Categories
Thought

Theodore W. Schultz

“It does not distract from the economic fundamentals set forth by Adam Smith to point out that the wealth of nations would come to be predominantly the acquired abilities of people — their education, experience, skills, and health. No one at Adam Smith’s time could have foreseen that there would be a nation in which four-fifths of the national income would be derived from earnings and only a fifth of it from property. Yet the United States is such a nation. We have learned that advances in knowledge are an important source of wealth and income. We appear, however, to know less about the functions of organization than Adam Smith knew.”

Theodore W. Schultz, Investing in People: The Economics of Population Quality (1981), p. 140

Categories
Accountability Common Sense crime and punishment First Amendment rights

Wisconsin Raids Speak Volumes

Assault on Free Speech in Wisconsin, police abuse, harassment, militarization, democracy, intimidation, collage, photomontage, illustration, editorial, violence

Where’s the outcry among campaign finance “reformers”?

Silence.

In Wisconsin, laws regulating political speech, along with the clamor for stepped-up “enforcement,” have facilitated an awesomely powerful prosecutor to launch dawn SWAT raids, dragging men, women and children out of their beds, stealing their computers and cell phones and ransacking their homes.

For what crime?

Supporting an act passed by the state legislature and signed into law by the governor.

And for having the bravery, or naïveté, to think we live in a free republic where organizing with others to promote ideas about public policy is a noble pursuit.

Not a one-way ticket to Room 101.

Here at Common Sense we’ve been following these dystopian John Doe raids since 2013, when my friend and hero, Eric O’Keefe, refused to be bullied into silence: he violated a gag order to tell the Wall Street Journal and other media about secret investigations tying up 29 conservative groups.

O’Keefe’s courage inspired several suffering the dawn raids to finally speak out. An article by David French in the May issue of National Review tells their stories, which sparked attention last week from Rush Limbaugh and on Fox News’s The Kelly File.

Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm “correctly identified some of the most important communicators of political messages in Wisconsin,” O’Keefe told Meghan Kelly, “and they raided their family homes, with kids at home . . . . They came in the dark.”

“Put aside whether people should have filed different campaign finance reports, is this an appropriate tactic for any kind of campaign finance question?” he asked.

O’Keefe has fought back, suing Chisholm in federal court. Today, we may discover whether the U.S. Supreme Court will hear an appeal in his case and determine whether a federal district court judge’s injunction against Chisholm’s witch-hunt will stand.

We all know what this is really about. Chisholm was retaliating against individuals and groups that supported Governor Scott Walker’s ultimately successful moves to curb Wisconsin’s public employee unions. It’s a grand example of our age’s real class warfare: between insiders with power and outsiders trying to curb that power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Assault on Free Speech in Wisconsin

 

Categories
Thought

Herbert Spencer

Duplicate men are not to be found. There is in each a different balance of desires. Therefore the conditions adapted for the highest enjoyment of one, would not perfectly compass the same end for any other. And consequently the notion of happiness must vary with the disposition and character; that is, must vary indefinitely.

Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: or, The Conditions essential to Happiness specified, and the First of them Developed (London: John Chapman, 1851), Introduction, § 2.

Categories
links

Townhall: The War for/on Democracy

Defending democracy in state after state entails wins here, losses there, and an ongoing struggle. But it’s worth it. For the “democratic means” are about all that is left of what we have to defend the Republic from its corrupters.

Click on over to Townhall, for the latest wrap-up; and come back here, for more information.

Nebraska

Arizona

Arkansas

Oklahoma

South Dakota

Categories
Thought

Immanuel Kant

“No-one can compel me to be happy in accordance with his conception of the welfare of others, for each may seek his happiness in whatever way he sees fit, so long as he does not infringe upon the freedom of others to pursue a similar end which can be reconciled with the freedom of everyone else within a workable general law — i.e. he must accord to others the same right as he enjoys himself.”

Immanuel Kant, Theory and Practice (1791)

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Today

Philosopher of Common Sense

On April 26, 1710, English philosopher of “common sense” Thomas Reid was born. A highly influential figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, and well-known critic of Hume before Kant, his major works were An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, and Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind. Reid died in 1796.

The Scottish “common sense” approach (shared by Adam Ferguson and Dugald Stewart) continued, in varying forms, into the 19th and 20th centuries in the works of William Hamilton, Herbert Spencer, C.S. Peirce, G.E. Moore and George Santayana.

Categories
video

Video: IRS Must Go

Grover Norquist makes a good case:

Categories
Common Sense crime and punishment general freedom individual achievement responsibility

Resist Criminal Attacks

Defend and Evade

Are you ever too old to stop a mugger? Not if your mobility scooter is ready to go.

This conclusion is informed by the example of 92-year-old Eileen Mason, who was with her 75-year-old friend, Margaret Seabrook, when a mugger tried to make off with the contents of a scooter basket.

The two British great-grandmothers were returning from a lunch club in Wiltshire as the thief approached and targeted the older of the two.

When he grabbed Eileen Mason’s arm and reached for the bag, she shouted “Oh no you don’t” — at her maximum volume.

“I put my scooter into accelerate and turned really fast,” she told the UK Telegraph. “The next thing I know he was on the floor. I thought ‘my gosh.’ Something in me just told me to turn so I squeezed the accelerator and turned and he went flying. He was so evil looking.”

If you like this story, don’t miss the ones about the grandma who used a handbag to stop a jewel-store robbery, or the grandma who trapped a burglar in a shed.

Margaret Seabrook says they want their experience to teach people “not [to] leave things on display in their baskets. . . .”

That’s one lesson — don’t make yourself an unnecessarily tempting target. But the other thing is be prepared . . . to defend and evade.

If somebody is gearing up to rob you, be ready to stop him. At least, if you can do so without too much risk to life, limb, or liberty.

Thanks, ladies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Defend and Evade

 

Categories
Thought

Herbert Spencer

Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower. The modifications mankind have undergone, and are still undergoing, result from a law underlying the whole organic creation; and provided the human race continues, and the constitution of things remains the same, those modifications must end in completeness.

Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: or, The Conditions essential to Happiness specified, and the First of them Developed (London: John Chapman, 1851), Chapter 1, § 4.

Categories
folly free trade & free markets nannyism

A New, Freer Sector

Food Folly

Current trends in public policy and law seem to be pointing not to consistent principles, but contradictory ones.

Wyoming just made it legal for farmers to sell directly to local customers, in such venues as farmers’ markets — without government inspection and conformity to the usual, clunky set of regulations that apply when selling to other businesses for resale.

The bill, recently signed into law by the governor, also allows neighbors to sell homemade foods to one another informally and at special community events like bake sales.

An obvious win for freedom. Who can argue against a free market in foodstuffs at the community level, where normal transactions tend to be customary and casual, and also obviously subject to regulation by reputation?

But government regulations still apply maximally to farmers and supermarkets and grocery chains. And yet, many of the arguments for local free markets apply equally to these currently controlled ones. Free competition would likely lead to the re-introduction of reputation economies into big agribiz markets. Could very well be transformative.

For our health.

After all, it’s not as if government has really helped us in this realm. We are right now working our way out of a government-sponsored health and diet paradigm that we are learning was exactly wrong.

The official “anti-fat” hysteria made us fat.

A more competitive approach, allowing for different philosophies to operate — as they can at the community level, with old recipes co-existing with the new-agey ones, as well as with non-pasteurized milk and organic farms and local cheese and everything else — would encourage new ways of meeting old food fears as well as accommodating new food fads.

Extend freedom. (Not waistlines.)

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Food Folly