Category: Common Sense

Have an Endurable New Year!

Post author By Redactor
Post date January 1, 2026
1 Comment on Have an Endurable New Year!

So that was A.D. 2025.

We made it.

Endured.

What must we bear in 2026?

Most of us, I think, would prefer “more of the same” to something entirely new. Especially if the “something new” can be interpreted as reaping all the consequences of bad choices all at once.

So what was 2025? Going by stats on this website, here’s what I’ve covered:

Fiscal Irresponsibility: 15% of coverage.
Free Speech/Censorship: 20%.
Political Scandals/Elections: 15 – 20%.
Government Overreach: 25%.
Representation/Local Issues: 10%.

Grok did the analysis, and added another category, “Historical Reflections,” at 10% of content — but this likely reflects the “Today” feature on the website, highlighting the most important event(s) concerning human liberty occurring on each date.

I do like to think that I have a sense of history, which informs what I do here. In 2023, a meme spread around the Internet, where women asked the men they knew how often they thought about the Roman Empire. “The results will surprise you,” for men tend to think about the past generally, and the classical Romans in particular, a great deal indeed. The meme played out as a “gender” issue, with women finding men’s apparent fixation inexplicable.

Truth is, for me, I think a lot more about the Revolutionary War. I suppose it’s possible to identify people’s ideologies by which historical war they think about most. This last year and earlier — really since the 2019 protests in Hong Kong — I’ve developed this strong suspicion that we are already in a war and just don’t quite know it.

Wishing you the best in 2026. And girding for what comes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense

Thanksgiving 2025

Thanksgiving, collectivism, individualism, freedom

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Common Sense general freedom obituary

Waiting for the Day

Towards the end of their lives, former President John Adams asked former President Thomas Jefferson whether he would live his life over again.

The third president answered in the affirmative: “I think with you, that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us.”

Not everyone agrees, of course. Jefferson called these people “gloomy and hypochondriac minds,” who “always count that the worst will happen because it may happen.”

Jefferson has a challenge to those whom we today call “the black-pilled”: “How much pain have cost us the evils that have never happened!” Jefferson confessed to lacking hope sometimes, but not as often as the perpetually gloomy.

Those of us who follow the news often have occasion for gloom — or alarm. But on July Fourth it is appropriate to remember the council of these two leaders of Independence.

In 1826, as Jefferson and Adams approached their inevitable demises, both struggled — and succeeded — in their final goals: to make it to Independence Day.

On the Third, Jefferson inquired, more than once, about whether it was the Fourth yet, wrote Albert Jay Nock at the end of his Jefferson (1926), “and when told at last that it was, he appeared satisfied. He died painlessly at one o’clock in the afternoon, about five hours before his old friend and fellow, John Adams; it was the only time he took precedence of him, having been all his life ‘secondary to him in every situation,’ except this one.”

According to Adams family lore, when Adams died a few hours later, he said, “Jefferson survives.”

Wrong, as a point of fact. But in spirit?

On Independence Day, we should ask ourselves what of the founding survives.

Unlike the actual lives of those who made our Independence, and, to paraphrase Tom Paine, we can start Independence anew. And as John Adams definitely said on his last day, “Independence forever!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense defense & war

In Memory of the Fallen

Today is Memorial Day. It grew out of Decoration Day, which developed into a reconciliation memorial in the late 19th century to honor the fallen soldiers in the Civil War.

Decoration Day started in the South as Confederate Heroes Day and Confederate Decoration Day, but it almost immediately caught on in the North — one can hardly get more Yankee than the Danbury, Connecticut, avant-garde composer Charles Ives (1874 – 1954), whoseDecoration Day (1915 – 1920) tone poem (he later placed it in his Holidays Symphony as the second movement) is one of the great American orchestral classics (or so I’m told).

By 1890, every Union state had adopted a Memorial Day of some kind, under different names, not always celebrated on the date first promoted in the North, May 30. The two world wars shifted the emphasis even further to a national commemoration, and, in 1968, Congress changed the day of its observance to the last Monday in May; in 1971, Congress standardized the name as “Memorial Day.”

In 2000, Congress passed the National Moment of Remembrance Act, asking people to stop and remember at 3:00 pm. According to Statista, there have been 1,304,705 military fatalities in America’s wars. These ultimate sacrifices warrant a special day of remembrance dedicated solely to them.

Don’t we owe them our freedom? I certainly believe we owe it to the fallen to keep that freedom alive.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense general freedom national politics & policies

President Veto Remembered

Grover Cleveland, veto, limited government

This week, here at Common Sense, we did not celebrate the birthday of Stephen Grover Cleveland (1837 – 1908), whom some of my friends regard as the last great president of these United States. It wasn’t even mentioned in Tuesday’s Today feature.

Is there any reason to devote a column to him?

Sure:

He was the only president, prior to Trump, to serve two non-consecutive terms, designated as the 22nd and 24th president in the history books.
Like Trump, and like presidents Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was born in New York; like Van Buren and the Roosevelts, he had, before his presidency, served as governor of that state.
Also like Trump, he weathered a major sex scandal. Accused of fathering a child out of wedlock, he admitted to it. And still got elected.
Grover Cleveland also made history by being the first president to get married in the White House. He married his former ward — itself something of a scandal — in the Blue Room during his first administration.*

The main truth about Grover Cleveland, though, was that he was a great believer and practitioner of honesty in government, and was the last real limited government man in the office — though, like all presidents, he was hardly consistent on this issue. He supported sound money, and opposed (but could not stop) the imperialist move of annexing Hawaii. He could be called President Veto, for his 584 vetoes held the record until the first four-term president stretched out enough years in office to beat it.

He also knew his place: “Officeholders are the agents of the people, not their masters.”

He was the only Democrat President in the half-century following the Civil War, when the Republican Party dominated, and was — consequently — super-corrupt.

Today we have a Democrat-turned-Republican fighting an ultra-corrupt Democrat-dominated federal government.

Donald Trump could learn a lot from Grover.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* This made his bride, Frances Folsom, the youngest First Lady in history — at the age of 21. There was a 27-year difference between them.

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Common Sense

Henry Adams

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), Vol. XII, “Eccentricity.”

Common Sense regulation

Cooking with Gas

If you’ve been wanting to buy a gas stove but have been worried about the federal government’s determination under Biden to outlaw selling them and other nice things, relax. You’re now going to be cooking with gas.

I’m looking at a paragraph of one of the many executive orders issued by President Trump to get the government off our necks.

I refer, of course, to provision (f) of Section 2 of “Unleashing American Energy.”

To wit: “It is the policy of the United States … to safeguard the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances, including but not limited to lightbulbs, dishwashers, washing machines, gas stoves, water heaters, toilets, and shower heads, and to promote market competition and innovation within the manufacturing and appliance industries.…”

Water heaters … toilets and shower heads … and gas stoves?

It shouldn’t be such a big deal to be able to keep buying this or that modern convenience. We’ve already invented and can mass-produce, mass-distribute these things. We have a functioning market economy. And most of us don’t want to be Amish.

But if you’ve got successive administrations hell-bent on returning us all to the Stone Age in order to control global weather and spare Mother Earth further inconvenience — well, adamant interruption of this trend is indeed a very big deal.

It seems that certain insanities will be stopped cold at least for the next four years. Maybe even beyond.

Industrial civilization: a good thing. Let’s keep it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense general freedom

Happy New Year — 2025

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the events of a few months. The reflection is awful, and in this point of view, how trifling, how ridiculous, do the little paltry cavilings of a few weak or interested men appear, when weighed against the business of a world.”

—Thomas Paine