.

Increasingly, our social media and news outfits no longer trust us with information not heavily controlled by them.

Which means we cannot trust them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The doctors also confirm, as I suggested might happen, that medical personnel are being pressured to “add COVID” to death reports.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags 1st Amendment, first amendment, free speech, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson

ideological culture

The Great Divide

Virus, corona virus, Covid, epidemic, pandemic, authoritarianism,

The current pandemic panic and crisis, Brian Doherty noted in Reason, “is a harshly vivid example of Americans’ inability to understand, fruitfully communicate with, or show a hint of respect for those seen to be on other side of an ideological line.”

Mr. Doherty, who profiled me in his book Radicals for Capitalism, calls the two major positions “Openers” versus “Closers.”

They do not trust each other, and their respective policy prescriptions — opening up society to normal commerce versus keeping it closed, under lockdown — are poles apart.

Doherty doesn’t mention how we treat experts. Virologists, medical doctors and epidemiologists also form ranks on both sides, and these experts sure seem to be talking past each other, too.

Which seems neither professional nor scientific.

Doherty concludes by asserting that, even after obtaining answers to questions regarding “the disease’s spread, extent, and damage” or coming to an eventual conclusion regarding “the long term damage to life and prosperity the economic shutdown is causing,” we must admit that “human beings of goodwill and intelligence might come to a different value judgment about what policy is best overall.”

Sure. But, looking over the divide as he presents it, I am afraid I see one side — the Openers — concerned about a broad number of possible disasters (economic dislocation and even mass starvation in addition to illness and death) while the other — the Closers — obsessing about fighting a disease about which there remains limited knowledge and little agreement.

The Openers seem a whole lot more open to diverse considerations.

Including the possibility that freedom might result in a better collective response than orders issued by mayors and governors and the president.

Which strikes me as more like Common Sense.

I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags authoritarianism, corona virus, covid, epidemic, pandemic, virus

general freedom ideological culture media and media people

Follow the (Media) Money

“[A]t a time of rising tensions with China” is “the objectivity of news” . . . dead?

Wounded?

So wonders Arthur Bloom, lamenting for The American Conservative, in “China’s Long Tentacles Extend Deep Into American Media.”

“We’ve got this tremendous disconnect between what the American people actually think about China and what the media has been telling us,” Bloom explained to Fox New’s Tucker Carlson. “Something like 70% of Americans blame China for [the spread of the coronavirus], and yet that’s not what we’ve been getting. So, why?”

Bloom suggests part of the reason is that media corporations are “in business with them.”

“Comcast which owns NBC Universal” is “building a big theme park in Beijing” offered Bloom . . . “a multibillion dollar investment.”

Last December, the Free Beacon informed,“China routinely broke federal law by not disclosing how much it spent to publish regime propaganda in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers,” adding that “China Daily gave media outlets millions to publish ads disguised as news stories.”

During his short-lived presidential run, Michael Bloomberg soft-peddled China’s totalitarian threat to its own people, Hong Kong, neighboring democratic Taiwan and the rest of us. With Bloomberg News having done business in China for years, the former mayor told Americans that President Xi Jinping was “not a dictator.”

“Six years ago, Bloomberg News killed an investigation into the wealth of Communist Party elites in China, fearful of repercussions by the Chinese government,” National Public Radio revealed last week. “The company successfully silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters quiet, too.”

Using legal non-disclosure agreements.

Regarding China, is non-disclosure the operating principle of our media?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts