Here is the segment of The Kelly File mentioned on Monday.
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Run for the border
On May 2, 1989, Hungary began dismantling its border fence with Austria, allowing a number of East Germans to defect.
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Immanuel Kant
“The civil state regarded purely as a lawful state, is based on the following a priori principles:
- The freedom of every member of society as a human being.
- The equality of each with all the others as a subject.
- The independence of each member of a commonwealth as a citizen.
“These principles are not so much laws given by an already established state, as laws by which a state can alone be established in accordance with pure rational principles of external human right. ”
Immanuel Kant, Theory and Practice (1791)
State-powered Puritanism is alive and well in the west. And freedom of speech is in its death throes.
Or so it seems in Great Britain. And the U.S. isn’t far behind, suggests Brendan O’Neill.
O’Neill, editor of the London-based Spike, recounts recent absurd assaults on freedom of speech, so frequent now in Britain as to be routine.
Consider the case of the malevolent hashtag. A hashtag is a label with a pound sign that Twitter-folk use to flag and meta-comment on their tweets. A soccer fan named Stephen Dodds thumbed the hashtag “#DISGRACE” to bemoan how Muslims attending a game were conspicuously praying during halftime. His tweet provoked an Internet uproar. Good. But Dodds was also reported to the police, who investigated his open hashtaggery for two weeks (!!).
And how about the case of the svelte-model-adorned subway ad that dares ask British ladies if they’re “beach-body-ready”? Uh oh. A direct psychic assault on those who will never be “beach-body-ready” in the super-model sense of the word. After feminists vandalized the ads, something called Advertising Standards Authority lurched to investigate — not the vandals, no: the blatantly anti-blobby sentiment.
Few opinions or postures fail to offend somebody.
What offends me is that we should ever be subject to arbitrary, government-backed assaults on our rights launched to satisfy persons especially thin-skinned and/or especially eager to stomp on the rights of others.
As with all fake rights, foisting a fake right to not-be-offended can only violate genuine rights. #DISGRACE.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Great Exhibition
On May 1, 1851, Queen Victoria performed the ritual function of opening the Great Exhibition in London.
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Theodore W. Schultz
Whereas the governments of some low-income countries are improving their economics policies, in the United States the proliferation of political movements that view economics with disdain, along with apparent general public support for government market interventions, are in considerable measure contributing to the decline in the performance of the U.S. economy.
Theodore W. Schultz, Investing in People: The Economics of Population Quality (1981), p. 143-4.
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.
Urban African-American poverty is a problem, as is, increasingly, rural and urban white poverty. What can we do?
Not what folks at The Nation suggest: by increasing progressivity in local taxation, adding progressivity to fines (making the poor pay less and the rich more), and the like. That’s the gist of what Brad Lander and Karl Kumodzi write about in their article “How Cities’ Funding Woes Are Driving Racial and Economic Injustice—And What We Can Do About It.”
Though they call their solution “forward-looking,” it is not that time element that makes their views “progressive.” It’s their obsession with tax rates. What makes a progressive a progressive seems to be little more than a reliance on progressive rate taxation.
Embarrassing.
The three big examples of failed cities the authors give are the urban community of Ferguson, near St. Louis; Detroit, Michigan; and now Baltimore, Maryland, currently undergoing “protests” and conflagration.
Typical for Nation writers, they see the problem as not the poverty, culture, and behavior of black individuals in neighborhoods where few work and 70 percent grow up in fatherless families, but not taxing whites enough.
Meanwhile, Detroit and Baltimore have been run as “liberal” Democratic enclaves for years. Yet “blame the rich” is the approach. The authors want to double down on old, failed policies. More taxes. More government.
Now, government is to blame, of course: “welfare” programs encourage the break-up of the nuclear family; horrible public schools; minimum wage laws that hit low-skilled population hardest; and the Drug War.
The authors are right, though, that the cities’ desperate regressive burdens on the poor are no answer. Less taxes, less regulation, less subsidy, less policing for profit, more freedom — those are the better solutions.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Theodore W. Schultz
[T]here is an abundance of rhetoric consisting of dire predictions that the soils of the earth are being depleted, natural resources are being exhausted, the land that is suitable for crops cannot produce enough food for the still growing population, and that massive famines will soon occur. These predictions are not a true reckoning of the limits of the earth, because the future productivity of the economy is not foreordained by space, energy, and cropland. It will be determined by the abilities of human beings. It has been so in the past and there are no compelling reasons why it will not be so in the years to come.
Theodore W. Schultz, Investing in People: The Economics of Population Quality (1981), p. 140.
You’re a nice person, Gentle Reader; I’m glad to communicate with you in a public forum and listen to your responses.
But we both expect limits to this mutual access. If we’re not legitimately suspected of being criminals, we expect to go about our business without strangers intruding upon us at will. We have a right to boundaries.
More and more, though, the borders of the privacy we rely upon are routinely violated by government employees who trawl our lives at random. We often have no idea of the existence or extent of the intrusions until long after the fact.
The latest disturbing practice we’re getting a smidgen of info about is the secretive use by police agencies of so-called “sting ray” devices, which simulate cell towers to track cell phone data and location.
For years, obeying FBI demands for secrecy, prosecutors have been dropping cases rather than report how the devices are deployed. In a Baltimore murder trial, though, Detective Michael Dresser testified that his department has used the device 4,300 times. He assures us that officers await judicial permission . . . unless the circumstances are too urgent.
That’s nice. But without a lot more transparency about how and when the sting ray is deployed, I don’t have much confidence that such scrupulousness is par even in Baltimore, let alone all other locales. It’s hard to give government agencies the benefit of the doubt when the track record is so lousy.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
