Category: Common Sense

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Common Sense

What Goes Up, China Edition

Skyscrapers inspire.

Sometimes they inspire shudders.

I am an admirer of such neo-Babels, and you can’t find a better Schelling point for New York than the Empire State Building. Civilization’s highest erections symbolize something good about humanity.

And yet, I wonder about the latest Chinese engineering effort, Sky City, to be built in Changsha in record time, 90 days.

It’s supposed to house over 31,000 people, contain hotels and restaurants and schools and shops, too, and tower up 163 floors to a height of 2,749 feet.

How could such a thing be so quickly constructed, and still be safe?

Cheating.

Well, not really. It’s prefab. Much of the work has already been done. Building it will be a job of putting pre-fabricated pieces together. The company responsible for the effort has had some success on prefab buildings before, and . . .

The whole thing still sounds a tad hubristic. I wish the builders (and inhabitants) the best, but, even if it succeeds, there’s an ominous aspect to the whole project, if economist Mark Thornton’s theory about new-building skyscrapers has any truth to it. Tall buildings are built when people are optimistic. People are most optimistic during booms. Booms — at least inflationary booms — yield to busts, and many of the major economic depressions have been marked by unfinished or just-finished record-book skyscraper projects.

Does Sky City signal a Chinese bust coming soon?

It may. For the story of our time might be this: China is to America, now, what America was to Great Britain in the 1920s and ’30s. Similar monetary policies and bailouts.

And the loaning nation doesn’t get off free. At least, we didn’t in the decade in which the Empire State Building was finished.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense

The Rest of the Story

One thrill of my lifetime occurred soon after I helped launch U.S. Term Limits in 1992, when radio commentator Paul Harvey phoned me to fact-check a story he was doing.

Harvey, king of radio back then, was a huge fan of term limits. And I was a big fan of him. I loved his quirky vocal mannerisms and the way he told us “the rest of the story.” Today, three years after his death, I’d like to bring you “the rest” of a few recent Common Sense stories.

I. “There is no Olympic medal for political dishonesty,” I concluded a recent commentary about a Missouri State senate race where the principled Ed Emery was wrongly and ridiculously smeared by State Rep. Scott Largent. “Let’s hope Show-Me State voters show Largent the agony of defeat.”

Well, voters did just that. In the August 7 primary, Emery narrowly defeated Largent.

II. Recall my rant on the California parks system apparently hiding $54 million from the department of finance?

With an investigation underway, the Sacramento Bee not only reports “a department that wanted to keep secret a reserve of its own special funds” and — surprise, surprise – the unauthorized use of those slush funds, but also “a springtime rush each year to spend money authorized by the Legislature to avoid having the funds return to the general fund.”

Seems the parks department may also have been dummying up million-dollar contracts to make funding look like it was spent when it wasn’t.

All while asking for donations from the public and closing parks.

III. Objected, I did, to the Obama Administration’s successful push to get a record number of people to sign up for food stamps. Others have objected to David Fowler, president of the Family Action Council of Tennessee, who posted on Facebook that we should follow the advice of the National Park Service — “Do not feed the animals” — noting that, “Their stated reason for the policy is because the animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves.”

Fowler was denounced for being insensitive, for calling poor people animals.

But aren’t all people animals?

We’re not potted plants.

And now you know the rest of Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense Thought

Aldous Huxley

Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.

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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?

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Common Sense Today

Joan of Arc relieves Orleans, Dachau liberated, LA riots

On April 29, 1429, Joan of Arc entered the eastern gate of the city of Orleans to relieve French forces badly in need of supplies and more soldiers. Barely a week later, on May 8, the English siege of Orleans was broken by the French.

On April 29, 1945, the U.S. Seventh Army’s 45th Infantry Division liberated Dachau, the first concentration camp established by Germany’s Nazi regime, just five weeks after Hitler became chancellor in 1933.

