A conversation with the candidate for governor of Florida who doesn’t sport an R or a D after his name:
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Should Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) create a wolf-hunting season? That question will be on the statewide ballot this November.
Twice.
Twice? Yes, voters will decide two separate referendums: Proposal 1 and Proposal 2. And yet, voters may not actually determine with either vote whether there will be a wolf hunt.
What’s going on has less to do with killing wolves than it does with politicians butchering democratic checks to their power.
Until 2012, wolves were a federally protected endangered species. Now some say the estimated 650 wolves in Michigan have become a nuisance.
It has long been legal to shoot wolves threatening livestock or people, so that’s not at issue.
What is at issue? Last year’s legislation, which gave the DNR power to establish a wolf-hunting season. Animal protection activists objected, gathering more than 250,000 signatures to put the law to a statewide vote.
Okay, let the people decide, right?
Wrong. Legislators intent on not permitting citizen control passed a brand new law to have it their way — the people be damned. So tenacious citizens signed more petitions to put this second statute to a referendum.
Hence the two referendums on the ballot.
Legislators still weren’t finished, though. They passed a third bill, this time slapping an unrelated appropriation in it, thus blocking a referendum. That law faces a legal challenge.
This seems a choice between the government regulating wildlife matters with or without any popular check on that power. By voting NO on both Proposals 1 and 2, Michiganders can tell the wannabe dictators in Lansing that their democracy-hunting season is over.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Karl Jaspers
Man is always something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process…
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Karl Jaspers
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.
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.