Category: ideological culture

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education and schooling general freedom ideological culture

Bright College Days

We parents worry when we send our kids off to college. But do we worry they’ll become terrorists?

No.

But a funny and slightly disturbing article by Colin Lidell in Taki’s Magazine takes notice of the deep connection between college life and terrorism. Indeed, “every major Islamist terrorist attack in Britain has been led by university students or recent graduates.”

Lidell makes a broader point, too, even with his title: “The Persistence of Bourgeois Radicalism.” Universities and colleges have long served as hotbeds of extremism:

Becoming “radicalized” — whether your bearded prophet happens to be Marx or Muhammad — is essentially code for having too much time on your hands and a sense of smug entitlement. This is the essence of university life. With three years of sleeping late, anything seems possible.

The author concludes that the best cure for such radicalism is the requirement of work. He leaves that thought to linger in the readers’ minds, letting us extrapolate upon government subsidies to increase the rolls of college student bodies.

A related fact, uncovered by previous scholars of Islamic radicalism, is that the main subsidizer of Muslim radicals in the West have been the welfare states of those countries. It seems that the safety nets of British and European states (as well as Canadian and Australian governments) have funded quite a number of terrorist cells.

Perhaps one reason America has nurtured fewer home-grown terrorists is our tougher-to-obtain “welfare.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture

Nab-N-Brag

Could America’s obsession with intellectual property be getting out of hand?

Congress has extended copyright protection for existing and old works as well as future works . . . which looks more like giveaways to major corporations than anything else. You know, like Disney, whose lawyers dread the day Mickey Mouse ever hits the public domain.

Now that patents have been taken out on “business procedures” and even strings of DNA, it seems that almost anything is up for grabs.

The easiest intellectual property to defend is the trademark, since unique identifiers are so important for both commerce and law. But even here there’s a lot of weirdness going on.

Take the recent lawsuit by In-N-Out Burgers against Grab-N-Go Burgers. The west coast outfit thinks the east coast outfit has, well, stolen its look. The Huffington Post calls it “copyright infringement,” but, in the first report I read, “the suit alleges that Grab-N-Go’s name and color schemes mirror In-N-Out’s signature style,” which sounds more like trademark. But the suit also mentions menu similarities.

Well, the names are similar, and the logos do resemble each other. But they seem quite distinct, and I would have thought common sense would judge Grab-N-Go as merely emulating In-N-Out, not infringing on rights. Businesses copy each other all the time. That’s capitalism.

It’s even Aristotelian. Keyword: mimesis.

Even innovation is never ex nihilo creation. It’s copying plus modification.

It’s why I call this commentary “Common Sense” and not “Xbligigroobi Blubqui.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Dead Doctrine

Take off your hat, crank up a dirge, and get out the shovel, for it’s time to put the last bit of dirt over the Fairness Doctrine. It’s dead.

The FCC killed it on Monday. Buried it.

“Our extensive efforts to eliminate outdated regulations,” explained FCC Chairman Julias Genachowski, “are rooted in our commitment to ensure that FCC rules and policies promote a healthy climate for private investment and job creation.”

A total of 83 regulations were deleted in the efficiency-minded campaign.

And it’s nice to hear of it. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving . . . target.

Actually, it’s been a score of years since the old dinosaur of speech regulation “fell into desuetude,” as President Grover Cleveland might have put it. (Ol’ Grover was not exactly a punchy writer.) And hurray for its death and burial — let’s hope it shall not rise from its coffin, like Dracula in a cheap horror flick.

For the “Fairness Doctrine” was an attempt to regulate speech rather than let speech remain free. It  helped further solidify the two-party system in America, and the very idea that there were only “two sides” to any political question . . . when it is obvious that a whole spectrum of possibilities exists for nearly any proposal or issue.

The Founding Fathers were right: Congress should “make no law” abridging the freedom of speech.

Interestingly, the regulation received its death blow not from Congress, but from the Federal Communications Commission.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall media and media people

What the Media Misses

The big news story last week became the media’s non-coverage of the Ron Paul campaign. After Jon Stewart of The Daily Show successfully brought out the full nature of the media prejudice, it became the story.

That’s how bias backfires. Trying to keep Ron Paul out of the headlines led to putting Ron Paul in the headlines.