On April 29, 1992, three days of rioting erupted after four Los Angeles police officers — videotaped beating Rodney King with Billy clubs, after a high-speed car chase and subsequent confrontation — were acquitted of wrongdoing. Rioters in south-central Los Angeles blocked freeway traffic and beat motorists, damaged and looted downtown stores and buildings, and set more than 100 fires. On May 1, President George Bush ordered military troops and riot-trained federal officers to LA and by the end of the next day the city was under control. In three days of disorder, 55 people were killed, almost 2,000 injured, 7,000 people were arrested, and nearly $1 billion in property damage reported, including the burnings of nearly 4,000 buildings. Rodney King had been released without charges after his arrest. The four police officers, acquitted of state charges on this day, were later prosecuted under federal law for violating Rodney King’s constitutional rights. Two officers were convicted, and sentenced to 2½ years in prison, and two were acquitted of the federal charges.

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Common Sense

Democracy Sans Factions?

It’s worth remembering, as Democrats proceed with programs that have failed in the past and as Republican insiders strive to rig their own nomination process, that the political parties are private organizations. They are not governments.

They are groups of people working to gain control over government — and that control can only ever be temporary. Let us hope.

Over many years of activism in politics I’ve supported openness in elections and ballot access, working for a variety of reforms, including the securing of the rights to initiative, referendum and recall. I’ve also contemplated a few less simple ideas, like Instant Runoff Voting and proportional representation, both designed to break (or at least ease up on) the stranglehold that the two-party system has over American democracy.

But additional reforms are worth thinking about. One, for instance, would prohibit any mention of a party name on a ballot.

Since the parties are private groups, they ought not have special access to the public ballot. All the more because the two parties are a problem in and of themselves — their perennial clamor for power perverts political discourse, unnecessarily restricting and channeling the direction of debate.

Such rules already hold sway in many county and municipal governments throughout the country. It could be instructive to study the differences in politicking and policy.

For todays’ growing ranks of independent and unaffiliated voters, perhaps the motivations in favor wouldn’t wholly be rational, but partly vengeful.

And perhaps partisans might wish to consider the reasons for that kind of anti-partisan sentiment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense general freedom ideological culture

Happy Common Sense Day

Credit George Washington for mobilizing our military to win the Revolutionary War. It was Thomas Paine, though, who did the most to mobilize the people in support of the cause of freedom and independence from Britain. He did it with his stirring pamphlet, Common Sense.

Originally published anonymously on this very date 235 years ago, and addressed to “the Inhabitants of America,” Paine’s polemic circulated to a higher percentage of the American population than any book save the Bible.
Happy Common Sense Day
One reason for its success was Paine’s style, which was much more accessible to the common person than most political writing of that time. In fact, Common Sense was read aloud in public, allowing citizens who lacked letters to engage in the debate over separation from the British empire — some seven months before the Declaration of Independence.

Common Sense attacked both the evils of monarchy, generally, noting that “Monarchy is ranked in scripture as one of the sins . . .” and the British monarchy specifically, referring to William the Conqueror as a “French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives.”

Paine’s pamphlet cogently endorsed republican forms of future government. “Society in every state is a blessing,” he wrote, “but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one. . . .”

More than two centuries after its publication, Paine’s message still rings prophetic: “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”

That remains true. And Paine’s mission remains ours: To resist tyranny, to “prepare an asylum for mankind.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense general freedom national politics & policies

The Same America

This episode was written immediately after the events of 9/11/01.

This is war. And on our shores. Thousands of American citizens murdered in cold blood. But despite our pain and suffering as a people, we are still strong. Not only militarily, but also in our love of freedom and our commitment to defend it come what may.

Some have argued that America will never be the same. In a sense that’s true: we’ll certainly never forget this savage and senseless attack. And we have much work to do to make certain it doesn’t happen again. But it’s important to be careful how we go about it.

In the wake of this unprecedented brutality, two out of three Americans say they would be willing to trade some civil liberties to get more security. But this is isn’t our real choice. Nothing about increasing our security requires abridging our civil rights. We don’t have to let the terrorists win, not in any respect. For these terrorists would like nothing better than to knock America off our foundation, our principles, the things that make us truly the greatest country the world has ever known. They hate our freedom. Let’s sustain that freedom. Let’s show the whole world: we are the same America.

