The inflexible integrity of the moral code is, to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of history.
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Bataan recaptured, Silver Dollars are back
On Feb. 16, 1878, the Bland-Allison Act, which provided for a return to the minting of silver coins, became U.S. law. Today, the value of American money is secured only by public faith in the stability of the government, but during the 19th Century, money was backed by actual deposits of silver and gold. In 1873, when Congress stopped buying silver and minting silver coins — following the lead of European nations — a financial panic ensued.
Give people money, or services free of charge, and (shock of all shocks) they will do things with them … and even go so far as to change their behavior to keep getting more and more freebies. Click on over to Townhall.com, for this weekend’s dosage of Econ 101 — or would that be Incredulity 101? Come back here for a few links, a few more thoughts.
- Washington Post: “They quit their jobs, thanks to health-care law,” by Sandhya Somashekhar
- Washington Times: “Federal judges backs Obamacare subsidies in win for administration,” by Tom Howell, Jr.
- US News: “How New Health Insurance Subsidies Will Work,” by Philip Moeller
- Cato Institute: “Obamacare Subsidies,” by Michael Cannon
- Cato Institute: “Congress’s Obamacare Waiver,” by Michael Cannon
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Remember the Maine
On Feb. 15, 1898, the USS Maine, a battleship, exploded in the Cuba’s Havana harbor, killing 260 American sailors. An official U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry ruled in March 1898 that the ship was blown up by a mine, without directly blaming Spain. Nonetheless, Congress declared war and, within three months, the U.S. had decisively defeated Spanish forces. On December 12, 1898, the Treaty of Paris was signed between the U.S. and Spain, granting the United States its first overseas empire with the ceding of such former Spanish possessions as Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. In 1976, a team of American naval investigators concluded that the Maine explosion was likely caused by a fire that ignited its ammunition stocks, not by a Spanish mine or act of sabotage.
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Video: Our Pension Problem
Around the country, politicians and government employees have committed future taxpayers to pay for pensions that should have been funded at time of employee service. Things must change. The problem is huge.
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James Mill
Every man should be considered as having a right to the character which he deserves; that is, to be spoken of according to his actions.
Pizza is popular. It hardly needs advertising, much less government subsidy.
And yet the federal government does, indeed, subsidize the promotion of pizza.
Apparently, our government wants us to eat more of the scrumptious (but fattening) stuff.
Has this has been cleared with Michelle Obama?
The program is the business of a much more power group, the USDA. In recent years, according to the U.S. Food Policy Blog,
USDA’s dairy checkoff program has spent many millions of dollars to increase pizza consumption among U.S. children and adults. Using the federal government’s taxation powers, the checkoff program collects a mandatory assessment of 15 cents on every hundredweight of milk that is sold for use as fluid milk or dairy products.
The goal is to promote cheese. (It promotes milk, too, but milk consumption is going down, steadily over the long term.) And, since the pizza industry is the biggest single user of cheese, those checkoff funds wind up in the advertising coffers of Domino’s Pizza, which soaks up about three-quarters of the dough. Ahem.
The federal government seems especially concerned to promote the eating of cheap delivery pizza.
But, good or bad, just talking about pizza makes me hungry for pizza. And yet, to prevent my corporeal presence from ballooning into a behemoth approximating the dimensions of the U.S. national debt, I don’t eat pizza very often.
In view of both of these truths, the USDA could afford to stop promoting the nominally Italian (but actually very American) foodstuff.
Get the government out of food advertising. Particularly (but not limited to) pizza.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
*Pie chart not made from a pizza from Domino’s.
On Feb. 14, 278 A.D., Valentine, a priest in Rome during the reign of Emperor Claudius II, was executed. In order to facilitate the raising of an army for his unpopular military campaigns, the emperor outlawed all marriages and engagements. Valentine defied Claudius’s order and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. Once discovered, Valentine was arrested and condemned by the Prefect of Rome to be beaten to death with clubs and to have his head cut off. The sentence was carried out on February 14. Valentine was named a saint by the Roman Catholic Church after his death.
Feb 14, 1989, at a meeting of the presidents of Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and El Salvador, the Sandinista government of Nicaragua agreed to free a number of political prisoners and hold free elections within a year. In return, Honduras promised to close bases used by anti-Sandinista rebels. Within a year, the Sandinistas were defeated the elections in Nicaragua.
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Frédéric Bastiat
To force men to dig wells by prohibiting them from taking water from the brook is to increase their useless labor, but not their wealth.
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Galileo to Inquisition, Dresden bombed
On Feb. 13, 1633, Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome to face charges of heresy for advocating Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’s theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun. In April, Galileo pled guilty before the Roman Inquisition in exchange for a lighter sentence. Put under house arrest indefinitely by Pope Urban VIII, Galileo spent the rest of his life at his villa in Arcetri, near Florence, before dying in 1642.
On Feb. 13, 1945, the bombing of Dresden by the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force began, lasting for three days. The inner city of Dresden was largely destroyed and early reports estimated 150,000 to 250,000 deaths. The German Dresden Historians’ Commission, in an official 2010 report published after five years of research, but years after the war, concluded there were up to 25,000 civilian casualties.