When the tempest rages, when the thunders roar, and the lightnings blaze around us it is then that the truly brave man stands firm at his post.
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Étienne de la Boétie
Since the very beasts, although made for the service of man, cannot become accustomed to control without protest, what evil chance has so denatured man that he, the only creature really born to be free, lacks the memory of his original condition and the desire to return to it?
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Video: Jon Lovitz Clarifies
A few months ago, Jon Lovitz caught Hollywood’s elites off-guard by turning on President Barack Obama on the tax issue. He ranted against the notion that he and others like him don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes. He used, shall we say, “harsh words.” Now, calmed down a bit, and in a different venue, he clarifies:
A section of his original rant, here (contains profanity).
On July 7, 1863, the United States begins its first military draft, allowing individuals an exemption at the price of $300. For the wealthy who can afford it, the exemption, not the draft, may be said to be “neater than sliced bread” — a product first sold on this date in 1928 by the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri.
In 1958, President Eisenhower signs the Alaska Statehood Act, allowing Alaska to join the union as the 49th state early in 1959. In 1978 the Solomon Islands become independent of the United Kingdom.
Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein [pictured, above] — author of “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” and other classics — is born on July 7, 1907. Thomas Hooker, Puritan founder of the colony of Connecticut — a major advocate of religious toleration — died on this date in 1647.
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Étienne de la Boétie
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.
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Étienne de la Boétie
“By such words, Hydarnes, you give us no good counsel,” replied the Lacedaemonians, “because you have experienced merely the advantage of which you speak; you do not know the privilege we enjoy. You have the honor of the king’s favor; but you know nothing about liberty, what relish it has and how sweet it is. For if you had any knowledge of it, you yourself would advise us to defend it, not with lance and shield, but with our very teeth and nails.”
July 6 marks some horrific attacks upon individual liberty — indeed, on individuals’ lives. In 1415, Jan Hus is burned at the stake. In 1535, King Henry VIII of England has Sir Thomas More executed for treason. In 1939, the Nazis close the last remaining Jewish enterprises in Germany. Exactly three years later, Anne Frank and her family go into hiding.
California’s Democratic legislative majority is anything but lazy. On July 3, when most politicians had long-since left their posts to begin vacationing, California legislators kept their collective nose to the grindstone, busy trying to grind down the right of citizens to petition their government.
Again.
Last year, California’s initiative process withstood multiple attacks. One would have required petitioners to wear signs on their chest stating whether or not they were paid. Another would have outlawed paying petitioners per signature.
Nary a Republican voted for these bills; thankfully, Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, vetoed both. He suggested government shouldn’t force citizens to wear signs on their chests and noted, “It doesn’t seem very practical to me to create a system that makes productivity goals a crime.”
Undeterred, the Assembly Elections Committee passed ACA 10, which would require constitutional amendment initiatives to qualify by running petition drives in 27 state senate districts. This, on top of the current requirement to gather more than a million voter signatures statewide,
Well-heeled interests would be able to afford the higher costs. Grassroots groups? Not so much.
Further, ACA 10 mandates that constitutional amendments proposed by citizens through the initiative must garner a supermajority of 55 percent to pass. This would allow big spending-unions or wealthy individuals or big corporations to defeat reform measures even when a majority of voters favor the measure.
Legislators claim the constitution should not be changed by a slim majority. Yet, ACA 10 doesn’t increase the simple majority currently required when it comes to amendments that legislators propose.
Legislators are working overtime to get those pesky citizen reformers out of their way.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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French Rolls
Jim Dixon, Kingsley Amis’s infamous Lucky Jim, put the logic of wealth redistribution in everyday terms: “If one man’s got ten buns and another’s got two, and a bun has got to be given up by one of them, then surely you take it from the man with ten buns.” Remarkably simple, leaving out, as it does,
- the making of buns;
- the effect of expropriating buns now on future bun production;
- trade in buns and
- consequent changes in ratios of bun ownership, sans expropriation;
- what effect the nabbing of buns has on the demand to take more buns in the future; and
- the necessity of taking buns in the first place (which Lucky Jim’s interlocutors noted).
Think about it longer than a minute, and it’s easy to see that the “soak-the-rich” plan quickly runs into trouble, one bit of difficulty neatly stated in the old adage often attributed to Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
Sometimes you even run out of other people. As France may show next.
Socialists there have won the recent elections. They promise to reinstate the old, ugly wealth tax, as well as up the income tax on “the rich.” And so of course some of the richer French folks contemplate exile — at least as far as the welcoming cantons of Switzerland.
There are problems with this option, though. Under Sarkozy, the French government had instituted a whopping exit tax. But, if Mathieu van Berchem is to be believed, even this will prove “unlikely to stop any ‘exodus.’ There are often more reasons to leave than to stay, while the Socialist government could turn on the wealthy even more.”
If so, expect future French buns to have Swiss crosses stamped upon them.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Isaac Newton
Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but my greatest friend is truth.