What characterizes capitalism is not the bad taste of the crowds, but the fact that these crowds, made prosperous by capitalism, became consumers of literature — of course, of trashy literature. The book market is flooded by a downpour of trivial fiction for the semibarbarians. But this does not prevent great authors from creating imperishable works.
On March 25, 1774, the British Parliament passed the Boston Port Act, closing the port of Boston and demanding that the city’s residents pay for the tea dumped into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773. The cost of the tea was equivalent to $1 million in today’s currency. The Boston Port Act was the first and easiest to enforce of four acts that together were known as the Coercive Acts. The other three were a new Quartering Act, the Administration of Justice Act and the Massachusetts Government Act.
On March 25, 1955, U.S. Customs seized 520 copies of Allen Ginsberg’s book Howl, which had been printed in England. Officials alleged that the book was obscene. The poem created an earthquake in the literary world and still stands as an icon of the ’50s and ’60s counter-culture.
On March 25, 1967, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., led a march of 5,000 antiwar demonstrators in Chicago. In an address to the demonstrators, King declared that the Vietnam War was “a blasphemy against all that America stands for.”
The New York Times says something is missing from comments by President Obama on how government has funded scientific research. What is it? The fact that the research can be, has been, and increasingly is funded privately.
Sometimes private efforts have immediate application, as is often true in the firms of electronics, pharmaceutical and other innovative industries.
But scientific research is also funded by wealthy individuals — James Simons, David Koch, Bill Gates, and Eric Schmidt come to mind immediately — without prospect of immediate financial payoff. Such wealthy men have financed investigations of disease, “hunts for dinosaur bones and giant sea creatures,” and “innovative ships, undersea craft and giant telescopes — as well as the first private mission to deep space.”
Good thing or bad thing, these privately inquiring minds?
In light of the billions too often splurged on wasteful or bad (but politically faddish) research programs, all without the assent of the source of those billions — us taxpayers — I see private inquiry into Nature and Nature’s laws as only a good thing.
We needn’t agree about the value of any particular private project. Maybe if you and I were funding research, we’d have different priorities from Bloomberg, Gates or whomever. But when they waste their money, it’s their money being wasted, not ours. And if the research we prefer is important enough to us, what’s to stop us from raising funds from like-minded others to enable the inquiries we want scientists to pursue?
In a free society, nothing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
American Federalist politician, diplomat, and Constitutional delegate Rufus King was born on March 24, 1755.
American economist Robert Heilbroner was born on this date in 1919. Heilbroner was a career-long socialist who, after the fall of the Soviet Union, admitted that “Mises was right” about the unworkability of socialism.
Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was also born on the same day as Heilbroner.
It is an enormous simplification to speak of the American mind. Every American has his own mind.
The legislative history of Idaho’s Senate Bill 1332 can be briskly told; its enactment was swift indeed. The Federal Firearm, Magazine and Register Ban Enforcement Act was
Because of an emergency clause, SB-1332 went into full effect on that date.
The new law instructs Idaho’s public servants not to co-operate with the federal government on any future gun and ammo registration, prohibition or regulation passed by the U.S. Congress. It also provides a civil penalty of a maximum $1000 fine for each instance of co-operation.
It’s part of the low-key rebellion that many state legislatures and governors are waging against the federal government. Claiming something like a right to nullify unconstitutional laws — a right enumerated, after all, as the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution — at issue is the usurpation of state prerogatives by the feds.
We’ve seen a number of states resist the federal government’s attempt to “organize” a grand (and catastrophic) public-private alliance known as Obamacare.
The current Idaho effort doesn’t strike me as pure nullification, however. It relies on a proven principle of federalism: the states may not be commandeered to enforce federal law. Specifically, any future federal law attacking our essential Second Amendment rights.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Over at Townhall this weekend, the enormity of the Colorado insiders’ lawsuit against the voters who put them in office receives expanded treatment. Click on over, then back here. Comment. Share. Shout.
Why do politicians do what they do? Droll considerations of the popular Netflix show:
On March 21, 1921, the Soviet Union’s Bolshevik Party implemented the New Economic Policy (NEP) in response to the economic failure of War Communism.
Economist Ludwig von Mises and many other observers would go on to note that this slight liberalization of socialist policy — the re-introduction of money, for example — was a frank admission of the inability of bureaucrats and politicians to run an industrial economy from a central board. That is, in a socialist commonwealth, it is impossible to calculate and plan for the needs of society.
Vladimir Lenin called the NEP “state capitalism.”
Who was the first woman to receive an Electoral College vote?
Not the one you are probably thinking of — Geraldine Anne Ferraro (1935-2011).
The answer is: Theodora Nathan, listed on the ballots of Colorado and Washington State in 1972 as Tonie Nathan. She ran as the first Vice Presidential candidate for the fledgling Libertarian Party. She didn’t receive many votes — the party had barely been formed. But she got that one Electoral College vote because a Virginia state elector, Roger MacBride, was so disgusted by President Nixon and his wage and price controls (everybody has a tipping point) that he went renegade.
I bring this up because of sad news: Tonie Nathan died yesterday, age 91.
I knew her, having served with her on the Libertarian National Committee back in the 1980s. (See a recent picture of her, with former party chair Alicia Clark and me, at the 2012 Libertarian National Convention.) Tonie was a dynamo: sharp, kind, hard-working, organized, a people person committed to making a difference.
Her run to unseat Senator Bob Packwood (R-Oregon) in 1980 was memorable for the three televised debates with her major party opponents. In the first of them, all the major papers dubbed her the winner, one of which headlined her as having “skewered” her opponents.
Odd fact: She received eleven times more votes in her senatorial race than in her “nationwide” campaign.
I’ve noticed fewer debates with Libertarian candidates in them, since. I think it might be the result of fear of a Nathanesque “skewering.”
Her place in history should be more widely acknowledged.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.