On May 9, 1800, abolitionist revolutionary (and, technically, terrorist) John Brown was born.
In 1883 on this date, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was born.
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John Brown
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José Ortega y Gasset
The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our other faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or to break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. A strange thing, indeed, the existence in man of this mental activity which substitutes one thing for another — from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second.
José Ortega y Gasset, “Taboo and Metaphor,” The Dehumanization of Art, 1925.
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Townhall: Who is Hillary’s “Tim”?
Can you identify Hillary’s apparent co-partner in anti-coal? This weekend Paul Jacob asks the question, and puts it in context.
Click on over to Townhall, then come back here for more reading.
- Wall Street Journal Video: Hillary Clinton Is Challenged on Coal Comments
- Washington Post: Emotional unemployed W.Va. coal worker confronts Hillary Clinton over comment about putting coal ‘out of business’
- Infowars.com: Hillary’s War on Coal Will Make YOU Poor, Not Just Coal Miners
- HotAir.com: No, Hillary did not apologize for bragging about putting coal miners ‘out of business’
- HillaryClinton.com Factsheet: Hillary Clinton’s Plan for Revitalizing Coal Communities
- CBN News: Obama’s War on Coal Decimating ‘America’s Powerhouse’
- America Rising: “We Are Going To Put A Lot Of Coal Miners & Coal Companies Out Of Business”
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Mill and Hayek . . . and bang!
On May 8, 1899, Austrian-English economist and philosopher Friedrich August von Hayek was born. He signed the bulk of his books written in the English language as “F.A. Hayek,” and is best known for The Road to Serfdom, The Constitution of Liberty, The Fatal Conceit, and many essays, several of them which are widely cited, including “Individualism, True and False” and “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”
Years earlier, on the same date in 1873, English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill died. Now best known for On Liberty and Utilitarianism, Mill’s letters to his wife were edited into book form by Hayek.
On May 8, 1946, two Estonian school girls (Aili Jõgi and Ageeda Paavel) blew up the Soviet memorial which stood in front of the Bronze Soldier in Tallinn.
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Video: Money Isn’t Speech?
A short discussion on campaign finance reform and the First Amendment, addressing the usual arguments against the Citizens United decision, but making a few points rarely heard together:
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Benedetto Croce
Poetry is produced not by the mere caprice of pleasure, but by natural necessity. It is the primary activity of the human mind.
Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R. G. Collingwood (London 1923).
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Belated Amendment
On May 7, 1992, the State of Michigan ratified a 203-year-old proposed amendment to the United States Constitution, thereby fulfilling the terms of amending the document, adding it as 27th Amendment. The amendment had been written by James Madison. He had presented it as part of the original twelve amendments that became the ten making up the Bill of Rights. It bars the U.S. Congress from giving itself a pay raise until after the next election, so that voters have a chance to decide whether those voting for the raise would remain in Congress to receive it.
Socialists often brag how their activism — through unions — gave the modern world its five-day workweek. One could spend a book picking at this boast, but no need: it’s overshadowed by the latest.
A socialist country has just reduced the workweek to two days! Hooray for socialism!
Or, no cheers at all. For this epochal move occurred in Venezuela, the “world’s worst performing economy,” with an inflation rate soaring to 720 percent and an absence of food, toilet paper, and . . . electricity: “President Nicolás Maduro will furlough the country’s public employees,” Nick Miroff writes in the Washington Post, “who account for a third of the labor force — for the bulk of the week, so they can sit through rolling blackouts at home rather than in the office.”
It’s only government employees who get the five-day weekend. And this is not a sign of socialist efficiency (heh heh), ushering in a Marxist utopia.
Another nation ruined by socialism and technocracy!
But not just any nation. Venezuela can boast one of the largest oil reserves in the world. If Norway and Alaska and desert sheiks can milk their underground deposits and distribute goodies to their people, why cannot Venezuelans manage it?
Because they extended socialist planning beyond a kleptocratic sharing scheme. Experts had advised them decades ago to build the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, live off low- or no-priced electricity as well as oil sales. Today, oil goes cheap . . . and there’s a drought, too little water behind the dam.
Now Venezuelans are trying to burn oil to generate electricity — mostly without success. Socialism has it all — rampant corruption and catastrophic inefficiency.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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William H. Prescott
The history of literature is the history of the human mind. It is, as compared with other histories, the intellectual as distinguished from the material, the informing spirit as compared with the outward and visible.
William H. Prescott, “Chateaubriand’s English Literature” (1839), p. 245.
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Benedetto Croce
Liberty is not the function of the bourgeoisie or any other economy but rather the human soul and its deep needs; it possesses qualities and origins that are not economic but instead moral and religious. . . .
Benedetto Croce, as quoted in As If God Existed: Religion and Liberty in the History of Italy, by Maurizio Viroli, (Princeton University Press, 2012).