It is harder to preserve than to obtain liberty.
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Google Vindicated
In 2009, I noted that an Italian court was trying three Google executives for violating Italian privacy laws. The three soon received six-month suspended jail terms for being “too slow” to remove a video from YouTube that depicted the bullying of an autistic child. Google had pulled the video as soon as told about it.
The unjust conviction has now thankfully been reversed.
At the time, Google rep Bill Echikson complained that his colleagues had been convicted although they had neither uploaded the video nor reviewed it before it was posted.
A key word is “review.” Must any Internet host of user-posted content review such content before it is published or else risk incarceration? Of course, “hosted” content covers the gamut of Internet content. Few website publishers provide their own servers.
If a publisher must obtain special approval from Facebook, Google, WordPress or any other platform provider before tossing something onto the web, that’s the death knell for freedom of speech and press on the Internet. At best, the pace of publication would slow to a crawl. At worst, censorship by Web-service providers would become rampant — except when providers suspend their services altogether for fear of non-suspended jail time.
Perhaps if the bad Italian precedent had been allowed to stand, the worst would not have come to pass. Perhaps only rarely would we see a horrific conviction exploiting that precedent, and perhaps only in Italy. But why take even one step down that road?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Precious Gifts
There’s a quiet on Christmas morning . . . after Santa has come and gone . . . and the kids are still sound asleep . . . sugar plum fairies dancing to their gentle snoring.
A moment to stop and think.
I hope they’ll like their presents; they always do. There’s so much love my wife and I want to share, to give to them.
Of course, the biggest gifts are never under the tree. The most important being a staple home, with love, and the freedom for children to grow into themselves.
My parents gave me that . . . along with the bicycles and baseball gloves and some really good books. I’ve tried to be the same kind of parent.
Another incredible endowment I’ve enjoyed is to be born in a country “conceived in liberty.” A place where individual citizens are the sovereigns, creating government to be a servant and not a master. Land of the free.
What a gift!
But Tom Paine told us that, “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly, ’tis dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”
Freedom is under siege. And, therefore, we who love freedom, grateful for our historic luck, must come together to protect our “expensive” gift.
Some may get discouraged after setbacks, but none of us got involved in politics because we like “the game” and figured we’d pile up a shelf of trophies. We’re engaged because we must be and we seek victories because, as Churchill once put it, “without victory, there is no survival.”
In 1776, on this very day, General George Washington and his soldiers of the American Revolution crossed the Delaware River to score a surprise military victory against the British at Trenton, New Jersey.
Thank goodness, for these brave patriots and their muskets. Three Americans gave their lives in the battle. To secure our liberty.
Today, the Gift has been handed to us. Not to play with on Christmas morning and forget about, not to let get broken without our fixing it, but to protect and defend and cherish.
My commentary strives to illuminate, to amuse and to motivate toward action, bringing citizens together. Citizens in Charge protects the initiative process — the best weapon citizens have to cut taxes, term-limit politicians, stop the drug war, protect property rights, and place limits on government. The Liberty Initiative Fund partners with leaders across the nation putting measures on the ballot to protect freedom and hold government accountable.
Thanks for your gifts to these efforts and to the many other important ones. We aim to protect the precious gift of freedom.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays!
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Alfred Marshall
The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished, derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the nineteenth century.
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Cold as Ice
Well, it’s a few days after the much-ballyhooed End of the World, wherein the magnetic poles were (according to some less-than-astute prognosticators) supposed to flip — North would go negative, and South, positive — causing volcanoes, tidal waves, and all sorts of havoc.
But Christmas Eve has arrived on schedule, the Mayan calendar goes back to being as irrelevant as Isaac Asimov’s idea of a quarterly calendar that would “abolish the months,” and we can return to thinking about the upcoming magnetic pole flip in a scientific way, sans Apocalypse.
Indeed, on Christmas Eve, the only talk about poles is about Santa’s storied connection with the North.
But hey: don’t think Arctic, think Antarctic. The big story, today, is that Queen Elizabeth II, Diamond Jubilee monarch of America’s “Mother Country” (sorry, Mother), is getting a plot of land on the Frozen Continent named after her.
Yes, to celebrate her 60 years on the throne, she attended a cabinet meeting, and received 60 place mats, one for each year of “service.”
