The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
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Townhall: The Fight for Your Gun Rights
This weekend’s Common Sense column at Townhall.com looks at the latest political battles over gun-ownership rights in the two states of the union that have also legalized marijuana. Shoot on over, and reload back here, with more information:
- Spokane Spokesman-Review: Washington gun initiatives square off
- Ballotpedia: Washington Gun Rights Measure, Initiative 591 (2014)
- Washington Sec. of State: Initiative Measure No. 591 (text)
- Protect Our Gun Rights / Yes on I-591
- Seattle Times: Gun-rights supporters planning initiative of their own
- Ballotpedia: Washington Universal Background Checks for Gun Purchases, Initiative 594 (2014)
- Washington Sec. of State: Initiative Measure No. 594 (text)
- Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility / Yes on 594
- New York Times: Facing a Recall After Supporting Stronger Gun Laws in Colorado
- Citizens in Charge: Colorado Second Amendment Activists Turn-in Recall Petitions
- Video: Colorado Sheriffs File Suit Against Anti-Gun Laws
- Independence Institute: Colorado Gun Case
- 2nd Amendment Crusader Dave Kopel: davekopel.org
- Morse Recall: The Basic Freedom Defense Fund
- Ballotpedia: Giron Recall
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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.