On January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was banned.
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Slave Trade
Presidential candidate John McAfee is an adventurer. Best known for founding the first successful anti-computer virus company, he has also been shot at in tropical jungles, by men trained by U. S. forces, with American-bought guns. This range of experience makes him the most interesting presidential hopeful, bar none.
His big issue is cyber-security. He thinks Americans have placed themselves in a too-precarious position. As he sees it, the war on terror has served as a grand distraction from the real threat, a prime example of doing foreign policy and national security completely upside-down wrong.
He has a point.
But he’s neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and not long ago he realized that his own Cyber Party didn’t have the oomph to get him on the ballot in enough states.
So he has announced his candidacy for the Libertarian Party nomination.
Why? He’s obviously not a libertarian in any strict capital-L sense. But the septuagenarian insists that he has been a libertarian at heart since before the word entered common use.
This is what the Libertarians get for their most obvious success: obtaining and keeping ballot status in more states for more election cycles than any other “minor party.”
Think of the Libertarian Party as the host, and one-time Republicans like former Congressman Bob Barr and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson — and now McAfee — as viruses, aiming to commandeer the host’s operating system.
Of course, one might also view the LP as a virus attempting to do the same to the federal government.
Shall we root for the viruses, for once?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Bricked Windows
On December 31, 1695, Englanders received a new tax, a window tax. One of the main responses to this was the bricking up of many British windows.
This last day of the year in 1991 marked the complete cessation of all institutions of the Soviet Union.
New Year’s Eve 1992 saw the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This has been dubbed the “Velvet Divorce.”
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Sarah M. Grimké
“The system of slavery is necessarily cruel. The lust of dominion inevitably produces hardness of heart, because the state of mind which craves unlimited power, such as slavery confers, involves a desire to use that power, and although I know there are exceptions to the exercise of barbarity on the bodies of slaves, I maintain that there can be no exceptions to the exercise of the most soul-withering cruelty on the minds of the enslaved. All around is the mighty ruin of intellect, the appalling spectacle of the down-trodden image of God.”
Sarah M. Grimké, from An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States, New-York, 12th Mo. 1836.
“The Department of Justice announced [last] week that it’s suspending a controversial program that allows local police departments to keep a large portion of assets seized from citizens under federal law and funnel it into their own coffers,” reports the Washington Post.
The Feds call the paused program “equitable sharing”; as I explained last month, I call it “equitable stealing.”
Even when state and local laws prohibit it, local police have been using this federal program to continue taking people’s money and property without ever convicting them of a crime.
The loophole? They split the loot with the Feds.
Now that has ended. According to the Post, this is the result of “budget cuts” in the recently passed omnibus spending bill; the Wall Street Journal calls it a “reallocation of funds.”
Either way, Happy Holidays!
Yet, sadly, the return to freedom, justice and the American Way may be short-lived.
“The Department does not take this step lightly,” wrote M. Kendall Day, the chief of DOJ’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section. “We explored every conceivable option that would have enabled us to preserve some form of meaningful equitable sharing. . . .”
In his letter, he proclaiming a commitment to the principle of guilty-until-proven-innocent and to grabbing people’s stuff, telling state and local and tribal police departments, “We will take all appropriate and necessary measures to minimize the impact of the rescission and reinstate sharing distributions as soon as practical and financially feasible.”
As the Wall Street Journal editorialized, “Congress should make sure that never happens.”
Of course, Congress will likely need a mighty nudge from us.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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A law student
On December 30, 1919, Lincoln’s Inn in London, England, admitted its first female bar student.
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William Leggett
“‘DO NOT GOVERN TOO MUCH,’ is a maxim which should be placed in large letters over the speaker’s chair in all legislative bodies. The old proverb, ‘too much of a good thing is good for nothing,’ is most especially applicable to the present time, when it would appear, from the course of our legislation, that common sense, common experience, and the instinct of self-preservation, are utterly insufficient for the ordinary purposes of life; that the people of the United States are not only incapable of self-government, but of taking cognizance of their individual affairs; that industry requires protection, enterprize bounties, and that no man can possibly find his way in broad day light without being tied to the apron-string of a legislative dry-nurse. The present system of our legislation seems founded on the total incapacity of mankind to take care of themselves or to exist without legislative enactment.”
William Leggett, in an editorial in the Evening Post, March 11, 1835 (republished in A Collection of the Political Writings of William Leggett (1840), and titled “The Legislation of Congress”).
Senator Bernie Sanders gave us a big present last week. In one simple “tweet” he warbled out the essence of his socialism: “You have families out there paying 6, 8, 10 percent on student debt but you can refinance your homes at 3 percent. What sense is that?”
That’s what he broadcast. That’s what this self-proclaimed socialist wrote — or allowed his staff to write — on his official Twitter account, @SenSanders.
And it is not as if he had the excuse of haste. He was repeating a thought from his presidential campaign account in September: “It makes no sense that students and their parents pay higher interest rates for college than they pay for car loans or housing mortgages.”
To the earlier post, Twitter erupted in criticism. The gist? Have you never heard of collateral, sir?
Lenders can charge less on secured loans because, in case of default, the recourse is to take the collateral, the car or house, thereby recouping the loss.
But an unsecured loan? Well, by law one cannot easily slough off student loans — but one can simply not pay, or pay late. Hence the higher rates.
From its beginnings, socialism — and progressivism and Fabianism and fascism and social democracy, following — has been fueled by complaints about markets.
Without showing any understanding of the logic of markets.
Which is why, when put into practice, socialistic and interventionist programs produce such great amounts of negative collateral effects. Socialism is the philosophy of good intentions that yields collateral damage worse than the problems meant to be solved.
Oh, Bernie Sanders! Your initials say so much.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On December 29, 1911, Mongolia gained independence from the Qing Dynasty.
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John C. Calhoun
“A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.”
John Calhoun, in a speech (May 27, 1836); this is the source of the phrase, “Cohesive power of public plunder.”