Categories
Thought

Herbert Spencer

People … become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. Just as money, which is a means of satisfying wants, comes to be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because most conducive to happiness, has come to be thought of as intrinsically preferable: not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be), but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate end.

Categories
media and media people Second Amendment rights

Rapid-Response Counterfire

If somebody tries to polemically gun down your rights, button your flak jacket and shoot back.

It may take years — say, if you’re John Locke answering Robert Filmer.

Sometimes you’ve got only seconds.

You’re on a gab show being watched by millions. Somebody says something unwise, illogical and destructive — but possibly persuasive to a certain percentage of viewers. Unless you reply, instantly, with something wise, logical and constructive, you lose your chance.

If it’s dueling YouTube videos, maybe it takes a couple of days to blast the enemy and win a viewership the size of a small city.

The offending “celluloid” I have in mind is a Bloomberg-funded skit that opens with the caption “Warning: this video depicts scenes of domestic violence.” An armed ex-boyfriend breaks into a woman’s home and threatens to take their kid. The woman calls the police — minutes away when seconds count. The video implies that the way to “stop gun violence against women” is to get rabid-ex-boyfriend-empowering guns off the streets.

Two days later, Liberty PA had posted a parody-rebuttal. This time, the prospective victim flourishes a shotgun to scare off the ex. Opening caption: “Warning: this video depicts scenes of self-defense.” Closing caption: “Stop gun control against women.”

Bull’s-eye.

The video-rebuttal didn’t cost much more to make than the quick wit and time of a few alacritous participants. Within a couple days — credit partly yours, O modern technological infrastructure! — it had garnered 72,000 hits.

On Fox’s Red Eye and elsewhere the inanity of the original propaganda piece was pointed out. But it was the Liberty PA video response that really brought the point home.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Herbert Spencer

The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.

Categories
Thought

Alexis de Tocqueville

No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.

Categories
free trade & free markets

Help Airbnb Win in San Fran

Whenever companies invent radical new ways of making life easier, there’s a good chance someone will kvetch about how hazardous the new way is and/or how rudely inconvenient for those wedded to old ways.

That’s true when it comes to smartphone apps that helps users buy rides outside the usual regulated-taxi context (as I’ve discussed here and here). It’s also true in the case of Airbnb, whose app connects renters and home owners.

Airbnb and other companies are fighting to reform San Francisco’s restrictive housing laws, which have helped inflict one of the most hellish housing markets in the country. The Fair to Share San Francisco website says that the town’s housing laws are “outdated” — which understates the case, since the strictures weren’t valid to begin with. Regulators prohibit San Francisco residents from subletting their residences for fewer than thirty days.

This makes things tough for an app designed to broker short-term rentals.

Airbnb has also been hassled in New York State, where it has been forced to turn over some data about its users to the attorney general as prelude to turning over even more data about users the AG decides may be breaking the law.

It is indeed unfair to outlaw you from peacefully using your own property as you wish. If you live in the San Francisco area, you can help change Fog City’s smoggy housing laws by signing a petition at the Fair to Share site.

Strike a blow for Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Original photo by Dave Alter, “Lombard Street San Francisco,” some rights reserved.

Categories
links

Townhall: Womenomics! Really?

This weekend on Townhall, what Japanese and American experts want to do with Japanese wives: nudge them (force them?) out of the house and into the workforce, farm out their kids to daycare, and pretend that the resulting uptick in GDP stats shows an increase in economic value.

Click on over, then click back here for some more on this topic:

Categories
video

Video: “Why I Love a Country That Once Betrayed Me”

George Takei talks about his childhood experience in a World War II internment camp, and immediately after, and how he squared his experience with the ideals of American democracy:

Categories
Thought

Ludwig von Mises

Government cannot create anything; its orders cannot even evict anything from the world of reality, but they can evict from the world of the permissible. Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Old Rules Gotta Go

Old hat. Long in the tooth. Creaky as an outhouse door.

These are just some of the expressions that apply to how our cities, states and metro areas are run — by ancient principles that do not serve the common good.

Last weekend I wrote about the ongoing revolution in transit, the peer-to-peer online app services offered by Uber, Lyft and the like. These ride-sharing services allow normal folks to give and receive car rides at great convenience.

They blow mass transit “out of the water” and throw taxi service sideways. Super-convenient, they make it cheap and safe for people to co-operate in new and productive ways.

Art Carden, at EconLog, notes the “social waste” that governments add to the system. While the new app-based services provide true solutions to the high transaction costs of negotiating among many people, governments give us squabbles: “the battle over the rules governing the conditions under which people will be allowed to do certain things is pure social waste,” Carden argues. “The social waste is reflected in the resources consumed in the fight over the rules.”

We’ve gotta have rules, of course. But they needn’t require micromanagement, massive restrictions, or high taxes.

The new era will be run (if allowed) on the basis of convenient co-operation, transaction costs reduced by communications technology.

The old era that still rules the roost runs on clunky old ideas that Carden rightly calls “mercantilism,” the political ideology that Adam Smith argued against . . . in 1776.

Government should undergird free markets, not intrude and dominate by licensing near-monopolies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Today

Slavery Ends

On August 1, 1834, Great Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act 1833 took force, freeing slaves throughout the British empire.

Technically, it freed slaves under the age of six. On the August 1 date in 1838 and 1840, the rest of the empire’s slaves were freed, practically speaking.

August 1 births include Francis Scott Key (1779), composer of the poem “The Star-Spangled Banner”; American authors Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (1815) and Herman Melville (1819); and Thomas E. Woods, Jr. (1972), historian and popularizer of Austrian economics.