On January 6, 1907, Maria Montessori opened her first school and daycare center for working class children in Rome, Italy. In 1912 on this date, New Mexico became the 47th state of America’s United States.
In 1941, on January 6, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his “Four Freedoms” State of the Union speech, emphasizing vague “freedoms” that enabled government to usurp definable freedoms.
Perhaps Hermine Ricketts should be glad that a SWAT team didn’t descend upon on her front-yard garden. After all, in blatant if ignorant violation of a new zoning law, the former architect had been growing vegetables there.
Yes. Vegetables!
Several months ago, a Miami Shores zoning inspector happened by (doubtless alerted by a troublemaking neighbor) and told Ricketts that she must uproot the vegetables, now illegal because the village council is okay with seeing fruits and flowers in a front-yard garden but has a thing about veggies.
Hermine Ricketts complained to the code enforcement board but was rebuffed. She therefore obeyed the order to uproot vegetables from the garden that she had been tending without controversy for 17 years. But she and her husband Tom Carroll are also taking their case to court with the help of the Institute for Justice, the ubiquitous champion of property rights.
“You can plant fruit, you can have flowers, you can adorn your property with pink flamingos— but you cannot have vegetables!” exclaims Ari Bargill, a lawyer with the Institute. “That is almost the definition of irrationality.”
The couple’s back yard is mostly in the shade because of the way the house is positioned, so relegating the vegetables to the rear isn’t really an alternative. However, that’s irrelevant. Front yard or back, it’s their own property from which their own kale and cabbage are being banned. The city doesn’t own the plot; Tom and Hermine do.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Men must stop being jealous of their power and generously allow freedom and responsibility to others. The reward is harmonious families and society.
Head on over to Townhall, where voter fraud and voting reform is the hot topic. Come back here, for the background stories:
On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company announced an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage of $5 for a day’s labor.
Socialism is essentially inimical to family life, which it regards as a bourgeois institution – to use its own favorite anathema. Socialism would make motherhood a State business or profession, would pay women for this sexual function, and deprive fathers of all status or recognition.
Voters must “take control” because politicians won’t solve our problems. They ARE the problem.
Individualism . . . means neither egotism nor isolation. It means voluntary beneficence and public spirit, as against all attempts to enforce these by penal laws. It means voluntary cooperation as contrasted with the forced cooperation of the State.
On Jan. 4, 1642, King Charles I of England sent soldiers to arrest members of Parliament, beginning England’s slide into civil war.
On Jan. 4, 1649, the English “Rump Parliament,” having purged those members willing to restore Charles I to the throne, voted to put Charles I on trial for high treason. On Jan. 30, 1649, he was executed.
You know that politicians waste money. You guess that they waste a lot of time.
But did you know they deliberately waste our time?
Transportation scholar Randal O’Toole regales us with the fix that California’s overlords have put themselves in. Merely assuming that dense city living decreases commuting, California’s legislators cooked up a law requiring local governments to increase population density.
But it turns out “transportation models reveal that increased densities actually increase congestion, as measured by ‘level of service,’ which,” O’Toole informs us, “measures traffic as a percent of a roadway’s capacity and which in turn can be used to estimate the hours of delay people suffer.”
So what to do? Golden State’s august solons have exempted cities and municipalities from calculating and disclosing the bad effects of their own legislation. They offer other standards, all of which, O’Toole explains, demonstrate only “that planners and planning enthusiasts in the legislature don’t like the results of their own plans, so they simply want to ignore them.”
The gist of the new standards of “regulation”? “[T]hey ignore the impact on people’s time and lives: if densification reduces per capita vehicle miles traveled by 1 percent, planners will regard it as a victory even if the other 99 percent of travel is slowed by millions of hours per year.”
It’s quite apparent that politicians are willing to sacrifice our time to get what they — not we — want. Time is not money. Time is more important than money.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.