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Common Sense general freedom ideological culture

Precious Gifts … 2019 and Beyond

There’s a quiet on Christmas morning … after Santa has come and gone … and the kids are still sound asleep … sugar plum fairies dancing to their gentle snoring.

A moment to stop and think.

I hope they’ll like their presents; they always do. There’s so much love my wife and I want to share, to give to them.

Of course, the biggest gifts are never under the tree. The most important being a staple home, with love, and the freedom for children to grow into themselves.

My parents gave me that … along with the bicycles and baseball gloves and some really good books. I’ve tried to be the same kind of parent.

Another incredible endowment I’ve enjoyed is to be born in a country “conceived in liberty.” A place where individual citizens are the sovereigns, creating government to be a servant and not a master. Land of the free.

What a gift!

But Tom Paine told us that, “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly, ’tis dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”

Freedom is under siege. And, therefore, we who love freedom, grateful for our historic luck, must come together to protect our “expensive” gift.

Some may get discouraged after setbacks, recent and not-​so-​recent, but none of us got involved in politics because we like “the game” and figured we’d pile up a shelf of trophies. We’re engaged because we must be and we seek victories because, as Churchill once put it, “without victory, there is no survival.”

In 1776, on this very day, General George Washington and his soldiers of the American Revolution crossed the Delaware River to score a surprise military victory against the British at Trenton, New Jersey.

Thank goodness, for these brave patriots and their muskets. Three Americans gave their lives in the battle. To secure our liberty.

Today, the Gift has been handed to us. Not to play with on Christmas morning and forget about, not to let get broken without our fixing it, but to protect and defend and cherish.

My commentary strives to illuminate, to amuse and to motivate toward action, bringing citizens together. Citizens in Charge protects the initiative process — the best weapon citizens have to cut taxes, term-​limit politicians, stop the drug war, protect property rights, and place limits on government. The Liberty Initiative Fund partners with leaders across the nation putting measures  on the ballot to protect freedom and hold government accountable.

Thanks for your gifts to these efforts and to the many other important ones. We aim to protect the precious gift of freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays!


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Christmas 2019

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This Week in Democracy?

Paul Jacob finishes his weekend wrap-​up with stories on Colorado’s TABOR, a squeak by for republican governance with citizen hero Ron Calzone, and the weirdness surrounding the corporate media’s attitudes towards whistleblowers.

This Week in Common Sense, November 4 — 8, 2019

Paul began his “Common Sense with Paul Jacob” commentary in 1999, and for a decade he produced these weekly commentary spots for the radio. Now, a decade later, he begins to podcast. Catch him on SoundCloud, and soon to a podcast service you use:

https://​soundcloud​.com/​t​h​i​s​i​s​c​o​m​m​o​n​s​e​n​s​e​/​o​n​e​-​v​o​t​e​-​f​r​o​m​-​t​y​r​a​n​n​y​-​t​h​i​s​-​w​e​e​k​-​i​n​-​c​o​m​m​o​n​-​s​e​n​s​e​-​podcast
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Common Sense Popular

Chortling Evil

Kamala Harris laughed.

She stood naked on the edge of a …

Oops. Wrong story.

The right — or, very wrong — story is Senator Harris (D – Calif.) laughing, sure. But the only thing naked is her powerlust.

Why refer to the opening of the novel The Fountainhead? To call attention to the Chortling Politician.

Harris isn’t the only politician openly contemptuous of treating the Constitution as worth sober assent. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, when asked about the constitutionality of Obamacare’s health insurance mandate, responded with “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

To some politicians — who I wish I could say did not include the current president — the Constitution is so passé, so insignificant, that bringing up the subject as a possible limit to what they seek to do is, well, chuckleworthy.

On her campaign website, Harris assures us that should Congress fail “to send comprehensive gun safety legislation” to her “desk within her first 100 days as president”  she would “take executive action to keep our kids and communities safe.”

Included in such a demanded “comprehensive” bill is “universal background checks, an assault weapons ban, and the repeal of the NRA’s corporate gun manufacturer and dealer immunity bill.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden, on last Thursday’s Democratic presidential candidates’ debate stage, challenged the notion of executive orders to ban assault weapons. At issue? Constitutionality. She smiled wide, all teeth and bright eyes, with “Hey, Joe, instead of saying, ‘No, we can’t,’ let’s say, ‘Yes, we can.’”

And she laughed and laughed.

Oh, the wit. 

She then explained how she “thinks about” the issue. The Constitution and the rule of law are not part of her thinking.

The empress is naked, yeesh.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Common Sense individual achievement media and media people

Hate in Plain Sight

“Classy guy,” won’t be the moniker afforded comedian Bill Maher when his time on Earth comes to an end.

“I guess I’m going to have to reevaluate my low opinion of prostate cancer,” Maher told his HBO audience regarding the death of libertarian billionaire David Koch at 79.

“As for his remains,” continued Maher, “he has asked to be cremated and have his ashes blown into a child’s lungs.”

You get the tenor of his “humor.”

