A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
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Video: White Riot
Enough of the “Black Community” and the “White Community” — how about seeing everyone as an individual? Though not perfect, this bit of satire is well worth thinking about:
http://youtu.be/NjyUSxCD4jg
What kind of world do we live in?
That was my thought when I heard how Sharon Snyder got fired for doing right.
The 70-year-old worked in a Kansas, Missouri, court for over three decades. She was fired for providing a public — public — document showing how an inmate could successfully request DNA testing.
Twenty-seven years ago, Robert Nelson was convicted of rape. Nelson was no angel back then. He was also sentenced for robbery; the sentence for rape would begin after he had served the time for robbery.
When his sister appealed to Snyder in 2011, Nelson had filed two previous requests for DNA testing, both denied. Snyder gave her a copy of a motion that had worked in a different case. It worked again. A crime lab determined that Nelson’s DNA was not that found at the crime scene.
He was released with decades left to serve on the rape charge.
Then the judge who had denied Nelson’s first two motions, David Byrne, fired Sharon Synder for violating court rules. Whatever validity those rules may sometimes have, they were wrongly applied here.
We live in a world where persons like Byrne feel justified in firing a woman for helping a wrongly convicted man escape many years of unjust imprisonment. That makes me angry. But — it is also a world in which Sharon Snyder acted to save that man from suffering any more of that unjust prison time. Thank you, Sharon Snyder.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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George Bernard Shaw
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.
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Pat Paternalism
Ever since Demosthenes choked up a pebble, politicians have been trying to improve their persuasion techniques.
The new “nudge” initiative is, in that context, not new.
Our glorious leaders in Washington are in the process of cooking up a “Behavioral Insights Team,” which will research behavioral economics, psychology and allied fields for new ways to nudge we, the people, to do what they, the rulers, want.
Ominous?
It’s a revival of the fashionable “libertarian paternalism” of a few years back. The idea is to find ways to encourage “good behavior” by providing the right contexts, juxtapositions, and options for citizens as they interface with their beloved overlords.
Excuse me: beloved public servants.
Businesses have used similar techniques. What do you think the art of product placement near cash registers is but a “nudging” of consumers to “impulse buy”?
Folks in government smilingly shrug off any ominous odor of intimidation: placing organ donor options on drivers’ licenses is a fine example of the technique. They want to extend such practices to encourage us to save, drive safely, pay taxes., etc., etc.
But how well behaved are our paternalistic manipulators? After all, as Greg Gutfeld pointed out on Red Eye or The Five (they blend in my mind), the reason they must encourage people to save is that the incentives to save have been undermined by other government policies. And people would pay taxes more readily if taxes were easier to understand . . .
The paternalism is obvious. The context anything but “libertarian.” But, all in all, much worse things have come out of Washington in recent years.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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William Leggett
If the clause of the Constitution under which the Post Office establishment exists were struck from the instrument to-morrow, is any one weak enough to suppose that the activity of commerce would not soon supply a system of its own?
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Milton Friedman
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.
The New York Times has an odd title for its report on the slowly increasing disposable income in some incipiently quasi-post-Communist corners of Cuban society: “Slowly, Cuba Is Developing an Appetite for Spending.”
What a starving man lacks is not the appetite for food.
It is true that in any production-killing statist society, people may suppress ambitions and desires in psychological self-defense. But they hear about what they’re missing. If wealth and opportunity are allowed to begin to return, it is not “appetite” that revives only slowly and tentatively. It’s long-range planning of production, accumulating of capital, engagement in previously outlawed forms of trade. People must wonder whether the new hints of freedom will be expanded or capriciously reversed.
What counts as indulgence in the new Cuba? Watching a 3-D movie not on the big screen of a theatre, but on a 55-inch screen in an apartment. “This is novel — at least in Cuba,” says Manuel Alejandro, a Havana resident who recently saw his second 3-D movie on that 55-inch screen.
But those with disposable income to spend on a living-room movie theater, backyard swimming pool or car washes “are strictly a minority in Cuba, where the state pays its four million workers [in a country with an estimated 11 million people] an average salary of $19 a month.”
Most Cubans “live humbly.” For them, the slow development of economic freedom at the margins of the failed communist utopia is way too slow.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Tweet, Tweet, Zoom
Recently, Peter Thiel, a very interesting mover and shaker in today’s most vibrant markets, criticized the upshot of today’s technology: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” That’s a slam at Twitter, a free service that somehow makes enough to stay afloat.
The lack of flying cars, though: Is that a problem?
Joshua Gans thinks we should ask ourselves whether we really want flying cars. You know, in our heart of hearts. After all, kids want to be Superman.
Markets only deliver the possible.
And much of what they deliver we hadn’t thought of before: iPods/iPhones/iPads weren’t really dreamed about much, outside of Dick Tracy/Star Trek fandom.
As for Twitter, Gans says it’s “a new communications protocol and more than just social media,” which makes it “more than merely trivial.” I’m sure he’s right. But I still keep kicking myself: whose time is worth so little that it’s worth complaining about free stuff?
Thiel’s focus is on technology, not markets — but it is the market that brings us stuff. Free markets are not “free” as in no price, they are free as in being unencumbered by busybody regulators, prohibitionists, and thieves. Such markets strike me as amazingly effective at providing a wide range of goods to the rich and the poor and everyone in-between. Hobbled, subsidized markets, on the other hand, exhibit Tweetable perversities — and usually serve the rich better than the poor.
Still, a lot of folks complain about what markets have to offer. I don’t get that, either. Hey, I reject most offers. So can they.
I say we stick to complaining about offers we can’t refuse.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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William Leggett
It ought to be one of the leading objects of the democracy of this country for many years to come to diminish the power of the general and several state governments, not to increase it.