How easily a conspiracy of silence turns into a deafening noise.

Media bigots think they are doing a public service when they pick winners and throw out losers before almost anyone has even heard from the challengers. They consider it their job.

Undoubtedly they look at Ron Paul’s platform and say to themselves “This guy doesn’t fit into the normal left-right spectrum, or even neatly into his own party. That makes him unelectable. So we won’t talk about him.” This points to media’s true power: establishing what’s worth talking about.

Trouble is, by rushing to judgment against Paul, they miss the day’s major story: Paul’s appeal transcends usual party lines. It’s not just a tiny cadre of libertarians on his side, it’s conservatives and liberals and exes of both persuasions; it’s centrists who’ve never heard anyone talk about the Federal Reserve before; it’s peaceniks who are serious about ending America’s wars.

It might even be that strong core of American society that still respects honesty and consistency.

The media has missed this elsewhere, too: In repeated recalls and initiatives around the country.

Cover the big story, folks. Not just your own spin.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture tax policy

Greed and Bigotry on the Campaign Trail

On the video page featuring Mitt Romney’s notorious “corporations are people” comment — the one I clicked to, anyway — every comment was negative, with jokes like “Did you hear that S&P downgraded the Tea Party credit grade to KK+?” and economically illiterate whoppers like “Corporations do not help anyone except those who own them or do what they say.” It’s saddening to see ignorance and bigotry so self-righteously maintained by everyday Americans.

Yes, bigotry.

For Romney was right: Corporations are made of people. Those who roil with hatred for corporations, singling them out for more regulation or greater taxation, are attacking actual living, breathing people, who, as Milton Friedman pointed out, are made up of three classes of just plain folks: the owners, the shareholders, who are people; the corporation’s hired workers and managers, who are people; and served customers, that is, people who have chosen, sans duress, to buy stuff from the corporations.

Economist Steven Horwitz, writing in the Buffalo News, cited one study that estimated that “45 percent to 75 percent of the burden of a corporate tax increase is borne by workers,” and noted that, if profits fall, fewer dividends would go to stockholders.

And “stockholders” are often nothing other than workers’ retirement funds.

Yeah, soak the older people. That should make corporation-haters feel good.

Setting aside “some other people” to hate is exactly what anti-corporatists are doing. It’s bigotry. And it’s ugly . . . and de-humanizing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture media and media people

Frummious Bandersnatch

Columnist David Frum buys what Washington’s establishment is selling. Consider the seven theses of his recent screed, “Wake up GOP”:

  1. “Unemployment is a more urgent problem than debt.” Maybe. So what are you going to do about it — accumulate more debt to fund unstimulating stimulus packages, as mass unemployment calcifies?
  2. “The deficit is a symptom of America’s economic problems, not a cause.” Sure, the deficit is worse because of decreased revenues. But deficits were high before the bust, and debt was increasing. Deficits are a symptom of a governance problem.
  3. “The time to cut is after the economy recovers.” So why didn’t politicians — Frum’s beloved Republicans, while he was personal manservant to George W. Bush — cut spending before the bust?
  4. “The place to cut is health care, not assistance to the unemployed and poor.” The place to cut is over-spending everywhere. Pentagon. The medical-industrial complex. “Discretionary spending.” And start by freezing the baseline spending. And cut federal salaries across the board.
  5. “We can collect more revenue without raising tax rates.” Uh, maybe “we” shouldn’t raise revenues! And yet establishing a simpler, flat income tax rate probably would raise revenues, so . . .
  6. “Passion does not substitute for judgment.” Yes. And it’s about time Frum showed some of the latter.
  7. “You can’t save the system by destroying the system.” If the system has put America on a crash course with disaster, then that system must be replaced. With a better one.

It’s arguments like Frum’s that stand in the way.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture

Population Prophecies Go Poof

Are today’s problems caused by the sheer quantity of people?

No.

A week ago or so, the Los Angeles Times wasted space arguing the wrong side, “The world’s biggest problem? Too many people.” Laura Huggins responded with an able rejoinder, showing that such doomspeak is old hat, falsified by experience.