“[David Koch] and his brother have done more than anybody to fund climate-​science deniers for decades, so f — k him!” Maher argued. “I’m glad he’s dead, and I hope the end was painful.”

The HBO celeb likely hoped his crass takedown of the already deceased would go viral. “I know these seem like harsh words and harsh jokes,” Maher conceded, “and I’m sure I’ll be condemned on Fox News …”

But perhaps not reprimanded more universally, since such political viciousness has become ubiquitous. For instance, when a questioner at the Minnesota State Fair mentioned Koch’s passing, applause erupted. 

“I don’t applaud, you know, the death of somebody,” Sen. Bernie Sanders chided the crowd (to his credit). “We needn’t do that.”

Celebrating someone’s demise is sickening. Moreover, in the case of David Koch, and brother Charles, so many of the non-​stop political attacks have been erroneous — condemnation for positions they do not hold, for things they have not done. Not to mention ignoring all the wonderful benefits they have provided our society.

Bill Maher is a professional punk, so I’m not shocked. But David Koch was a hero.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


N.B. Lovers of liberty lost another champion last week: Eric Dixon. For years, Eric has been a huge help to Common Sense in a myriad of important ways. He also assisted a number of other liberty-​oriented and free-​market groups, including U.S. Term Limits, the Cato Institute, Missouri’s Show Me Institute, the Atlas Network, the Libertarian Party, and more. A lot of people will miss Eric, not the least of whom will be me.

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David Koch

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Money for Robots and Representatives!

Yesterday I addressed Senator Bernie Sanders’ minimum wage problem. Today it is member of Congress and “The Squad” Rashida Tlaib’s turn. She is unsatisfied with the just-​passed national $15/​hour minimum wage. 

She wants to make it $20.

Now a bidding war begins?

But not where laborers bid for jobs. Instead, a war in which restaurateurs bid for robots.

The point being that when you force up the costs of employing one factor in a production process, those who are trying to make a living as producers do not just fold and give their wealth away to rent/​purchase the newly exorbitant factor. They economize.

They make substitutions.

If I am not mistaken, basic economics has a term for the core concept … marginal something of something substitution

Why folks enamored of government regulation and prohibition (for the minimum wage law prohibits hiring help below a certain rate of pay) seem to think this elementary aspect of human behavior can safely be ignored is hard to figure.

At Reason, Billy Binion explains just how devastating Tlaib’s “one size fits all approach” would be for restaurants, “particularly those of the mom and pop variety.” What Tlaib demands, for these wage contracts, “amounts to an increase of almost 940 percent.”

Binion cites one study predicting “that a median-​rated restaurant on Yelp (3.5 stars) was 14 percent more likely to close with each additional dollar added to the tipped wage.”

If restaurants go out of business, new businesses would emerge, admittedly. Say, a return of the Automat!

While young folks look up that term, we oldsters wonder if these automation-​minded entrepreneurs will fund Tlaib’s re-​election campaign.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 


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Rashida Tlaib, minimum wage, The Squad, economics,

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Common Sense general freedom ideological culture

Dependence or Independence?

“America does not want to witness a food fight,” Senator Kamala Harris said at last week’s debate, reprimanding her squabbling fellow Democratic Party presidential contenders. “They want to know how we’re going to put food on their table.”

The no doubt well-​rehearsed line drew raucous applause. She’s right; we’re not interested in a food fight.

But her second statement struck me as … odd … and not true. 

Harris spoke of how “we” — meaning they, the assembled politicians on the stage — are “going to put food” on “their” — meaning our — tables. 

Does she imagine that presidents produce our food, not farmers? Is she trying to say, “You didn’t grow that”? 

“Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap,” the author of the Declaration of Independence wrote, “we should soon want bread.”

Perhaps this presidential aspirant remains unaware of how America became a land of abundance? It wasn’t the exertion of career politicians. Or regulators. Or bureaucrats. It was the amazingly productive engine that is a free people.

“Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way,” Henry David Thoreau explained in his famous 1849 essay, entitled Resistance to Civil Government. “The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished.” 

The difference between a society where people honor independence and one where, conversely, they idolize dependence on the government is the difference between bright day and darkest night. 

Today’s date is July 4th, but the holiday is Independence Day. It is not a celebration of dependence on cradle-​to-​grave big brother government. We celebrate freedom for the individual.

A Republic … if We, the People can keep it.

But how? How do we restore freedoms lost while retaining extant freedoms?

Well, with ideas. Arguments. Promotion of others’ efforts.

And for two decades, this daily commentary has defended freedom and those fighting for it. And I hope to keep the Common Sense coming far into the future. 

Yet, this effort is totally dependent on you — and your generosity. In this 20th year, won’t you make a special pledge of $20? Or $200? Or $2,000 if you have the financial freedom to do so.

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must,” wrote Tom Paine in 1777, “undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”

Don’t worry, it won’t be so fatiguing. We stand up for freedom and against dependence on big government — with a rhetorical flourish now and again … and a sense of humor. 

Please pass the ammunition. And no food fight.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Kamala Harris, debate, Democrats, Fourth of July, Independence Day,

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