Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end.
Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Part Two: “Metaphysics of Virtue.”
Arbitrary governmental pricing of water — as opposed to free-market pricing — provides one major reason why it’s so hard for Californians and others to deal with drought.
I’ve talked about it before. And, as before — indeed, as is so often the case when government constricts our freedom to “solve” problems — the do-badders are pursuing more than one line of attack.
Under-pricing plus edicts about how we may use water are bad enough, sure. But that kind of central planning is just one method of making it harder to quench thirst and water lawns and crops. Another method? Diverting massive amounts of water from the service of human needs in order to “help” a few expendable fish.
In his Reason article “California Drought a Shortage of Water or Common Sense?,” Steven Greenhut laments fishy schemes to lower reservoir levels and drain a lake near the Sierra foothills “to help coax a handful of steelhead trout to swim to the ocean.” Handful? Maybe not quite. Nine fish. A mere nine.
The Lake Tulloch Alliance estimated that up to $2 million in water value would have to be expended to save each individual fish.
Thanks to coverage like Greenhut’s and Stephen Moore’s, and the resultant public outcry — plus the eventual resistance of local water district officials to the environmental demands of state and federal agencies — this particular attempt by radical environmentalists to elevate fish life above human life has been deflected. At least for now.
But there are more battles to come.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“There’s two kinds of people in the world, the ones who need to be told and the ones who figure it out all by themselves.”
Tom Clancy, Without Remorse (1993), p. 231
I mean Nebraska’s civil war, a 23-year schism between its unicameral legislature and what’s known as the state’s “second house” — that is, the people, acting through the initiative and referendum process, often checking the power of the first house.
Hero of the day? State Senator Mike Groene of North Platte, who championed Legislative Bill 367. Kudos also to the 42-0 vote of the Nebraska Legislature that enacted the measure, as well as to Governor Pete Ricketts for signing it into law.
Groene, who has been politically active for years with the Western Nebraska Taxpayers Association, got into office as a result of term limits. His LB 367 reverses the state’s seven-year ban on paying petition circulators according to the number of signatures they gather. He convincingly argued that the ban had “really broken the back of people trying to take part in their government through the petition process.”
“It’s time for this body to call a truce,” Groene told fellow lawmakers, declaring that since term limits were first passed, citizens and their representatives had been locked in a “civil war.”
During that war, State Sen. Diane Schimek, a 20-year legislator about to be term-limited, successfully pushed legislation to restrict citizen petitions. Part of her measure was struck down as unconstitutional in Citizens in Charge v. Gale. Now the rest has been unanimously repealed by the state legislature.
Sen. Paul Schumacher of Columbus favored Groene’s bill, saying that legislators could use a more viable initiative check on their power. The unicameral’s attacks on citizen petitions were, he said, “reflective of a government that was afraid of its people.”
Now it’s peacetime in Nebraska.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals was first published in Il Mondo, then by most Italian newspapers on April 21, 1925 — the national, anniversary-day celebration of the Founding of Rome (ca. April 21, 753 BC). Nowadays, all sorts of people call other people “fascist,” often on the shakiest of rationales. It might be a good idea to look up this original document, for a good idea what politics’ “f-word” really means. Here is an excerpt:
Fascism was . . . a political and moral movement at its origins. It understood and championed politics as a training ground for self-denial and self-sacrifice in the name of an idea, one which would provide the individual with his reason for being, his freedom, and all his rights. The idea in question is that of the fatherland. It is an ideal that is a continuous and inexhaustible process of historical actualization. It represents a distinct and singular embodiment of a civilization’s traditions which, far from withering as a dead memory of the past, assumes the form of a personality focussed on the end towards which it strives. The fatherland is, thus, a mission.
“The difference between me and you is that I do good fiction.”
Bestselling author Tom Clancy, to news reporters at the National Press Club (May 18, 1999)
No reason anymore to even feign surprise at today’s police state insanities.
At Townhall yesterday, I bemoaned the six-hour kidnapping of a 10-year-old Maryland boy and his 6-year-old sister for the terrible crime of peacefully walking home from a public park. The children were grabbed just a couple blocks from their home . . .
. . . by police, who held them for over two hours before handing them to Montgomery County Child Protective Services.
It was hours before anyone contacted the panicked parents.
There’s no law prohibiting kids from walking down a public street, but bureaucrats are threatening this poor family over just that.
So, I guess we shouldn’t be shocked that when an 11-year-old boy disagrees with what he’s being taught in school about marijuana, and explains that his mother has used cannabis oil to treat her Crohn’s disease and his mother is not a criminal, (a) he’s going to be detained and grilled by authorities and (b) his mother may soon become a criminal.
A raid on Shonda Banda’s home indeed turned up two ounces of cannabis oil. Ms. Banda could be facing felony drug charges in Kansas, where she now lives, but she used to live in Colorado, where her use of cannabis oil would be legal.
The Washington Post’s Radley Balko identifies the absurdity: “a woman could lose her custody of her child for therapeutically using a drug that’s legal for recreational use an hour to the west.”
Today she has a custody hearing over her son.
The state “protection” being afforded the children in both of these cases isn’t protecting them. It’s terrorizing them.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On April 20, 1657, freedom of religion was granted to the Jews of New Amsterdam (later New York City).
“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
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: