The practical reason for freedom is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fiber can be developed — we have tried law, compulsion and authoritarianism of various kinds, and the result is nothing to be proud of.
When I think of Oregon, I often think of Don McIntire. Last Friday, 74-year-old Don died from a heart attack suffered at home.
I knew him as a great storyteller, with a Mark Twain sort of wit. But McIntire was best known in the Beaver State as a longtime taxpayer activist, specifically the main proponent of Measure 5, a 1990 citizen initiative that limited the state’s oppressive property taxes.
Then-Governor Barbara Roberts hyperbolically predicted that if voters passed Measure 5, “people would die.” Nonetheless, voters enacted the citizen initiative . . . and lived to tell about it.
Learning of McIntire’s passing, Jason Williams with Oregon Taxpayers United recalled the many phone calls he’d received from senior citizens, expressing their “heartfelt gratitude for Measure 5” and saying, “If it wasn’t for Don McIntire, I wouldn’t be able to live in my home today.”
Radio talk show host Lars Larson recognized McIntire as “a tax hero to millions of Oregonians whose taxes were reduced by literally billions of dollars because of the tireless efforts of this man.”
“Don McIntire was a giant in Oregon’s limited government movement,” said Cascade Policy Institute founder Steve Buckstein. “He gave tirelessly of himself for literally decades to reign in the government he thought was too large and too intrusive. . . . Every Oregonian who wants to keep government in check owes Don McIntire a huge debt of gratitude.”
Thanks, Don, for siding with taxpayers. Rest in peace.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting; otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture.
This weekend’s Townhall column is about race. It is long, in part because talking about race is still so tricky that brief discussions can be easily taken out of context.
And there’s so much to say.
I expand on some comments I made on Friday. But I try to spell out the logic at greater length. So it doesn’t get missed. Racism is an affront to justice. Justice tries to mete out what people deserve, individually. It is especially concerned about establishing basic rules of how to behave. It doesn’t answer every problem of society. It answers crime with punishment and restitution, answers torts with redress. But it does so based on individual responsibility.
Racism is wrong because it judges individuals not on their merits, but by their race. It’s stupid as well as ugly and unjust.
Progressives, however, have been trying to overthrow the old idea of justice as personal freedom and individual responsibility since Progressivism first became an Era.
So it’s no wonder they spread a response to racism that is itself racist. They don’t understand what justice is. So they make an unjust response to an injustice.
Anyway, go over to the column and give it a read. Come back here and tell me what you think.
You will probably be brimming with ideas, complaints, responses. Fine. Me too. One idea I couldn’t include in the column was the sources for some of today’s inner-city African-American problems. It sure seems like they’ve been selected, by racists, for some horrible burdens. But I wouldn’t be hasty on this.
It’s certainly true that official policy has played a huge role in destroying a lot of lives in the inner cities (especially but not limited to African-Americans) — the progressive trifecta of minimum wage raises, welfare aid to families without in-home fathers, and the war on drugs, has devastated the culture of many inner city blacks. Some folks call one of more of these policies “racist,” but the intent, usually, has seemed to be color-blind. That these policies have hit African-American communities especially hard may be more of an accident of history than a policy of repression. But I could be wrong.
Writers from my perspective were once called liberal. Self-defined “Progressives” took over that word in the FDR era. But that hasn’t stopped us from continuing to uphold a commonsense view of justice. Important contributions to the study and advocacy of this concept of justice as they relate to racial issues include
These are all books worth looking up. For further reading about the links between laissez-faire individualism and true anti-racism, you couldn’t do better than start your reading here:
The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests.
Yesterday’s Common Sense was about racism. Tomorrow’s Townhall column will expand on the subject. What better, then, to insert between these two days a provocative interview with a careful thinker on the matter, Thomas Sowell:
When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic!
“A deeply divided Supreme Court squared off Wednesday over the future of affirmative action in college admissions,” reports the Washington Post, covering the admissions policy of the University of Texas. The arguments for and against race-based admissions preferences were mostly old hat, but got weird when Justice Alito noted a policy of preferring the children of minority professionals over more-qualified, but poorer, non-minorities:
“I thought the whole purpose of affirmative action was to help the disadvantaged,” Alito said. He asked why a minority child of the “1 percent” should get a “leg up against, let’s say, an Asian or a white applicant whose parents are absolutely average in terms of education and income?”
State universities are allegedly all about equality of opportunity. Favoring the under-performing children of wealthy minority folks doesn’t exactly qualify. As a friend of mine put it, “If the elites have to choose between rubbing elbows with the poor or hanging out with the under-performing children of upper middle class professionals, there’s no contest: administrators much prefer racial diversity over a diversity of economic class and ideas.”
What we have here is a new classism using “anti-racism” as a wedge.
But it is itself racism. It’s just not “old-fashioned racism.”
Barack Obama, way back in 1994 — in the earliest recording of our current president arguing policy — used that phrase (“good old-fashioned racism”) to attack Charles Murray and defend reverse discrimination and massive increases in welfare programs. So, in keeping with his terminology, perhaps we should call today’s race-based “compensatory” policies “new-fashioned racism.”
After all, these policies favor some over others not based on their relevant qualifications — or on the “content of their character” — but, instead, based on their race.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence; true friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.
President Obama immediately ballyhooed the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ September unemployment rate of 7.8 percent as the logical outcome of the good work he has done.
But the BLS was promoting B.S. . . . according to many conservatives.
NPR’s talking heads immediately pooh-poohed the idea that there was a conspiracy going on at the BLS. “That’s not how Washington works,” they informed us. And as if of one voice, Washington insiders rallied to the BLS.
Former GE CEO Jack Welch, one of the doubters, defended his skepticism in the Wall St. Journal. BLS data are decidedly not “handled like the gold in Fort Knox, with gun-carrying guards watching their every move, and highly trained, white-gloved super-agents counting and recounting hourly.” His basic take on the allegedly sacrosanct numbers? “Get real.” Welch provided more than a little reason to suspect “the possibility of subjectivity creeping into the process.” And he noted that skepticism is not just a right-wing trait:
I’m not the first person to question government numbers, and hopefully I won’t be the last. Take, for example, one of my chief critics in this go-round, Austan Goolsbee, former chairman of the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers. Back in 2003, Mr. Goolsbee himself, commenting on a Bush-era unemployment figure, wrote in a New York Times op-ed: “the government has cooked the books.”
Truth is, unemployment figures are not tallies of surefire data, but statistical extrapolations based on surveys. They are more like Gallup Poll results — but perhaps less reliable.
And Welch is right to conclude that “the coming election is too important to be decided on a number,” especially that kind of number.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.