“Never read any book that is not a year old.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “First Visit to England” in English Traits (1856)
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Belated Amendment
On May 7, 1992, Michigan ratified a 203-year-old proposed amendment to the United States Constitution, thereby fulfilling the terms of amending the document, adding it as 27th Amendment. The amendment had been written by James Madison. He had presented it as part of the original twelve amendments that became the ten making up the Bill of Rights. It bars the U.S. Congress from giving itself a pay raise until after the next election, so that voters have a chance to decide whether those voting for the raise would remain in Congress to receive it.
On Monday, pushing an expansion of his “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative, President Barack Obama gave a talk about the recent rise in racial discord.
Does he ever ask himself, “Under whose watch?”
When the financial system melted down in 2008, candidate Obama — not without some justification — blamed President Bush and the Republicans. Why shouldn’t he and his party be today held somewhat responsible for rising racial unrest?
Wasn’t his very status as the First Black American President supposed to continue the healing process between blacks and whites?
In his talk, Obama recognized the “sense of unfairness, of powerlessness, of not hearing their voices, that’s helped fuel some of the protests. . . .” Well, sure. But there would be no occasion for this were inner-city blacks not treated unfairly in the first place.
The president wants to spend more money on education, for example, despite the high levels of per-student public ed funding in hot spot Baltimore.
It is quite clear that other programs have done the most damage. We still have a War on Drugs, which is unpopular enough that it turns cops “racist” perhaps even against their wills — as I’ve explained before, police tend to focus their unpopular policing against drug use to the classes of society that have the least direct political power, most especially against inner-city blacks.
But even more bedrock: we see protests and talk about inequality during economic downturns. Obama should learn from Bill Clinton’s initial presidential campaign: It’s the economy, stupid.
Or put more bluntly: It’s your stupid economic policies.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Comes Good Sailing
On May 6, 1862, American author, philosopher and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau died, after many years of tuberculosis.
Aware he was dying, Thoreau’s last words were “Now comes good sailing,” followed by two lone words, “moose” and “Indian.” Bronson Alcott planned the service and read selections from Thoreau’s works, and Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at his funeral.
His remains, as well as those of members of his immediate family, were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The thing done avails, and not what is said about it. An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “First Visit to England” in English Traits (1856)
Last Thursday I tried to be magnanimous. Of campaign finance regulation proponents, I wrote, “I suppose a reasonable person could blanch at rich people giving money to political causes . . . if they objected to all super-rich donors.”
My expectation of reciprocity was dashed at the non-reciprocal gambits of the Koch-hating campaign finance regulation advocates. It all really does come down to how they hate having others spend lots of money . . . against their causes.
Hardly democratic, that. Sorta ‘live and don’t let live.’
But they could (and will) defend themselves. They could say something like this: “We don’t like our billionaires having to give so much either. We’d like to cap our billionaires’ giving, too!”
It’s tough to have to keep up with your opponents’ spending, a pain having to give and give to get what you want and want.
We’d all like to get our way without having to spend time and money. But that doesn’t seem to be the way the world works — everything has a cost.
I sympathize. Economists call the problem of political campaign spending a “Tullock auction,” which sports no rational upper limit on spending, because winners take all.
Still, to bitch about your opponents’ spending but never your own gives away your game.
And we all know what the ultimate progressive game is: tax-funded elections. Tightly controlled, with more and more intrusions into how citizens assemble and cooperate to promote their candidates and causes.
So if the promotion, debate, and decision process is to be government-funded, government-controlled, we might as well call it Socialism and be done with it.
Could such a system be biased, just possibly for the pro-government growth side?
All mysteries solved.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Cinco de Mayo
In 1862, troops led by Ignacio Zaragoza stopped a French invasion in the Battle of Puebla in Mexico — an event leading to the popular “Cinco de Mayo” celebration.
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William H. Prescott
“In contemplating the religious system of the Aztecs, one is struck with its apparent incongruity, as if some portion of it had emanated from a comparatively refined people, open to gentle influences, while the rest breathes a spirit of unmitigated ferocity.”
William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, chapter three
Poverty kills.
In “The Tragedy of Nepal,” aerospace engineer Rand Simberg explains why industry-deniers striving to block economic progress in the name of blocking “climate change” do no favor to the poorest countries of the world.
Human beings cannot prevent disasters like the earthquake that recently struck Nepal. We can, though, mitigate their destructiveness . . . by being as economically free as possible and, therefore, as rich as possible.
And thus able to afford more durable — even antifragile — structures and infrastructure.
The same capital-intensive achievements that protect us when Mother Nature is quiescent also protect us when she’s at her worst. Buildings are more likely to withstand a quake when constructed of the best possible materials and designs. But the most robust safeguards can be the norm only when we are free and wealthy enough to engage in the industrial processes required to produce them.
This is a familiar point. But it bears repeating because it is not familiar enough to discourage foes of a vague threat called “climate change” — nothing new in earth’s history — from also ranging themselves against industrial production.
Industry-deniers assert that we can manipulate climate trends for the better if only we radically curb our carbon-emitting impact on the atmosphere. But attempts to enact this fantasy will only make it ever harder to grapple with vagaries of nature commonplace long before the rise of civilizations.
Human survival requires the opposite policy. It requires full freedom to build nature-transforming industries — and buildings, and all the other man-made bulwarks of our lives and future.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Wellington
“All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill.’”
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington