It is one of the unhappy incidents of the federal system that a self-righteous Supreme Court, acting on its Members’ personal view of what would make a “more perfect Union” (a criterion only slightly more restrictive than a “more perfect world”) can impose its own favored social and economic dispositions nationwide.
He who rejects liberty has no faith in human nature.
March 10, 1762: Jean Calas, a Huguenot, died after torture, after having been wrongly convicted of killing his son; the event inspired Voltaire to begin a campaign for religious tolerance and legal reform.
Newly elected New York Mayor Bill de Blasio made waves, recently. He nixed the establishment of two new charter schools and halted the expansion of another.
Widespread protest followed, with over ten thousand people showing up to express their frustration and ire. The charter chain under de Blasio attack, Success Academy, has been very successful increasing student test scores, and can boast a waiting list of five applicants for every school opening.
So why would the mayor be against them? What would make him so against this non-radical form of education reform?
Well, de Blasio received the overwhelming support of teachers’ unions during his campaign for office. Teachers’ unions are no fans of charter schools, which gain some of their advantages by not being hampered by union contracts.
Sure, the mayor’s heavy-handed slap at charter schools may simply be a political payoff to the teachers’ unions, but couldn’t there be something more to it?
Last May he directed his metaphorical guns at the head of the Success Academy, former New York councilwoman Eva Mosokowitz. “It’s time for Eva Moskowitz to stop having the run of the place,” he promised the United Federation of Teachers at a mayoral candidates forum. “She has to stop being tolerated, enabled, supported.”
Knee-capping the less politically muscular charter school folks to please the immensely powerful public education unions is indeed classic patronage politics. But maybe de Blasio’s personal animus also shows his true colors, his commitment to undercut any successful competition to the governmental way of doing things.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The most ludicrous suggestion of last week deserves a column this week (yes, it’s based on a segment of ABC’s “This Week”). Click on over to Townhall. Then click back here, for more fuel to your incredulity and ire.
On March 9, 1954, the CBS show “See It Now” reviewed Wisconsin Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy’s anti-Communism campaign.
The innovation of e-cigarettes seems a major advance. Instead of smoking tobacco, complete with its carcinogenic tars clogging up lungs, one inhales water vapor imbued with a liquid containing a concentration of nicotine. And so of course there’s a political movement to ban the things, or at least heavily regulate them. The specified reason for most of these regulations or prohibitions is that “vaping” looks like smoking.
But it isn’t smoking. It’s much, much safer. So, argues Greg Gutfeld, the practice of vaping will save lives:
Not mentioned in this discussion (on Fox News’s evening talk show The Five) is the possible puritanism behind the move. The five Democratic politicians who are moving against the technology recognize, I am sure, that e-cigs are nicotine-delivery systems. To be against nicotine is to be against “addiction.” And, on this very simplistic view, for “health.”
But as mentioned by more than one of Fox’s talking heads, it’s hard to support free needle distribution on the one hand, and prohibit or “crack down” on e-cigs, on the other.
Strange world.
On March 8, 1775, an anonymous writer published “African Slavery in America”, the first article in the American colonies calling for the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery. Some people think that Tom Paine was the author.
Other March 8 events:
In 1908, Jennings Randolph was born. Randolph was best known for sponsoring eleven times an amendment to the Constitution that would grant citizens aged between 18 and 21 the right to vote.
In 1917, seeking to limit the ability to maneuver with the filibuster, the Senate voted to establish the cloture rule.
In 1983, U.S. President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” He thus scored points for telling the obvious truth.
It began when a science experiment at a Minnesota high school set off a fire alarm. One of the students, Kayona Tietz, was swimming at the time. Her clothes were in her locker.
Because the alarm was unplanned, a teacher ushered Kayona outside without letting her retrieve her clothes. All she had between her wet swimsuit and the five-below-zero weather was a towel.
Once outside, to be protected ASAP from the cold the 14-year-old could simply have sat in one of the faculty-owned cars. Everyone knew this. Nevertheless, ten minutes passed before she was allowed to do so, by which time she was suffering frostbite. A teacher felt it necessary to first acquire permission from school administrators for an exception to rules obviously inapplicable to the circumstances. Eventually, also, a teacher lent Kayona a jacket . . . but not immediately.
What happened immediately is that her classmates huddled around to keep her as warm as they could. Apparently they lacked the training to blindly follow rules intended to protect students as morally superior to, well, actually protecting their classmate.
A girl got frostbitten because school personnel were complicit in a bizarre and dramatic loss of common sense. One needn’t “review procedures” to prevent such things. One need only use common sense (and be free to use it!) The inane regulations may have originated in some bureaucrat’s cubicle. But those on the spot were responsible for their own judgment.
Or lack of it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The true and equitable law of humanity is the free exchange of service for service. Spoliation consists in destroying by force or by trickery the freedom of exchange, in order to receive a service without rendering one.