From the steps of the capitol in Pierre, South Dakota….
For more information: Bosworth Case May Chill; PDF of the report presented.
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders made a splash last week with an off-the-cuff comment. “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.”
The candidate whose initials are “B. S.” doesn’t call himself a Socialist for nothing.
The Democratic-caucusing “Independent” Senator from Vermont was expressing a tired old sentiment. See his error? (Raise your hand if you know.)
To make any connection between “feeding the hungry” and cutting back on competitive products one would have to believe there is a fixed stock of wealth, and that we waste it on different brands and whole varieties of antiperspirants and sports shoes.
But there is no such fixed supply.
Supplies are concocted to meet consumer values, wants, and getting rid of competitive products means that some values are not being met . . . and that some folks are not being employed at the rates they could be with more diversity of commodities.
The best way to “feed the hungry” is for the hungry to feed themselves, by being productive — if children, then being fed by productive parents. And to do that, folks need to find their market niche. Which might very well entail another deodorant or shoe.
There is a realm where one person gains at the expense of someone else: redistributive government. If Sen. Sanders wants government to give more money to feed hungry people, he should consider cutting back on some other government expenditure.
Why didn’t B. S. suggest that? Perhaps more than feeding the hungry, he’s interested in feeding government, and his own pride in his own b.s. ideology.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Jeremy Bentham
“Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet.”
Private school choice is “in,” writes Patrick Wolf. “Far from being rare and untested, private school choice policies are an integral part of the fabric of American education policy.”
Now, these “new ideas” really upset some folks. I’m not one of them. School choice is greater freedom.
Freedom works.
Public schooling, on the other hand, is based on very different principles — and principals. It’s no wonder that a system based on compulsion (taxes, attendance, etc.) tends to have so much trouble performing well: it’s not the forced sector of the economy that booms.
Enter school choice. As long as kids must be forced to “attend” a school, I (as a parent) would rather decide which school, for both my sake and my children’s. And if I’m paying taxes, and other kids are getting tax moneys for their education, vouchers are more fair.
Wolf, writing in The Daily Signal, offers evidence that these eminently sensible policies lead to great results. “In Washington, D.C., use of an Opportunity Scholarship increased the likelihood of a student graduating by 71 percent.” Research into the effects of Milwaukee’s program show it “significantly increased the rates of high school graduation, college enrollment and persistence in college for the low-income students. . . .”
Researchers at Brookings Institution and Harvard found similar results for New York City’s “privately funded K-12 scholarship program.”
In his 1859 philosophical polemic, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argued that parents have a duty to educate their children — and society an interest in seeing these duties met. But that doesn’t entail setting up government schools.
It’s time to catch up with Mill’s 1859 wisdom.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect.”
What if police grabbed your children off the street and held them for five hours?
Alexander and Danielle Meitiv of Silver Spring, Maryland, have been investigated three times. First, when their children were discovered playing by themselves in a park a block from their home. The second time when police picked up the kids walking home from a park about a mile away. The third investigation was launched when the Meitiv’s 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter were arrested and held for five hours for walking home from a different park.
Nothing came of the first investigation. In the second, CPS originally found the couple guilty of “unsubstantiated neglect.” But last week, the Meitivs received a letter from Maryland’s Child Protective Services (CPS) now ruling out neglect in the second investigation.
Gee whiz, it’s good news. But the Meitivs still have investigation No. 3 to contend with. And CPS remains completely mum on whether the agency’s letter means the Meitivs and other parents can now freely allow their kids to walk to and from public parks and other venues.
Or not.
Can we really live in the “Land of the Free” and our children not be free to walk in public? What kind of freedom is that?
If the Constitution isn’t sufficient to stop police and child welfare [sic] agencies from snatching kids off the street, terrifying them, investigating their parents and threatening to take those children, we need to pass new laws granting children the right to walk down the street . . .
. . . as long as it’s okay with their parents.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Jacob Burckhardt
“The seventeenth century is everywhere a time in which the state’s power over everything individual increases, whether that power be in absolutist hands or may be considered the result of a contract, etc. People begin to dispute the sacred right of the individual ruler or authority without being aware that at the same time they are playing into the hands of a colossal state power.”
Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History
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Habeas corpus
On May 27, 1863, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of Maryland issued Ex parte Merryman, challenging the authority of President Abraham Lincoln to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in Maryland, the legal procedure that prevents the government from holding an individual indefinitely without showing cause.
Two days earlier, John Merryman, a vocal secessionist, had been arrested in Cockeysville. Although military officials continued to arrest suspected Southern sympathizers, the incident led to a softening of the policy.
Some claims don’t persuade. For example, the claim that starting a conversation is an effort to end conversation. Or that one “bullies” officeholders by telling constituents what officeholders are up to.
But so contends a Columbus Dispatch editorial (“Don’t let pledges close discussions”) chastising U.S. Term Limits, my old stomping ground, for spotlighting pols plotting to pulverize term limits.
U.S. Term Limits advised constituents of Ohio State Representatives Bob Cupp and Nathan Manning that neither will pledge to forbear from weakening Ohio’s state legislative term limits — and that both men serve on a commission scheming to weaken the limits.
The organization’s mailing is “out of line in two ways,” the paper opines.
First, lawmakers mustn’t “surrender their autonomy to bullying interest groups” but must consider issues “with open minds.” Should these open minds be closed to any reminders of the legitimate interests of constituents? The Dispatch editors write as if they’d never head of politics and political debate before; anyway, as if it should desist forthwith.
Second, the pledge itself is “misplaced,” because Ohio voters must approve any referendum Ohio lawmakers send to ballot; lawmakers can’t act unilaterally. True. But why take even one bad step on a bad road?
How can the Dispatch’s theme be that USTL seeks to “close” discussions of term limits? U.S. Term Limits would be delighted if all Ohioans engaged in loud and long discussions of term limits, as well as of what Ohio lawmakers hope to do to their constitutionally limited terms in office.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Jacob Burckhardt
“Nothing in the world is better suited to laziness than orthodoxy. If you gag your mouth, stop up your ears and put a blinder over your eyes, you can sleep peacefully.”
Jacob Burckhardt was a teacher and reserved, cautious mentor to Friedrich Nietzsche.