One who would influence the masses must have recourse to the art of advertisement. The clamour of puffery is to-day requisite even for an intellectual movement.
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Things are what they are, not their opposite. Can we accept that as a starting point?
Not if we’re scoring ideological points regardless of the cost to clarity.
Newsweek calls drug-war violence in Long Island “a harrowing example of free-market, laissez-faire capitalism.” To this, Cato Institute’s David Boaz objects that “the competition between the local Crips and Bloods [is described] in terms not usually seen in articles about, say, Apple and Microsoft or Ford and Toyota.”
Under a truly free market, the rights of buyers and sellers to peaceably trade are legally protected from theft and violence, and their contracts defended from fraud. Black markets, on the other hand, are made up of illegal exchanges, actively prohibited trade.
Sure, black-market trade has something in common with legal trade. As with legal exchanges, persons willingly participate in black-market trades and expect to benefit.
But economic activity that can easily get you jailed is fundamentally different in just this respect from that conducted in a relatively laissez-faire context.
The difference has consequences.
You can’t go to court if you have a grievance with a black-market trading partner or competitor. And persons less scrupulous, more violent, more criminal than the norm tend to be disproportionately represented among sellers of illegal goods that have especially big markups precisely because they’re illegal.
So Boaz is right.
The legal capitalism at K-Mart, J. C. Penny, or a post-Prohibition-Era liquor store isn’t fertile ground for the gang warfare invited by the War on Drugs. We can’t tell the difference, though, if we ignore the difference.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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October 23, women’s rights conference
On October 23, 1850, the first National Women’s Rights Convention began in Worcester, Massachusetts.
On the same October date 106 years later, thousands of Hungarians rose up against Soviet rule.
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The Groundhog Day Ban
Sometimes the only way to make your point is to keep repeating yourself. So it is when explaining why the law requires educational institutions that receive federal funding, like Ward Melville High School, to allow clubs such as the one formed by17-year-old student John Raney in 2013.
Students United in Faith meets to discuss faith and to plan charitable endeavors. Last year, Ward Melville officials sought to ban the club because of its religious character, but retreated after getting a letter from the Liberty Institute (dedicated to “restoring religious liberty in America”).
Near the beginning of this academic year, the school again moved to ban the club. Again, Liberty Institute intervened, threatening a lawsuit. Again, the school backed off.
If it were a private school, say, Atheist High, the school would well be within its rights to say “don’t come here unless you are willing to forgo any religious club.” Those hypothetical school officials wouldn’t be violating anyone’s rights.
But a public school funded by taxpayer dollars? Well, if it provides for extracurricular activities like clubs, it is acting as a part of the government to violate the right of freedom of association when it arbitrarily bans a club.
So what’s next? Either the administrators at Ward Melville High will keep trying the ban until they can get away with it; or, having finally learned their lesson, they’ll leave the group alone.
Thank goodness students and parents have the Liberty Institute in their corner.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Karl Jaspers
Reason is like an open secret that can become known to anyone at any time; it is the quiet space into which everyone can enter through his own thought.
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Oct 22, Sartre
On October 22, 1964, philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but turned down the honor — establishing a precedent that should have been followed by numerous Peace Prize winners, including Barack Obama and the European Union.
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October 21, liberty on a flag
On October 21, 1774, the first display of the word “Liberty” appeared on a flag, raised by colonists in Taunton, Massachusetts, in defiance of British rule in Colonial America.
The purpose of a military — unless invading places for the hell of it — is to wield violence against violent threats to your country. What else are all the tanks and guns for?
The putative threats haven’t normally included . . . the weather.
But that’s been changing.
We probably shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is on board with scare-mongering about catastrophic “climate change,” supposedly wrought by mankind’s industrial contributions of carbon to the atmosphere. But Chuck needs to study harder if he thinks that hurricanes, tornadoes, and other rotten weather — or, for that matter, changes in average global temperature — are anything new on this planet.
He also credulously accepts the most dire predictions about melting glaciers, rising sea levels, islands sinking under the ocean, rising emigration and global unrest, etc. And without a touch of irony avers that we must be “clear-eyed” about “the security threats presented by climate change, and . . . proactive in addressing them.”
How are soldiers supposed to “address” variations in weather except, like all of us, by proactively wearing coats, carrying umbrellas, turning on air conditioning, moving away from eroding shorelines, building arks, etc?
Drop bombs on coal plants?
Not quite.
Secretary Hagel wants defense ministers to start attending UN climate-change conferences, for starters.
In other news, scientists say the rate at which plants are absorbing carbon dioxide (green things love the stuff) has been substantially underestimated in climate models.
Just when you think you’ve got the enemy figured out. . . .
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Jean-Paul Sartre
I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.
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October 20, US territory expansion
On October 20, 1803, the United States Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase. Exactly 15 years later, the Convention of 1818 signed between the United States and the United Kingdom which, among other things, settled the Canada-United States border on the 49th parallel for most of its length.