On April 15, 1945, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated.
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Bergen-Belsen Liberated
You may have missed it. I wasn’t so lucky. This past Tuesday was “Equal Pay Day.”
“[T]he typical woman who works full-time earns 79-cents for every dollar that a typical man makes,” President Barack Obama said, repeating what we have already been told ad nauseum about the “wage gap” between men and women.
The “detailed calculation” used to determine this “gender wage gap”?
“Experts” simply added up all the money earned by all the men and all the women (subcategoried) and then divided by the number of men and women, respectively. No accounting for
- the actual jobs performed,
- hours worked,
- education,
- risk,
- work history
. . . or any other factor.
Using this statistic make sense if all people — brain surgeons and taxi drivers alike, having worked every day for the last 40 years or re-entering the workforce after decades away — should earn the exact same amount.
Communism.
It is already illegal to pay a woman less than a man for the same work. Yet, on the WhiteHouse.gov page entitled, “This Is Why Today is Equal Pay Day,” the prez says “we must rid our society of the injustice that is pay discrimination.” The website insists that, Obama “has made equal pay a top priority.”
Then, why does a pay gap exist between the men and women working for Mr. Obama? According to the Washington Post, “The White House has not narrowed the gap between the average pay of male and female employees since President Obama’s first year in office . . .”
The good news? Equal Pay Day is over.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Thomas Jefferson
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?
Thomas Jefferson, First Innaugural Address, March 4, 1801.
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Americanisms
On April 14, 1775, the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, the first American organization committed to the abolition of slavery, was formed in Philadelphia.
On April 14, 1818, Noah Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language, one of the first lexicons to include distinctly American words. The dictionary, which took him more than two decades to complete, introduced more than 10,000 “Americanisms.”
On April 14, 1988, representatives of the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, the United States, and Pakistan signed an agreement calling for the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. In exchange for an end to the disputed Soviet occupation, the United States agreed to end its arms support for the Afghan anti-Soviet factions, and Afghanistan and Pakistan agreed not to interfere in each other’s affairs.
In 1743, on April 2, Thomas Jefferson was born. But the old Julian calendar was superseded in 1752, so we now mark his birthday as April 13.
Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the United States’ Declaration of Independence. He authored the State of Virginia’s Statue of Religious Freedom, which disestablished the Episcopalian Church, thus officially beginning the long process of what he referred to as “building a wall of separation between Church and State.”
He followed Patrick Henry as Governor of Virginia, and was in that position when it was attacked by British forces (led by Benedict Arnold and Gen. Cornwallis). He later served as the first Secretary of State of the new union, and then as its second Vice President and third President. He wrote one book, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), and translated several others, including Volney’s Ruins of Empires (1802) and Destutt de Tracy’s A Treatise on Political Economy (1817). He designed the first campus of the University of Virginia, and managed its founding.
Thomas Jefferson was a man of achievement, yes; but mostly he is associated with the idea of freedom.
Yet, he was also a slave-owner. His several attempts to limit the severity and extent of slavery were mostly beaten back. And his personal involvement with slaves (he likely sired several children with his late wife’s half sister, a slave) was even more tangled.
Some people say this disqualifies Jefferson from current praise.
I’m not in that camp. It seems to me less than honest not to esteem him for helping us declare that “all men are created equal” . . . and outright foolish to ignore Mr. Jefferson’s lifelong agitation for a more equal freedom under law.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Rose Wilder Lane
This is the nature of human energy; individuals generate it, and control it. Each person is self-controlling, and therefore responsible for his acts. Every human being, by his nature, is free.
Rose Wilder Lane, Discovery of Freedom (1943).
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Thomas Jefferson
On April 13, 1743, Thomas Jefferson was born. Author of Notes on the State of Virginia and the first draft of the United States’ Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was also a scientist, philosopher, inventor, diplomat, and American politician. He also composed music, designed buildings, and translated works from his favorite French writers, whom he had met in his diplomatic missions to Paris.
Some of us who think of ourselves as populists — or just ordinary people, hence “outsiders” — are having a hard time this political season. The two most talked-about outsider candidates, billionaire Donald Trump and socialist Bernie Sanders, make for strange populists.
A billionaire as a “man of the people”? Not very plausible. It is his lack of a self-censor, his free-wheeling, stream-of-conscious grade-school-level discourse, that impresses many folks. Definitely not scripted.
A socialist as populist? Socialism, long associated with elitists, would put the State into every area of everyday life. Most folks with horse sense resist that.
But Trump and Sanders do have something in common. They rely upon common misconceptions about everyday market life. They both fan the flames of conspiracy theories about prices.
When the price of fuel was spiking a few years ago, Bernie Sanders warned us: “Forget what you may have read about the laws of supply and demand. Oil and gas prices have almost nothing to do with economic fundamentals.” It’s all greed, you see: arbitrary power.
But, as Daniel Bier reminds us at The Freeman, believing that businesses are superpowers out to screw us with ever-rising prices, unhampered by supply and demand, is not just socialist silliness, it’s Billionaire Trump silliness, too — four years ago, the developer not only trumpeted the idea that we simply threaten OPEC for lower prices, but suggested we actually seize foreign oil fields.
This is not common sense. It’s crankism.
It’s the kind of thing folks say when they’re drunk.
Maybe on power.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Common Sense Needs Your Help!
Also, please consider showing your appreciation by dropping something in our tip jar (this link will take you to the Citizens in Charge donation page… and your contribution will go to the support of the Common Sense website). Maintaining this site takes time and money.
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H. L. Mencken
[T]he average workingman has before him two practicable methods for satisfying his will to power. By the first method he enters into a conspiracy with other workingmen . . . endeavor[ing] to raise the market value of their skill without offering any corresponding improvement in its quality. By the second method, the individual workman seeks so to improve his own skill that it shall bring more than the average price.
H. L. Mencken, in Robert Rives La Monte and Mencken, Men versus The Man (1910).
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Armen Alchian
On April 12, 1914, American economist Armen Alchian was born. His contributions to economic theory and teaching were many and varied — his textbook, co-authored with William R. Allen, University Economics (also titled Exchange and Production), was widely considered one of the finest intermediate texts in microeconomics — but he remains perhaps best known for his work on property rights.
Alchian died in 2014, in late February, at the age of 99.