Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
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Somewhere, recently, I saw the Lord Acton maxim about power (how it corrupts, and, if absolute, corrupts absolutely) referred to as a “cliché.”
Just because a phrase is common doesn’t mean it’s cheapened by repetition. Some expressed truths are that profound.
If anything, we need to repeat the Acton Axiom more often, and louder. For we live in a time when the federal government usurps power, denigrates, evades and undermines the rule of law, and appears “hell bent” (now that’s a cliché) on accumulating power in concentrated form . . . you know, like Sauron did with the ring of power in The Lord of the Rings. (Another possible cliché, eh?)
The NSA spying program story, as it unfolds, exemplifies the typical pattern:
- Information gets leaked.
- The government denies it.
- Further information comes out, establishing the lying nature of the denial and
- Adding more details of even more shocking nature.
- The government makes further denials . . .
And repeat ad nauseam.
Retired Lieutenant General James R. Clapper still serves the president as Director of National Intelligence, even after lying directly to Congress about the existence of NSA “metadata” collection system.
Meanwhile, the long arm of the secrecy establishment has retaliated against journalist Glenn Greenwald (who helped break Snowden’s first and subsequent leaks) by detaining the journalist’s partner without charge for the legal maximum of nine hours in Great Britain, upon coming home from a trip.
And the gentleman I reported on last week, who shut down his encrypted email service and erased his records rather than fork it all over to the government, says he has been repeatedly threatened with imprisonment.
Typical modus operandi of tyrant wannabes. Don’t worry about “cliché”; worry about tyranny.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Herbert Spencer
A life of constant external enmity generates a code in which aggression, conquest, revenge, are inculcated, while peaceful occupations are reprobated. Conversely a life of settled internal amity generates a code inculcating the virtues conducing to harmonious cooperation — justice, honesty, veracity, regard for other’s claims. And the implication is that if the life of internal amity continues unbroken from generation to generation, there must result not only the appropriate code, but the appropriate emotional nature — a moral sense adapted to the moral requirements. Men so conditioned will acquire to the degree needful for complete guidance, that innate conscience which the intuitive moralists erroneously suppose to be possessed by mankind at large. There needs but a continuance of absolute peace externally and a rigorous insistence on nonaggression internally to ensure the molding of men into a form naturally characterized by all the virtues
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Incumbency Protection Racket
While discussing the latest IRS scandal — the one about how the IRS has been (is still) stacking the deck against non-lefty nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status — the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto mentions another kind of deck-stacking: campaign financial regulation.
Seems that Hillary Clinton, still running for president, is using her serially disgraced husband’s 501(c)3 foundation as a launching pad or financial resource for political operations. Taranto wonders whether the IRS “would investigate the Clinton Foundation for evidently acting as a front group for a political campaign” — quickly adding that his question is “facetious” given the fact that “the Obama IRS only goes after little guys.”
Suppose, however, that there were in fact an inquiry into the relationship between Hillary’s incipient campaign and the foundation? The point Taranto wants to make is that whether we’re talking about the IRS code or campaign finance regulation, it’s easier to comply with “complex and burdensome regulations on political speech” when you have resources to splurge on lawyers who can ensure that you’re obeying the letter of the law. Thus, the regulations “give incumbents a huge advantage over upstart challengers.”
Though hardly the only problem with CFR, this bedrock truth about the regulatory regime undermines the claim that such regulations serve only to “level the playing field.” What they really do is make it impossible for an unknown, un-wealthy but otherwise viable challenger to quickly “level the playing field” by accepting large checks from donors convinced of the challenger’s electability and election-worthiness.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Herbert Spencer
Perhaps the soul of goodness in things evil is by nothing better exemplified than by the good thing, justice, which, in rudimentary form, exists within the evil thing revenge.
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Townhall: Progressive Irony
This weekend’s Common Sense column takes us back to the question of the minimum wage, and the evil, awful Walmart. But really what it’s about is the vision of market life we see in liberal-progressive ideology. Click on over, then return here. There are links in the column, but it might help to consider a few ideas in addition to those links:
- Thomas Sowell, “‘Living Wage’ Kills Jobs“
- F.A. Harper, “Why Wages Rise” (PDF)
- Jeffrey Tucker, “Jeff’s Story (video)” and “The Basement Beneath the Floor“
- Bryan Caplan, The Myopic Empiricism of the Minimum Wage
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Video: The Policy of “Stop and Frisk”
Reasonable searches, or police-state harassment?
I agree with Eric Holder, the Attorney General of these United States of America: His gang at the federal Department of Justice should stop unfairly locking people up.
At the American Bar Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco, Mr. Holder admitted that, “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason.”
Specifically, the AG argued for “fundamentally rethinking the notion of mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes,” acknowledging “they oftentimes generate unfairly long sentences,” which breeds “disrespect for the system.”
Unfair long jaunts in prison do tend to ruin people’s lives — er . . . unfairly. Bad system.
Holder also pointed to the enormous cost of incarceration: $80 billion annually. Since 1980, our population has grown about 33 percent and our prison population 800 percent.
So, to hand out fewer of the “excessive prison terms” the DOJ has been meting out for decades, Holder is changing Department of Justice policies for charging “low-level” and “non-violent” suspected drug offenders – so they don’t face mandatory minimum sentences.
Like me, the ACLU is “thrilled.” But while calling Holder’s policy pivot “a great step,” Julie Stewart, the president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, added, “what’s being proposed here is very modest.”
A federal public defender in Virginia points out that prosecutors are likely to continue using mandatory minimums as a weapon, saying, “There is a real difference between general guidance from the attorney general and actually taking actions on the ground.”
The Department of “Justice” is locking people up “unnecessarily.” Attorney General Holder speaks out against it, but it is his job to actually stop it. Now.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Andrew Jackson
The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me, but I will kill it.
(said to the Vice President, July 8, 1832)
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William Graham Sumner
There ought to be no laws to guarantee property against the folly of its possessors.