She mentions Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb, in particular, 1968’s classic in the hysterically overblown prophecy genre. Not mentioned, however, is Julian Simons’s brilliant 1981 rejoinder to Ehrlich, The Ultimate Resource. Simons marshals economic argument and a vast array of factual evidence to demonstrate that human ingenuity and the market order provide amazing solutions to problems of scarcity and limited resources. The more people you have, the more solutions can be found. With greater prosperity comes the best possible amelioration to the resource scarcity that so worries and befuddles environmentalists of the Ehrlich stripe.

But really, this is much older hat than that.

The Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus wrote the first book on the subject, back in 1798, and, even  in the course of his life had to expand his tract — and radically tone down his thesis — to make himself look less of a fool. Later, writers such as Nassau Senior and Herbert Spencer demonstrated why Malthus was wrong. Population growth does not necessarily outstrip agricultural productivity. Human co-operation through markets more than makes up for our physical limitations.

We have the history of the past 200 years to prove it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture

Becoming What You Oppose

A bombing, then a shooting. Norwegians reel from the Oslo and Utoya massacres. The casualty count has hit the nineties.

Early reports mentioned jihadist terrorism, but the malefactor appears to be Norwegian, white, and Christian. “It’s not just that Anders Behring Breivik is not a jihadist,” wrote Jesse Walker at Reason.com. “It’s that he hails from the wing of the right that defines itself by its opposition to jihad, and to the leftists that it sees as jihad’s enablers.”

Like so many examples of jihad in the Mideast, Breivik’s “anti-jihad jihad” is as puzzling and self-defeating as was the anarchist “propaganda by the deed” of just over a century ago, as pointless as it is horrific.

What’s worth noting is the demonstration of that too-human propensity to adopt the tactics of one’s enemies. Desperate, hate-filled zealots of Islam commit horrible crimes, indiscriminately killing innocents. Everyone with a lick of sense opposes such horrible actions (including most Muslims). But some people really worked up about this decide not only that “some have got to pay,” but that terrorism itself is worth emulating.

Human history is filled with such irrational over-reaction: feuds, vendettas, even wars.

Norway’s prime minister immediately assured everyone that his government’s reaction will be “more democracy, more openness.” “More democracy” might be vague, but he foreswore naivety, and besides, the sentiment is spot on. We who oppose violence must never resort to matching the criminals’ criminality.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

Another Worthwhile Lesson for Muggles

We in middle-class, muggle America can learn something from Harry Potter.

My daughter got me reading the J.K. Rowling’s fantasy series years ago. I eagerly followed the growth of an 11-year-old to a young man of 18. This “boy who lived” was orphaned as a baby when He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, the evil, dark Lord Voldemort killed Harry’s parents. For seven books, Voldemort tries to kill Harry. For seven books, Rowling imparts some important lessons.

At the end of the second book, the wise headmaster Dumbledore, tells Harry, “It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” The fourth outing even made the case for term limits. “You are blinded,” Dumbledore tells a selfish government minister, “by the love of the office you hold.”

So, when the final movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—Part 2, was released last Friday, I was one of those buying tickets . . . at a cheapskate Sunday showing with two of my kids.

Once again, the movie climaxes with a cogent moral.

Continue reading “Another Worthwhile Lesson for Muggles”

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education and schooling ideological culture

Johnny Can Be Indoctrinated

Government schools in Frederick County, Maryland, deem the third grade the appropriate time to push a political agenda. Cindy Rose found this out when her daughter came down with the flu and read a textbook, Social Studies Alive! Our Community and Beyond, at home.

Mrs. Rose calls the book “socialistic.”

Judge for yourself. On page 104, it reads: “Child care is important, but it is not free for most people in the United States. Families have to pay for child care. It can be very expensive. In some countries, child care is a public service. For example, in Denmark and Vietnam, child care is free or costs very little. This makes it easier for parents to work. Do you think child care should be a public service in your community?”

Rose took her complaint to the school board, which suggested that the book’s slant might be balanced by other materials — but could point to no evidence it was being balanced. Those defending the textbook insist that it teaches critical thinking, but as one school board member asked, “Do you get much pushback from an 8 or 9-year old?”

Only if the book explained marginal utility and the Thomas Theorem would I put much stock in the “critical thinking” excuse.

“The entire slant of the book,” Cindy Rose argues, “is . . . the idea of government running your life.”

Thankfully, my wife homeschools our children. I can tell you that’s not one of the lessons.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.