Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies

Sanders Didn’t Say*

Bernie Sanders

What can we make of the leftist hatred of the Koch brothers, David and his elder brother Charles? For their support of libertarian and Tea Party causes, and a few Republican candidates, the left doesn’t just demonize them, the left singles them out.

I suppose a reasonable person could blanch at rich people giving money to political causes . . . if they objected to all super-rich donors.

But that’s not what’s happening here.

Leftist hatred of the Kochs is especially weird, considering that Koch causes include gay marriage and opposition to war in the mid-East. And yet it’s the Kochs who get called out . . . by Bernie Sanders, who wants to mobilize “millions of people to say ‘enough is enough — Koch brothers and millionaires can’t have it all.’”

Sanders didn’t say, “Soros and millionaires cannot have it all.” Leftist billionaire George Soros gives millions to organizations working to turn the U. S. into a European-style “social democracy.”

Sanders didn’t say, “Bloomberg and millionaires cannot have it all.” Super-rich statist Michael Bloomberg has spent fortunes to undermine the Second Amendment and make America more of a Nanny State.

Sanders didn’t say, “Steyer and millionaires cannot have it all.” California billionaire Tom Steyer sure spent a lot of money to raise taxes and elect Democrats.

Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist now running for the Democratic presidential nomination, is blinkered: others are greedy; his side is pure.

Enough is enough — what’s important to Sanders is that his opponents be silenced by government order. There’s nothing democratic about that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Bernie Sanders

 

* This “BEST OF COMMON SENSE” column is reprinted from April 30, 2015. It has a strange relevance now that left-of-center pressure groups, a few of them funded in the past by billionaires not named Koch, have gotten themselves in the news for “protests” designed to take away the free speech rights (and made a mockery of “peaceably assemble”) of people they do not like. Please also see Paul Jacob’s Townhall column this weekend.

 

Categories
Thought

Booker T. Washington

Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.

Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, Chapter XI: “Making Their Beds Before They Could Lie On Them” (1901).

Categories
Today

Gold

On March 14, 1900, the Gold Standard Act was ratified, placing United States currency on the gold standard.

Categories
links

Townhall: Worst Actors in a Freedom-Destroying Drama

Friday’s events may cast a shadow upon the rest of the race — or serve as a spark to ignite a fiery finish of this campaign year. Click on over to Townhall, for Paul Jacob’s Common Sense perspective. Other links? Well, there are stories everywhere. But for the GOP also-rans complaining about the front runner, click over to the Washington Post.

And scroll on back to yesterday’s video.

The image, above, is of one of the protestors getting his flag up onto CNN’s cameras. The CNN commentariat did not see fit to mention it. I guess it would have broken the rhythm of most of the talking heads excoriating Trump for all the violence. I am sure they think Trump was responsible for protestors blocking ambulances, too.

Categories
Thought

Mary Ann Evans

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, 1858.

Categories
Today

1862

On March 13, 1862, the U.S. federal government forbade all Union army officers from returning fugitive slaves, thus effectively annulling the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation.

Categories
video

Video: Silencing Trump With Mob Noise

So this happened:

I love a good protest. But a bad protest is where the protestors mob the event and shout down speech. That isn’t good protest. It is anti-free speech. It is bullying.

Things look like they are getting ugly this election year. The result could be chaos. But backlashes happen, and the protestors may have ensured that the man they say they oppose actually gets elected. We will see.

(The video was almost selected at random. Consider this a place filler. A historic marker.)

Categories
Today

Two Criminals

Disgraced New Yorkers

On March 12, 2009, financier Bernard Madoff pled guilty to pulling off perhaps the biggest swindle in U. S. history. One year earlier to the day, in the same city, New York, the state’s governor, Eliot Spitzer, resigned a mere two days after reports had surfaced that he was listed as a client in a high-end escort/call-girl prostitution ring. The cause of freedom is advanced with every criminal nabbed and every hypocritical illiberal politician disgraced.

Categories
Thought

Deirdre N. McCloskey

Nor during the Age of Innovation have the poor gotten poorer, as people are always saying. On the contrary, the poor have been the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism. It is an irrefutable historical finding, obscured by the logical truth that the profits from innovation go in the first act mostly to the bourgeois rich.

Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010).

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom individual achievement obituary

A Life Too Short

ElizaBeth Garrett

One lesson from the classic film, It’s a Wonderful Life, is that “Every man’s life touches so many others.”

Every woman’s life does, too.

On Monday, I was stunned and saddened to read in my morning paper that Cornell University President Elizabeth “Beth” Garrett had died, barely a month after being diagnosed with colon cancer, at only 52 years of age.

“Being the first woman president of Cornell, just as I was the first woman provost at U.S.C., puts me in the position of being a role model — not just for young women, but also for men,” she told an interviewer.

While at the University of Southern California, Beth “was the driving force behind the Initiative and Referendum Institute becoming part of USC,” according to my friend, Dane Waters, founder of the Institute.

I met her in the late 1990s. While we certainly were not in full agreement politically, my respect for her intellectual honesty grew and grew. She produced top notch research on the initiative process

And she cared. Years ago, when the Oklahoma Attorney General unsuccessfully sought to persecute myself and two others, Beth Garrett, an Okie native, reached out to lend her moral support.

Reason magazine mourned her passing by calling her “a staunch defender of free speech on campus.”

“There isn’t any idea that ought not to be tested and questioned,” Garrett once told students. “Because that’s how we get closer to the truth. . . . So if you disagree with someone, the answer isn’t to shut them down.”

Beth Garrett lived a wonderful life, leading by example. We’ll miss her.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ElizaBeth Garrett

 

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