“Can’t have too many place mats,” somebody said. Or must’ve.
Then she was chauffeured over to the Foreign Office where she received the “fitting tribute” of a big triangle of forbidding land south of the Ronne Ice Shelf, which will be called Queen Elizabeth Land. I’m assuming it’s a tribute to her warmth of personality.
Frankly, I’d prefer the place mats. But then, having a stretch of land you will never visit named after you is its own kind of place mat. Just goes to show you that giving gifts is not easy. What do you give the Person who has everything?
That is, everything but relevance.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
In case you didn’t notice, the world didn’t end on Friday. Oh, and Paul Jacob’s Sunday column on Townhall.com is up. Click on over, and come back here for more prophetic nourishment.
- “The Brutal Arithmetic of the Budget Deficit,” Businessweek
- “FAQ About Sequestration Under the Budget Control Act of 2011,” PDF
The bigger cliffs ahead include problems associated with
- a structurally unsound and unstable Social Security
- Medicare and Medicaid commitments that are also unsustainable
- a continuing regime of “too big to fail” providing incentives to another round of risky investments
- a looming dollar crisis
- imperial overreach risking the life and liberty (not to mention pocketbooks) of American citizens
- a general increase in the “gimme gimme” mentality, the political and moral hazard of everyone trying to live at the expense of everyone else.
Any one of these is very bad. Together they threaten the very existence of the union. Here at Common Sense, we’re always interested in these problems, and in finding solutions. So, if you haven’t already, click on the link, above right, and subscribe to the email version of this weekday commentary. Thanks!
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Video: Hayek on Social Justice
It’s a mirage, saith he, a fantasy:
Actually, this is a Bill Buckley interview not only with Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek, but also with George Roche, president of Hillsdale College . . . from quite a while ago.
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Richard Henry Lee
To say that a bad government must be established for fear of anarchy is really saying that we should kill ourselves for fear of dying.
Wearing his I’m-Not-Partisan-No-Not-Me hat, President Obama has again declared war on partisanship, telling congressional Republicans to “peel off the partisan war paint.”
To be partisan in a bad way is not merely to belong to a political party and more or less support its program. It is to cling to party at the expense of Doing the Right Thing.
Unless, that is, it’s about opposing the program of a president determined to be partisan at the expense of Doing the Right Thing.
I often disagree with both parties. But let’s say that a representative of one party is marginally more reluctant to destroy our wealth and freedom than a representative of another party. Then I prefer the slightly more responsible stance of the former — and wish it were tougher and more consistent — even when the latter engages in name-calling and abuse of the former.
Demanding “perspective,” President Obama declares that he and the Congress should “not put ourselves through some sort of self-inflicted crisis every six months.” And I wholeheartedly agree. These crises happen because their spending programs always go up and up and up, even when a few “cuts” get made.
But the president doesn’t stop there. He explains they must “allow ourselves time to focus on things like preventing the tragedy in Newtown from happening again, focus on issues like energy and immigration reform. . . .”
Um, sir, please do not suggest that an unimpeded path to fiscal ruin is the only way to prevent fiscal ruin, or can somehow enable policymakers to prevent crazy gunmen from killing people. Please.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Let Teachers Bear Arms
We have no sure way to prevent such horrors as the recent shooting at a Connecticut elementary school. We can’t predict which very few of the very many persons with grievances will choose to vent their rage by loosing a hail of bullets at innocents. And schools would be unable to function if they were so locked down as to eliminate the possibility of a gunman walking through the door.
We can, however, take measures to reduce the likelihood and severity of such an attack. We can also prepare to defend ourselves if the worst happens. When someone is shooting at you and the students in your care, the best chance of stopping the shooter within seconds — when the police are minutes away, at best — is to shoot back. The more persons able to shoot back, the better.
It makes sense for appropriately trained teachers and other school personnel to be armed and ready to confront an assailant. This isn’t just a theoretical proposal. In 2008, the Harrold school district in Northwest Texas introduced a “guardian plan” under which some teachers and other staffers carry concealed handguns. A few other school districts have followed suit. But the practice is far from common in Texas or in the nation at large.
Says Harrold’s superintendent, “Nothing is 100 percent. But what we do know is that we’ve done all we can to protect our children.”
The Harrold district’s provisions for self-defense are controversial. They shouldn’t be.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.