Categories
Today

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.

Categories
Thought

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

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?

Categories
Today

April 18

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.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture media and media people Second Amendment rights

Times Misfires

NYT-NRA

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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NYT-NRA

 

Categories
Thought

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.

Categories
Today

Ronald Hamowy

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.

Categories
folly property rights too much government

Rare Earth Reserve

NIMBY

There are many places on this planet I would hardly dare visit, much less seek to live near.

One of those places is remote Baotou, in Inner Mongolia, a boom region where much of our planet’s rare earth industry is located.

It becomes obvious as you read Tim Maughan’s BBC report on the region, “The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust,” that the reason China now “monopolizes” this industry is that un-democratic, illiberal China does not have a Not-In-My-Back-Yard “problem.”

NIMBY is for freer societies.

The devastation to the landscape, Maughan writes, is astounding in scope and horror. “Dozens of pipes line the shore, churning out a torrent of thick, black, chemical waste from the refineries that surround the lake,” he explains. “The smell of sulfur and the roar of the pipes invades my senses. It feels like hell on Earth.”

But NIMBYnomics aside, Maughan’s parting shot is interesting. “[O]nce we made watches with minerals mined from the Earth and treated them like precious heirlooms; now we use even rarer minerals and we’ll want to update them yearly. Technology companies continually urge us to upgrade; to buy the newest tablet or phone. But I cannot forget that it all begins in a place like Bautou, and a terrible toxic lake that stretches to the horizon.”

I hazard that Apple and its competitors will discover ways around rare earth reliance, in the future — if consumers raise a stink.

It is amazing how responsive free markets can be.

And as for outrageous pollution? Socialist command economies were notorious for their horrifying pollution standards back in the day. Corporatist, one-party (fascist) China carries on that tradition.

The cure for pollution is obvious.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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NIMBY

 

Categories
Thought

Frédéric Bastiat

Nature has provided, by means as simple as they are infallible, that there should be dispersion, diffusion, coordination, simultaneous progress, all constituting a state of things that your restrictive laws paralyze as much as they can; for the tendency of such laws is, by isolating communities, to render the diversity of condition much more marked, to prevent equalization, hinder integration, neutralize countervailing circumstances, and segregate nations, whether in their superiority or in their inferiority of condition.

Frédéric Bastiat, from Economic Sophisms, “To Equalize the Conditions of Production” — the “such laws” mentioned are protectionist measures, and protectionism was the chief target of Bastiat’s famous book.
Categories
general freedom government transparency tax policy

Latest Learned About Lois Lerner

Lois Lerner, IRS, collage, photomontage, puzzle, investigation, illustration, editorial, abuse, law, foundations, harassment,

Is it time to spell out the IRS as the Internal Revenue Scandal?

The IRS has so many scandals under its belt.

But the biggest, from a broad, threat-to-the-republic point of view, surely remains the agency’s targeting of Tea Party and conservative organizations seeking 501c(3) and 501c(4) nonprofit status. Agents ideologically tagged their applications for special obstruction in the run-up to the 2012 presidential campaign. And after.

I don’t bother Googling to get my IRS-scandal updates, I just visit the indefatigable Paul Caron’s TaxProf Blog. Day in, day out, for the past 700+ days and counting, TaxProf has aggregated all the latest reportage and analysis about this abuse of power.

Lois Lerner — former head of the IRS’s stomp-conservative-nonprofit-applicants division — has both declared herself innocent of any wrongdoing and asserted her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself.

But evidence is piling up of her actual attitudes and what-she-knew-when.

TaxProf points to an email by Lerner from way back in February of 2012 in which she advocates training for IRS staffers in the fine art of “understand[ing] the potential pitfalls” of providing too much information to Congress. A 2013 email by Lerner states that she can understand “why the IRS criteria” leading to the targeting of Tea Party and other groups “might raise some questions.”

The documents are out in the wild now, thanks to Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act requests. JW has been relentless in trying to hold the IRS accountable.

Which has to be one of the very toughest jobs on earth.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Lois Lerner