On April 20, 1657, freedom of religion was granted to the Jews of New Amsterdam (later New York City).
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New Amsterdam Jews
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Tom Clancy
“What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.”
Tom Clancy, as quoted by John Whitehead
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Townhall: Surreal Silver Spring Again
The story that won’t go away, because the government just won’t let up. Click on over to Townhall.com, for today’s sad iteration of government overreach. Then click back here for a little more perspective:
- Washington Post: ‘Free-range’ family again at center of debate after police pick up children
- Common Sense with Paul Jacob: Well-Substantiated Insanity
- Townhall: “Trickle-down Tyranny,” by Paul Jacob
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Facebook: I Stand with the Meitivs against CPS
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ABC News: 911 Call of Man Reporting Children
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Washington Post: “Parents rally around ‘free-range family’ with petitions, protest plans”
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The Revolution Begins
On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began when the “shot heard around the world” was fired between the 700 British troops on a mission to capture Patriot leaders Sam Adams and John Hancock and to seize a Patriot arsenal and the 77 armed minutemen under Captain John Parker waiting for them on the Lexington town green. The Battle of Lexington ended with eight Americans killed and ten wounded, along with one wounded British soldier.
In Concord, a couple of hours later, British troops were encircled by hundreds of armed Patriots. The British commander ordered his men to return to Boston without directly engaging the Americans, but on the 16-mile journey they were constantly attacked by Patriot marksmen firing at them Indian-style from behind trees, rocks, and stone walls. By the time the British reached the safety of Boston, nearly 300 soldiers had been killed, wounded, or were missing in action. The Patriots suffered fewer than 100 casualties. (See Liberty’s Kids for a video on these events, or the video featured on this page.)
On April 19, 1782, John Adams secured the Dutch Republic’s recognition of the United States as an independent government.
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Tom Clancy
“Nothing is as real as a dream. The world can change around you, but your dream will not. Your life may change, but your dream doesn’t have to. Responsibilities need not erase it. Duties need not obscure it. Your spouse and children need not get in its way, because the dream is within you. No one can take your dream away.”
Tom Clancy, commencement address, Loyola University 1986 graduation
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Video: Executing Innocents
The horror of an evil crime prompts us to demand the death penalty. But the horror of executing — killing — innocent people should make us worry about that same death penalty, no?
On April 18, 1689, Bostonians rebelled against the government of Sir Edmund Andros.
On this day in April, in 2007, the Supreme Court of the United States, split 5-4, upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.
April 18 marks the 1772 birthday of David Ricardo, English political economist and one of the most influential thinkers in economic theory.
Time to revise the Times’s motto? Should “all the news that’s fit to print” read “misprint” instead?
Maybe, after the New York Times’s latest editorial snafu, charging the NRA with hypocrisy for banning arms-bearing at its April convention.
According to the editorial, “none of” the attendees were allowed to “come armed with guns that can actually shoot. After all the N.R.A. propaganda about how ‘good guys with guns’ are needed to be on guard across American life . . . the weekend’s gathering of disarmed conventioneers seems the ultimate in hypocrisy. . . . So far, there has been none of the familiar complaint about infringing supposedly sacrosanct Second Amendment. . . .”
But after first hitting print, the text has changed. It was too quickly and conspicuously confirmed that “anyone with a permit valid in Tennessee can ‘come armed [to the convention] with guns that actually shoot,” that “the NRA had no problem with gun owners with the proper gun permits bringing their weapons inside.”
So the Times editorial was edited after initial publication, nixing the reference to “the ultimate in hypocrisy.” The revised online editorial now merely professes dismay that guns won’t be allowed in one of the convention venues . . . but doesn’t mention that this is because of the policy of that particular venue, not the NRA’s.
The editorial still complains that nobody is complaining about alleged Second Amendment infringement no longer attributable to the NRA. Whose alleged hypocrisy was the Times’s original point.
It’s like somebody’s shooting at random and just hoping to hit something.
This is Common Sense. (I mean this, not the Times editorial, is Common Sense.) I’m Paul Jacob.
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Frédéric Bastiat
“I wonder how we could have ever thought of doing anything so fantastic as to pay many millions of francs for the purpose of removing the natural obstacles that stand between France and other countries, and at the same time pay many other millions for the purpose of substituting artificial obstacles that have exactly the same effect; so that the obstacle created and the obstacle removed neutralize each other and leave things quite ‘as they were before, the only difference being the double expense of the whole operation.’”
Frédéric Bastiat, from Economic Sophisms, a book against the artificial obstacles created by the protective tariff.
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Ronald Hamowy
April 17 marks the 1937 birth of Ronald Hamowy, Canadian historian, who first came to international prominence for his writings in the short-lived New Individualist Review. Hamowy died in 2012.