It is an enormous simplification to speak of the American mind. Every American has his own mind.
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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
- introduced on the tenth of February;
- unanimously approved by the full Senate nine days later;
- leapt out of House committee, on March 10, with a Do Pass recommendation;
- read in full in the House two days later, and
- passed unanimously; whereupon it
- went to the governor, who signed it into law March 19.
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.
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Townhall: Their Right to Your Money
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.
- An Independence Institute report on the attack on TABOR
- The ruling about standing
- The original Common Sense piece upon which the column was based
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Video: Economics of House of Cards
Why do politicians do what they do? Droll considerations of the popular Netflix show:
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NEP, March 21
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.”
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Remembering a Pioneer
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.
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Ludwig von Mises
It is paradoxical indeed that the economic order that forces the most eminent individuals to serve the welfare of the masses of ordinary people is decried as a system in which the common man is “exploited” and “sinks deeper and deeper.” While the average manual worker enjoys in the capitalistic countries amenities of which the well-to-do of ages gone by did not even dream, the most successful and most popular ideology of our age, Marxism, is based upon the doctrine that the laboring masses are being impoverished more and more.
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Ludwig von Mises
The chief characteristic of the capitalistic system is precisely that it leaves for the most eminent individuals only one avenue open to deriving greatest advantage from their intellectual and moral superiority, viz., to minister to the best of their abilities to the well-being of the masses of less endowed fellow men. The captains of industry vie with one another in endeavors to supply the much talked-about common man with ever better and cheaper goods. An enterprise can .grow into bigness only by serving the many. Capitalism is essentially mass production for the satisfaction of the wants of the masses.
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Uncle Tom’s Cabin, March 20
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was published on March 20, 1952. Exactly two years later the Republican Party was organized in Ripon, Wisconsin.
Why is New Jersey Governor Chris Christie against profit?
You expect such an idea from a leftist. The big man is no leftist.
Christie’s anti-profit bias came up within a long, rambling answer to the subject of a recent bill in the New Jersey legislature to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana. He’s against it. But he’s been for “medical” marijuana. Ed Krayewski of Reason quotes the governor, who insists that legal cannabis distribution “be a hospital-based program, that way the profit motive is drained out a lot from it.”
I get his logic. He doesn’t want recreational use, but realizes there are legitimate medical uses. To allow the latter but discourage the former, he wants to monopolize the sale of the drug.
It’s the old “monopoly” idea leveraged to discourage over-use. Post-Prohibition, many states set up liquor control boards and sold liquor in state-owned or state-franchised stores. My state, Virginia, still does. They raised prices on the product, and made it harder to get. More monopoly, higher cost, less product.
But turn the subject on its head.
We want medicine to be cheaper. More accessible and more efficiently delivered.
So why do states limit the setting up of hospitals with hospital boards? Why the prescription system? Why, even, medical licensing? After all, quality controls can be imposed other ways.
Modern medicine has been subjected to monopolistic practices and cartelizing regulations for years. Decades. A century.
Such intervention limits supply and availability, and increases costs.
I suspect that Gov. Christie hasn’t really thought his position all the way through.
(He might be high on government.)
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.