On June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman to draft a declaration of independence from Great Britain.
In 1963, Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, doused himself with gasoline and set himself aflame in a busy Saigon intersection as a protest against South Vietnam’s lack of religious freedom.
We are living in what I hope are the latter days of the Watergate Era.
I’m old enough to remember Watergate. The un-making of President Nixon, before our very eyes, informed Americans in a deep and profound way. It led, in part, to the election of Jimmy Carter, often referred to as one of the least effectual presidents. And the Carter presidency led to Ronald Reagan.
While living under Watergate’s dark shadow, not all of us took away the same lesson.
We outsiders learned, once again, that power corrupts.
Insiders, on the other hand, learned something different: never willingly play a part in your side’s unmasking and un-making.
We tend to forget, what with the economic rebound and end of the Cold War, that the Reagan Administration had significant scandals. At the time, Reagan was dubbed the “Teflon President,” because Reagan & Co. figured out how to react: shrug; stall; deny, deny, deny. For this reason, scandal flowed off him, not sticking, as water off a well-oiled duck’s back.
Reagan and the Republicans did not allow what Republicans had allowed in Nixon’s day: there was no turning on one’s own, no (or few) breaking of ranks.
Then, President Bill Clinton took the effrontery of denial and stonewalling to new heights. With great help from fellow Democrats.
And so it goes, even to the present day, with Hillary Clinton carrying on her husband’s tradition. She, the first candidate to run for the presidency while under official investigation by the FBI, just received the current president’s endorsement.
The back-room deal has been made, perhaps? Obama will not allow Hillary to be prosecuted. It would tarnish his legacy.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Apple shipped the first Apple II computer on June 10, 1977.
Born on this day: historian, jazz critic and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff (1925); children’s writer Maurice Sendak (1929); scientist and pioneer of “sociobiology,” E. O. Wilson (1929).
[T]he hope of evading such taxes by smuggling gives frequent occasion to forfeitures and other penalties, which entirely ruin the smuggler, a person who, though no doubt highly blameable for violating the laws of his country, is frequently incapable of violating those of natural justice, and would have been, in every respect, an excellent citizen, had not the laws of his country made that a crime which nature never meant to be so.
Adam Smith, The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), referring to luxury taxes.
The fight against government theft of private property, through “civil forfeiture,” just got a little harder.
There’s a new technology available: ERAD card scanners.
And the Oklahoma City Police Department’s joint interdiction team has them, and can use the scanners to take money from you without your consent.
What money, in particular? The money you have stored in pre-paid debit cards.
ERAD stands for Electronic Recovery and Access to Data, and the ERAD Group, Inc., stands to make a lot of cash from the technology. Police around the country want to be able to take the funds secured in debit cards. It’s the latest thing in the war against the war against the War on Drugs.
Drug traffickers, we’re told, hide dozens of such cards in vehicles transporting drugs.
It’s not enough that police can, in the course of investigating a crime — without conviction, mind you; indeed, without charges being filed — confiscate the cards themselves.
The police also want to be able to siphon the money out of those cards.
Which leads to corruption. Which is already rife in civil forfeiture usage, as a recent Oklahoma state audit found — missing money, misused funds, that sort of thing.
The cavalier way in which government officials defend expropriation by ERAD scanners is chilling. In an Oklahoma Watch article, reporter Clifford Adcock relates the official explanation: “These cards are cash, not bank accounts. . . . Individuals do not have privacy rights with magnetic stripe cards.” Why not? Because the information on the strip “literally has no purpose other than to be provided to others to read.”
That’s so open to logical criticism you could drive a confiscated truck fleet through it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Roman Emperor Nero committed suicide on this day in June, 68 AD, ending Rome’s Julio-Claudian Dynasty, later written about with verve by Suetonius and Robert Graves.
Also on June 9, James Oglethorpe received a charter from the British crown to start the Georgia colony (1732); William Jennings Bryan resigned his position as Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, disgusted over the handling of the sinking of the Lusitania (1915); philosopher John Hospers — who would go on to run as a Libertarian candidate for the U.S. presidency in 1972 — was born in 1918 on the ninth of June.
Hospers was famous for his work in ethics and aesthetics, but his most-read book was probably his Introduction to Philosophical Analysis.
To promote the little interest of one little order of men in one country, it hurts the interest of all other orders of men in that country, and of all men in all other countries.
Adam Smith, The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), on colonialism, his own country’s participation in which Smith judged quite negatively: “Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies.”
This weekend, the Swiss people rejected the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) with a whopping 77 percent against.
That’s the kind of overwhelming result that one finds in America for, say, term limits. And 23 percent, you might notice, is about the percentage of the population in America of hard-core “liberal” progressives, the kind of people usually in support of such measures.
In Switzerland’s case, it was a measure put on the ballot by one group, Bien-CH. But if you are thinking “socialism,” the group insists that that’s the wrong way to think about the plan. UBI is needed, the group’s website says, “to grease the wheels of the capitalist economies” facing a declining need for workers as a result of technological advance.
Yes, UBI is a policy designed to accommodate the coming horde of robots! How? By “increasing demand” by spreading out wealth from the connected-to-tech few to the witless-about-tech many. (How vulgar Keynesian.)
The Swiss government urged a No vote, fearing a need to raise taxes by fifty percent. Quite a hike.
Meanwhile, the notion garners worldwide interest, and even libertarian social scientist Charles Murray promotes this guaranteed income idea (under a different initialism), mostly to streamline the costly bulk of the welfare state.
I’m dubious.
After all, about our latest industrial revolution, in artificial intelligence and in robotics: I say open up labor and entrepreneurial markets from excessive regulation, and allow networking advances to transform capitalism on its own terms, with person-to-person (P2P) cooperation (think AirBnB and Uber and Lyft) and much more.
The best is coming, I bet. If clunky proposals like UBI don’t get in the way.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The initiation of violence at the Donald Trump rallies foreshadows the force to come when socialism — an ideology of force — continues to gain ground in what was once the land of individual liberty, private property, freedom of association and freedom of speech.
Michael J. Hurd, “Why Violence Against Trump Supporters, But Not Sanders/Clinton Supporters?” June 4, 2016.
On June 8, 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.