The same America whose rifle shot for freedom was heard ’round the world in 1776, and is still being heard today. The same America that freed Europe from the Nazis and Asia from imperial Japan. Let it be known in the face of this terror today that we are indeed the same America, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Publication of this and previous Common Sense commentaries is only possible through the generous financial support of readers like you. Please contribute today.

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Common Sense

Is This a Great Country or What?

July 4, 2011

Some 235 years ago we made a clean break from the corrupt Old World of Europe. Fifty-six men risked it all to proclaim in the Declaration of Independence that:

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 sums it up — the grand total of good government. The rest is history. Freedom prospers. A country of empowered citizens works a whole lot better than a nation of subjects following a dictator.

But the most striking lesson of history is sadly the opposite of America’s July 4, 1776, birth. So much of the world has long lived under political oppression.

This year I’ve been watching and reading about the protests and revolutions all across the Arab world, knowing that people are choosing to risk beatings and death to stand up in the streets to speak out for freedom. I’m frustrated that there is so little I can do.

And then it occurs to me: the best thing I can do, as an American, is to fight to keep our country all that it should be.

That’s no easy fight. As you know.

Our governments from Washington, DC, to Hometown, USA, are out of control.

What’s the trouble? Spending. Debt. Regular attacks on our property rights. The list runs long: Corruption. Arrogance. Nanny-statism. Those relentless assaults on any process of reform — from term limits to voter initiative, referendum and recall.

The philosophy running government for far too long now directly opposes the creed of 1776: The career politicians and the special interests believe in unlimited government, the idea that everything is permissible, anything is affordable (with your money), and nothing is sacred.

Disaster is on the horizon; the storm clouds of several coming catastrophes are dark and visible.

Politicians cannot stop the rain. Though they act as if they can.

But all hope is not lost. I have faith in you. And in Common Sense.

Our political problems are absolutely solvable. But your work and commitment to freedom is ultimately the difference maker.

And I like to think Common Sense helps. By laughing at the sad absurdities. By voicing a little righteous indignation. And by using wit . . . whenever I can find it.

But mainly Common Sense does its job by connecting the outrages of unaccountable government with the great people all across America who stand up to defend their rights and the rights of their neighbors from politics gone wild.

Common Sense helps bring folks together to put citizens in charge and ensure that government is accountable to the people.

This Common Sense program is run on a shoestring by Citizens in Charge Foundation. But even shoestrings cost money. We need to raise $52,000 to cover the program for the remainder of the year and to step up our marketing of the program.

On July 4, 1776, they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.

This July 4, 2011, I’m asking you to pledge some of your fortune to help keep Common Sense on the air, online and in your email Inbox — and to help us reach out to new audiences.

A number of readers and listeners have made a monthly pledge of $17.76. That’s a big help. Can you make the same pledge?

Or give a one-time contribution of $176 today? If you can, please consider donating $1,776. Or $10, $25, $100 — whatever amount works for you.

The antidote to government gone wild is simple: Common Sense. Help us keep it coming.

Happy Independence Day!

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Common Sense ideological culture

Today’s Class Conflict

Today’s government workers receive not only better medical benefits and retirement packages than private employees, but significantly higher base salaries, too — as well as easier working conditions and greater job security.

I’ve talked a lot about how this has contributed to the current out-of-control spending at federal, state, and even local government levels.

But one thing I haven’t done is mention how old hat this is. Karl Marx would have raised an eyebrow in recognition of this trend, and then stifled himself. For this kind of thing was predicted by the thinkers he got his exploitation and class theories from.

Only those thinkers did not identify “capitalists” as the exploiters. They saw unlimited government as the exploiter — with net tax consumers as the class (or classes) that government exploitation sets up.

The ideas of the French Industrialist School are not well known, today. They should be. Kids should learn in school about the ideas of historian Augustin Thierry and economists Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, and other followers of the great J.B. Say and Thomas Jefferson’s friend and favorite economist, Destutt de Tracy.

Real class tension, today, exists not so much between “rich” and “poor” (that’s socialist diversion) but between government employees — who make up a quickly growing sector of today’s otherwise moribund labor force — and the taxpayers who fund their salaries and benefits.

We need another revolutionary shift — but not of a Marxist variety. We can do better. Less violent, more sensible. Can’t we?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.