It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.
Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920).
The standard case for government-run industry runs like this: some goods, by their very nature, are best provided by government . . . to ensure high quality and low cost.
City sewers, firefighting, roads and education are traditionally explained as requiring government operation, organization, and tax funding.
The trouble is, it’s no longer plausible, really, to say that one of the most expensive and omnipresent of these industries, “public education” (government schooling) guarantees much of anything.
Certainly we aren’t getting quality at low cost.
But a few folks do get wealthy.
I wrote about Barbara Byrd-Bennett a few weeks ago. She’s the Chicago public school administrator who had to resign her CEO-ship because of the overwhelming evidence against her scamming Chicago’s schools . . . for over $2 million in kickbacks.
And now, it turns out, she has a prehistory — in the Motor City. “Federal investigators were looking at Barbara Byrd-Bennett’s role in a $40 million textbook contract that was awarded while she worked in Detroit,” explains the Chicago Sun-Times, “long before she became Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s schools chief. . . .”
Republican, democratic government relies upon an alert press and citizenry to catch folks like Byrd-Bennett. Why? Because government, by its nature, is most efficient in delivering wealth from many into the hands of the few. Having it serve the many is difficult, and requires eternal vigilance.
Which is one reason why we need limited government: the more extensive government’s scope, the harder to keep track of all the frauds and exploitative con jobs.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“I hate victims who respect their executioners.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Séquestrés d’Altona: A Play in Five Acts, 1960
The experiment in legalized marijuana begun by citizens in the states of Washington and Colorado has, from the beginning, faced a huge obstacle: marijuana is still illegal, federally. State nullification of federal law is not merely “problematic,” it’s hard to “get away with.”
Take Colorado’s experience. The Centennial State, which has made the swiftest and most extensive progress regarding marijuana retail sales, has come up to an inevitable problem with the federal government.
Over banking.
Interesting Reason reporting tells us that “Marijuana-related businesses in Colorado are so profitable that the government doesn’t know what to do with all of the tax revenue they’re generating. But business owners face a more immediate problem: Where to stash their own profits when banks won’t take it.”
Congress has been very active making banking less and less private and less and less free for decades now, in part because of the War on Drugs. Existing banks refused to take new cannabis clients.
So a new credit union was formed, to handle the cash.
And now, NBC News tells us, our central bank, the Federal Reserve (dubbed by NBC “the guardian of the U.S. banking system”), said “that it doesn’t intend to accept a penny connected to the sale of pot because the drug remains illegal under federal law.” Which makes modern banking difficult, even for a credit union, apparently.
What are “weed” businesses to do . . . other than what they are doing, hiring security guards for all the cash?
Maybe Bitcoin will step in. Or old gold-warehouse banking, as was not unheard of even in the 19th century.
Or, maybe, the federal government will cease its over-reach?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Just tell the truth, and they’ll accuse you of writing black humor.
Charles Willeford, personal motto, quoted in Marshall Jon Fisher, “The Unlikely Father of Miami Crime Fiction,” The Atlantic Monthly, May 2000.
In the words of Yogi Berra, the recently deceased baseball great: “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
We’ve followed the incredible case of Dr. Annette Bosworth extensively this year. She was convicted of twelve felony counts of petition fraud for circulating petitions that were signed at her medical office by patients (and her sister), while the doctor was in the Philippines on a medical mercy mission.
I don’t defend Dr. Bosworth signing that affidavit, stating that she witnessed those signatures, but I also don’t see criminal intent. Her attorney advised her it was lawful and all the signers were legitimate voters who truly wanted her to run for the U.S. Senate. Talking about felony fraud in such a case seriously misses the forest for the trees.
Bosworth wasn’t sentenced to prison time, thankfully.
But she lost her medical license.
Let’s hold people accountable, but not with an over-the-top vengeance likely to scare the average citizen away from political participation altogether. That’s been my message to South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley.
What about déjà vu?
Today, in a Pierre courtroom, Annette’s husband, Chad Haber, will be arraigned on felony charges for signing as the circulator on a petition with two signatures affixed when he was with his wife on that medical trip.
AG Jackley loudly proclaims that this is not his indictment; it was filed by a county prosecutor. But anyone who didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday knows how these things tend to work.
Haber challenged Jackley last election and the feud is well known and long-running. Being a prosecutor requires judgment, something Jackley lacks . . . as he will no doubt prove in court.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“This is the contradiction of racism, colonialism, and all forms of tyranny: in order to treat a man like a dog, one must first recognize him as a man.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 1960
War without any declaration — or even a legal authorization of force from Congress — is the modern way, Constitution be . . . ignored. Both Obama and Congress fudge it. The better never to confront reality.
Click on over to Townhall.com. Then come back here for this weekend’s draught of common sense:
On October 25, 1806, the German philosopher known as Max Stirner was born — as Johann Kaspar Schmidt. Stirner developed a radical individualism, which under the name of “egoism” became culturally chic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with proponents as different as composer Richard Strauss and journalist Benjamin R. Tucker. In addition to Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, a major work that was famously attacked by Karl Marx at great and hysterical length, he translated Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Jean-Baptiste Say’s Traite d’Economie Politique into German.
Stirner died in 1856. His best-known representation, the caricature above, was sketched by his opponent among the Young Hegelians, Friedrich Engels. His most famous book, usually translated as The Ego and Its Own, became, in the words of art critic Herbert Read, “stuck in the gizzard” of Western culture.
This report came two days before an American soldier was killed in combat in Iraq.
https://youtu.be/1p7khnhzdrc