On March 5, 1616, Nicolaus Copernicus’s book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. This censorship notwithstanding, the Earth continued to revolve around the Sun. The book had been first published in 1543 in Nuremberg.
| In 1770, the Boston Massacre took place on March 5.
| March 5 is magician Penn Jillette’s birthday. He turns 60 today, beginning his 61st year of life.
Wages are a speculation. The laborer who offers his labor to a trader or a contractor, argues thus with him: ‘I deliver to you so much labor. It is true that you run the risks of the enterprise. You are obliged to make advances of capital. You may gain or lose. That does not concern me. I do my work, I make it over to you at a certain price; you pay this to me whatever happens. Whether it redounds to your benefit or causes you loss is not my affair.’
Yves Guyot, The Tyranny of Socialism, Laissez Faire Books, 2015, LFB.org.
Thinning ice sheets have made it hard for the people of Kivalina, a seaside village in Alaska, north of the Arctic Circle. The Iñupiats who live there have lived off the sea, especially bowhead whales, for a mighty long time. And climate change, town officials say, has raised havoc with their traditional occupation.
Worse yet, the federal government suspects that soon Kivalina will become uninhabitable. “The question now facing the town, the state of Alaska, and the nation,” Chris Mooney writes in the Washington Post, “is whether to move the people of Kivalina to a safer location nearby, either inland or further down the coast — and who would pay upwards of a hundred million dollars to do it.”
If you look at the sandbar upon which Kivalina rests, you can see why it might be subject to erosion and the vagaries of the weather.
But does that make it a government concern? Really?
In times past, it wasn’t up to taxpayers to guarantee every outpost of humanity’s continued existence. When a way of life became untenable in a given place, the people moved.
Now, folks tend to look to governments, seeing their “communities” as something others owe them, rather than something they must work to keep.
A bad sign if climate change proves real and massive.
If it takes over a $100 million to move a village with 400 people, what happens when whole cities must be abandoned? I’m sure government will be involved, but if a million Americans must move, we cannot afford to spend the Kivalina ratio: $250 trillion is quite a price tag.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“Industrial progress is due to individuals, not to governments. No state discovered gravitation, and, if humanity had waited for governments to apply steam and electricity to our daily needs, we should have neither railways, telephones, nor telegraphs.”
Yves Guyot Where and Why Public Ownership Has Failed, p. 292
Guyot (September 6, 1843 – February 22, 1928), a French journalist, politician and economist, was an uncompromising free-trader.
On March 4, 1789, the first Congress of the United States met in New York, New York, in accordance with the new Constitution. Two years later on the same date, Vermont was admitted as the fourteenth state of the union.
| In a twist in World War II allegiances, Finland declared war on Nazi Germany on March 4, 1945, beginning the Lapland War.
Worried about its costs, Netflix has asked millions of customers to support so-called “net neutrality” policies to curtail the freedom of action of broadband companies like Comcast. Netflix, a huge suck of bandwidth, doesn’t want to have to make deals with ISPs like Comcast to deliver service to its customers.
One goal of “net neutrality” is to prevent Internet providers from affecting Internet access via such nefarious practices as charging different rates for different levels of service (a ubiquitous form of “discrimination” without which markets cannot function). Mises Institute writer Ryan McMaken wants to know what problem the new regulations are supposed to solve: “Who is being denied access to the web?”
Since the Internet first became generally available, it has become only more widespread, service only faster.
Any problems caused by existing government barriers to entry should be solved by dismantling those barriers. But according to FCC commissioner Ajit Pai, the voluminous new regulations go in the opposite direction, giving the agency “power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how the Internet works.”
The FCC has voted to proceed with the regulations. The result will likely throttle the quality of broadband service.
Netflix and other advocates of the regime have also foot-shootingly increased the chances of intrusive new regulations of their own net-based businesses.
Any sweeping assault on our liberty is hardly “neutral.” Regulations like those proposed always favor some over others, the essence of partiality. What we need from government is not “neutrality” with respect to our freedom, but consistent upholding of our right to it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On March 3, 1991, an amateur videographer captured the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers, thus ushering in the age of citizen surveillance of the state.
“People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids? . . . It’s just not right. It’s not right. It’s not, it’s not going to change anything. We’ll, we’ll get our justice . . . Please, we can get along here; we all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.”
“We hold that what one man cannot morally do, a million men cannot morally do, and government, representing many millions of men, cannot do.”
—ALBERT JAY NOCK
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But they rarely show us much for all the talk.
Paul Woolverton, writing this weekend in the Fayetteville Observer, noted one such lapse after the North Carolina Senate voted to create a law to let magistrates “opt out of conducting any weddings if they have a religious objection.”
The problem? “No one in the debate,” Mr. Woolverton asserts, “questioned the underlying premise that a magistrate or clergy member is necessary to seal the marriage contract.”
The involvement of the state in the marriage contract biz is unnecessarily complicated, he explains. “As fiscal conservatives,” Woolverton insists, they could have taken the opportunity to ask something more fundamental:
A man and a woman pay the government $60 to get a government-approved marriage license. Why should they then have to visit another government office and pay the government another $20, or hire a government-designated third party for a fee or “donation,” to finalize their marriage contract?
Woolverton suggests streamlining the process: “. . . [G]overnment should make its involvement the least intrusive it can be. It should record marriages when couples visit the Register of Deeds to buy their marriage licenses.”
And that’s it.
Betrothed couples can legally testify to meeting any and all state requirements — and officially inform the state of their pre-marriage and married names.
Those who want the services of a priest or rabbi or preacher or imam can hire one, or cajole one. Or two.
That’s just not state business.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.