On November 2, 1772, Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren formed the first Committee of Correspondence.
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Townhall: Some Courage Required
Click on over to Townhall for what the next Congress — the country’s 114th — really needs. Hint: it isn’t cowardice.
Then come back here for more reading.
- Breitbart: True The Vote’s Lawsuit Against IRS Gets Tossed By Federal Judge
- NYTimes: Law Lets I.R.S. Seize Accounts on Suspicion, No Crime Required
- NYTimes: Statement of Richard Weber, the IRS chief of Criminal Investigation
- Real Clear Politics: “Special Report” Panel Reacts To New IRS Scandal Ruling
- WSJ: “Connecting the Dots in the IRS Scandal” by Bradley A. Smith
- Common Sense: Protecting the Guilty at IRS
- Common Sense: Learning Lerner’s M.O.
- Common Sense: The Dog-Ate List
- Townhall: New Emails Show Lerner in Contact With DOJ About Prosecuting Tax Exempt Groups
- USA Today: ‘Fake’ IRS scandal spawns real coverup
And hey: buck up. Courage isn’t just required for Congress.
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Video: A Wooden Horse in Arkansas
The most dishonest ballot measure in America is one from my former home state of Arkansas. Watch this short video featuring Bob Porto, co-chair of Arkansas Term Limits, explaining why this 22-page-long amendment to the state constitution is a “Trojan Horse.” His group has been touring the state with a rather large symbolic horse to dramatize the danger of Issue 3.
http://youtu.be/KcoN9rA8t44
The mobile horse symbol was donated to Arkansas Term Limits by Liberty Initiative Fund. I warn about Issue 3 in more detail here.
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November 1, Burke’s Reflections
On November 1, 1790, Edmund Burke published his “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” predicting that the French Revolution would end in disaster. Though many have disputed his premises, few dispute his prophecy, which proved spot on.
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Halloween OCT 31
Ireland, Canada, United Kingdom, United States and other nations celebrate Halloween on October 31. The word Halloween or Hallowe’en dates to about 1745 and is of Christian origin, meaning “hallowed evening” or “holy evening.” It comes from a Scottish term for All Hallows’ Eve (the evening before All Hallows’ Day). In Scots, the word “eve” is “even,” and this is contracted to “e’en” or “een.” Over time, (All) Hallow(s) E(v)en evolved into Halloween.
It is one of those darker-themed celebrations, often conjuring up images of death and horror. As if in keeping with this theme, Stalin’s body was removed from Lenin’s Tomb on October 31, 1961.
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The Creeping Horror
Which came first, the dead chicken or the rotten egg?
A bit gruesome. Sure. But it’s Halloween, no? Trick or Treat time.
Anyway, the subject for today’s exploration into contemporary horror is the modern city, so expensive it frightens middle-income earners away.
But wait. It’s not all cities. Only some are horror shows.
Particularly, I’m referring to those in “blue” states, the ones run by “liberal” Democrats.
It’s been pretty obvious for some time — especially as we witness hordes of everyday folks moving to parts South, particularly to Texas’s sprawling cities. But if you needed some statistics and graphs and the like, Derek Thompson provides them over at The Atlantic. His title addresses his basic question: “Why Middle-Class Americans Can’t Afford to Live in Liberal Cities.” Citing economist Jed Kolko, he notes the most astounding thing about housing in modern cities: “Liberal cities seem to have the worst affordability crises.”
Or, as Kolko puts it, “[e]ven after adjusting for differences of income, liberal markets tend to have higher income inequality and worse affordability.”
Why? Thompson contemplates the chicken-and-eggness of it all. Do liberal progressives congregate in coastal cities with limited land availability, and just happen to find themselves crunching out home growth, thus raising prices and reducing affordability? Or do they cause it?
Considering the nature of their favored policies, they almost certainly (if inadvertently) cause it.
Big government inevitably yields big bad effects. Support big government? Expect more inequality, not less. Then demand more government to “solve” the problem. Which causes yet more bad effects.
This trick-and-treat trap should horrify big government advocates.
It certainly horrifies me.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Grover Cleveland
What is the use of being elected or re-elected unless you stand for something?
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October 30, Sol Tax
On October 30, 1907, Sol Tax was born. Tax, an important anthropologist at the University of Chicago, organized a four-day conference on military conscription, which was the start of an intellectual movement that led to the end of the draft less than seven years later. Tax’s most famous work was probably his study of a Guatemalen Indian economy, “Penny Capitalism.”
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We Need iPads
Every once in a while somebody explains that “we” don’t need this or that product, however great it may be and however great the demand for it. For example, a tech reviewer dubs Apple’s latest iPad models “largely unnecessary,” given last-year models almost as capable.
The charge of unnecessariness is surely false when we’re talking about customers who do want the most cutting-edge technology and can put it to good use. But it’s false in a broader perspective too — unless we suppose that all advances in human civilization beyond the level of the hut and the bearskin are “largely unnecessary” to human survival and well-being.
If technological progress is necessary, so are key aspects of how that progress happens, including the fact that it so often happens by “largely unnecessary” increments. Any given marginal advance in computer or PC tech may have been dispensable. But the same can’t be said of the process of cumulative improvement as a whole. Consider, for example, that some ninety percent of what we now do on our PCs would have been impossible to do with the 1980 PC. Our 2014 laptops could not have been crafted without myriad intermediate advances.
As striving human beings, our needs evolve as our means improve and enable us to pursue ends that we could not have pursued with less powerful means. Ergo, I welcome every little improvement we can get. And I can hardly wait for my 2025 iPad.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Grover Cleveland
When more of the people’s sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and expenses of its economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of free government.
President Stephen Grover Cleveland, Second Annual Message (December 1886).