On December 1, 1824, with neither John Quincy Adams nor Andrew Jackson (pictured) receiving a majority of the total electoral college votes in the election, the United States House of Representatives was given the task of deciding the winner in accordance with the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The House selected Adams.
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
Today’s moral scolds and Mrs. Grundys aren’t old-fashioned, they say, or conservative, they say. 
They call themselves liberals or progressives and they think they know what’s best for you, your family, and the nation. This weekend’s Townhall column expands on Thursday’s Common Sense.
Here are the links to this week’s column:
Every week we archive Paul Jacob’s weekend Townhall column here on this site. Last week’s was “Who Is Eric O’Keefe?” If you missed it, please give it a look. It’s an important story.
Mike Rowe of the Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs” show here talks to the designers and engineers and tech mavens of TED on the reality of work. Not the fantasy. Not the politics. The reality. Fascinating:
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
Are persons necessarily racist if (a) white and (b) opposed to expansion of the welfare state — that is, merely for opposing such expansion?
In the New York Times, journalism professor Thomas Edsall, echoing a now-familiar charge, implies as though it were self-evident that many who oppose Obamacare-ized medicine do so because of the race(s) of the recipients:
“Those who think that a critical mass of white voters has moved past its resistance to programs shifting tax dollars and other resources from the middle class to poorer minorities merely need to look at the election of 2010. . . . [Obamacare] forced such issues to the fore, and Republicans swept the House and state houses across the country.”
Poor(er) people can come in all shapes, sizes and colors. But for the sake of Edsall’s freighted non-argument, let’s stipulate that the poorest Obama-subsidy recipients are slightly or much more likely to be minorities than not. Why must this fact motivate an individual’s opposition to seeing more and more of his hard-earned income coercively transferred to anybody?
Change the context to a street mugging. If a mugger is non-white, does the victim’s dislike of being mugged necessarily hinge on the race of the mugger?
Of course, any victim of crime may be a racist. But you wouldn’t simply assume it.
Gratuitous charges of racism are one sign of desperation by friends of Obamacare — a program the color-blind horrors of which will only grow more evident over time.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s simple and unpretentious — a good meal and time spent with loved ones, remembering to count our blessings.
This Thanksgiving, however, has spurred a social media maelstrom over stores opening for business on what George Washington declared in 1789 to be “a DAY OF PUBLIC THANKSGIVING and PRAYER.”
Stores have been open on Thanksgiving for years, of course, without any tear in the space-time continuum, but they’re opening even earlier this year.
Much of the “controversy” is being ginned up by professional Walmart haters, who incessantly complain that the world’s largest private employer pays wages and provides benefits so low that . . . well, arguably only these same complainers offer workers less.
A post at the Daily Kos argues that, “workers shouldn’t have to rely on having an especially good boss to get to spend Thanksgiving with their families.”
Matt Walsh writes on his blog that “a holiday created by our ancestors as an occasion to give thanks for what they had, now morphs into a frenzied consumerist ritual where we descend upon shopping malls to accumulate more things we don’t need.”
New York Post columnist Nicole Gelinas sounds alarm bells that workers required to make time-and-a-half or double-time for clocking in today are being “cut off from fully celebrating America’s all-race, all-religion family holiday.”
But she adds, “It’s shoppers, not the government, who should force stores to close.”
She’s right there. Everyone has a right to boycott stores for opening on Thanksgiving. But the government should butt out entirely.
Still, since this day is all about giving thanks, wouldn’t having a job be something for which to be thankful? In fact, someone needing extra money to fund their family’s needs might even see working today as an opportunity.
It is possible to give thanks on a day other than Thanksgiving. Some might say that every day in America provides an occasion for offering thanks.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“[T]he whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”
We live in strange times. The “nanny state” mentality is ramping up into overdrive just as the War on Drugs hits the rock of enlightened public opinion.
And nothing shows this to stranger effect than the contrast between the continuing success of the anti-tobacco movement while marijuana liberalization proceeds apace.
As “medical marijuana” and even decriminalized recreational marijuana use seem to be gaining ground, the whole “smoking in public” thing has become more draconian.
For years now, state legislatures and town councils and even voting populations have been cracking down on smoking tobacco in public, despite the very shaky science regarding second-hand smoke.
And now the city council of San Rafael, California, has voted — unanimously — to ban residents of apartments, condos, duplexes, and multi-family houses from smoking cigarettes and other “tobacco products” inside their homes.
This American Cancer Association-approved legislation is quite intrusive. And one of the writers of the law boasted how little it matters to her who owns what property: “It doesn’t matter if its owner-occupied or renter-occupied,” she said. “We didn’t want to discriminate.”
And yet, contrasted with the cannabis liberalization movement — with medical marijuana legal (in some sense) statewide — there is discrimination here: in favor of the “weed” and against the “leaf.”
Perhaps history repeats itself. The war against cannabis began as the war on alcohol ended, with the repeal of the 18th Amendment. We could be we witnessing, now, another weird and inconsistent trade-off of paranoid prohibitions.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.