In 1941, Czech economist and politician Václav Klaus was born; other June 19 births include Salman Rushdie in 1947, Kathleen Turner in 1954, and Laura Ingraham in 1964.
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Happy Birthday, Václav
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Video: They Must Suffer
Paul Jacob discusses the incentives and disincentives for politicians to serve the public. With some focus, this episode, on the Democratic Party.
CSV20160613-They Must Suffer from Paul Jacob on Vimeo.
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Auberon Herbert
On June 18, 1838, Auberon Edward William Molyneux Herbert was born.
Auberon Herbert was a Liberal Member of Parliament who, after reading the writings of Herbert Spencer, became a radical individualist and author of essays such as “The Ethics of Dynamite,” “A Politician in Trouble About His Soul,” and “The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State.”
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Arthur Kenyon Rogers
“There is no real paradox in the claim that satisfaction is open only to the man who stands prepared to give up pleasures. This only means, again, that satisfaction as a human goal is not an abstract ideal of limitless good, but presupposes a determinate human nature set to work out its destiny in determinate surroundings. That at which a sensible, human being aims is no unimaginable state of the intensest possible pleasure unaccompanied by pain, but the realization that he is making the very most of life that it is possible for him, with his particular interests and limita tions, to make, considering the means at his disposal. If one is not willing to accept these qualifications, he is not yet prepared to set out intelligently to secure satisfaction.”
Arthur Kenyon Rogers, The Theory of Ethics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922).
After the Orlando massacre, isn’t it finally time to get guns out of the hands of . . . licensed security guards?
Omar Mir Seddique Mateen, who murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others in the Pulse nightclub, worked for the globe’s largest security firm, Britain’s G4S. He passed two background checks conducted by the company, and his government credentials included “a Florida state-issued security guard license and a security guard firearms license.”
Not to mention that Omar Mateen was twice investigated by the FBI — in 2013 and again in 2014 — and cleared by the agency both times. Though on the terrorist watch list for a while, he was removed from that list after the FBI closed its investigations.
So we need more and tougher background checks? Must the FBI check every gun purchaser three times, is that the charm?
Even if the Feds blocked gun sales to those on the terrorist watch list and the “no-fly” list, it wouldn’t have affected Mateen, for he wasn’t on these lists when he purchased his Sig MCX.
Nevertheless, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy led a 14-hour filibuster to bring attention to his gun control legislation . . . that wouldn’t have stopped the Orlando massacre . . . or the shooting in Newtown.
“I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me,” tweeted Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, “about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns.”
If our government ever uses a secret list developed by security agencies to deny citizens their rights, without due legal process, without innocence until proven guilty, we will sorely need our Second Amendment rights.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Alexis de Tocqueville
I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest — his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not; he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2 (1840).
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The Statue of Liberty
The Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbor on June 17, 1885. On the same day in 1930, progressive Republican President Herbert Hoover — eager to please agricultural states, and confident that protectionism would yield greater wealth — signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. The Great Depression deepened, especially as provisions of the bill took effect.
Three years later, investment author and two-time Libertarian Party presidential candidate Harry Browne was born.
On June 17, 1944, Iceland declared independence from Denmark.
On this day in 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs,” which steadily decreased civil liberty and the rule of law in America.
Exactly one year later, five men were arrested for attempted burglary on the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., igniting the Watergate scandal that ultimately led to the resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon more than two years later.
On Tuesday, the Senate voted to force American women, in their early years, to register for the draft.
Just like men have been required to do since 1980.
The White House threatens to veto the bill, though perhaps on other grounds, since the bill also, in the words of Richard Lardner (AP), “authorizes $602 billion in military spending, bars shuttering the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and denies the Pentagon’s bid to start a new round of military base closings.”
The Senate’s social conservative ranks made the whole process leading up to the vote difficult for the mainliners, like Sen. John “Maverick” McCain, who is enthusiastic about registering women. Sen. Ted Cruz expressed alarm at the direction “sexual equality” is taking, and didn’t want to see “girls drafted onto the front lines.”
Decades ago, the Supreme Court had nixed a challenge to draft registration on discrimination lines, reasoning that since women weren’t allowed onto the front lines, there was no cause to force them to register for military conscription.
But now there are women in combat positions. So the old ruling no longer applies. If draft registration isn’t expanded to women, it’s likely to be struck down for men.
We have no draft, we are reminded, mere registration — which our government keeps in place mainly to remind men that they may be drafted.
In the House version of the bill, there’s no draft registration amendment. So there will be negotiations. Maybe a compromise can be reached where neither young men nor women face a military draft* or, likewise, signing up for one.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* For more on why to oppose the draft, see my essay “The Draft Is Slavery” in J. Neil Schulman, The Rainbow Cadenza, pulpless.com edition (1999).
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Arthur Kenyon Rogers
Rational satisfaction is no dream of an undisturbed and impossibly complete felicity. It is not inconsistent with pain and sorrow, and the exclusion of many human delights. To have the least chance of success it must be weighted with a sober sense of reality, and an acceptance of the actual conditions of human living; to demand more than life can possibly give is to cut off our chance of satisfaction at the outset. We must be ready, if we are not to be always open to the inroads of discontent, to see and acquiesce in inevitable limitations, to make the best of necessarily imperfect attainment, to give up without repining what does not lend itself to our more dominant and insistent interests, to prefer defeat to success that degrades us in our own eyes.
Arthur Kenyon Rogers, The Theory of Ethics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922).
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Nureyev & Adam Smith
On June 16, 1961, dancer Rudolf Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union.
The great Scottish moral philosopher, political economy pioneer, and Enlightenment intelectual Adam Smith (1723-1790), best known for authoring the 1776 masterwork The Wealth of Nations, was born on June 16.