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national politics & policies political challengers too much government

The Monkey on Their Backs

The “war on drugs” is not a mere metaphorical war, like the “war on poverty.”

The biggest problem with the term is not the subject, but the object: Our forces don’t shoot at pills and pipes and chemicals and syringes.

They shoot at people.

Sometimes dealers. Often just users. Too often innocents . . . “collateral damage” in a war that seems never to end, because impossible to win.

But if the war seems bad in America — now a land with the world’s largest gulag — it’s far, far worse in Mexico, especially since President Felipe Calderón turned the military on his own people, in the vain hope of subduing the drug traffickers.

What did he get for his efforts? Blood, death and terror.

The body count is over 50,000.

I’ve long advocated drug legalization. I don’t need to elaborate the reasons, not after 50,000 deaths have been weighed in on the pro-drug war side, but I probably should mention a few notions that the drug-war mentality suppresses: individual responsibility, a rule of law, and peace.

In America, our politicians slowly awake to the truth that killing people to prevent them from ruining their lives with drugs is a fool’s mission. But few yet commit to actual change.

In Mexico, on the other hand, the top three candidates to replace Calderón — whose service is limited, by law, to just the one term — go a step further: All agree that the drug war has to be scaled down.

Little talk, so far, of legalization, but hey: The addiction to war is a tough monkey to shrug off.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Gore Vidal

TV-watchers have no doubt noted so often that they are no longer aware of how often the interchangeable TV hosts handle anyone who tries to explain why something happened. “Are you suggesting that there was a conspiracy?” A twinkle starts in a pair of bright contact lenses. No matter what the answer, there is a wriggling of the body, followed by a tiny snort and a significant glance into the camera to show that the guest has just been delivered to the studio by flying saucer. This is one way for the public never to understand what actual conspirators — whether in the F.B.I. or on the Supreme Court or toiling for Big Tobacco — are up to.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

How Not to Help the Poor

Q. When’s the best time to kick out the bottom rungs of a ladder?

A. After everybody’s climbed it.

So, when’s the best time to raise the minimum wage?

After everybody is being paid at a higher rate.

Contrary to innocent expectations, minimum wage laws don’t guarantee that people will be hired to work at or above the minimum. Instead, they prohibit businesses from hiring (or workers from accepting jobs) below the minimum rate. That is, rates are guaranteed, but the jobs are discouraged.

A recent push by House Democrats to raise the national minimum wage to ten bucks per hour was stalled by leadership. Left-leaning representatives cried foul. But a report in The Hill explains the reluctance: “Concerns about the economy have increased since last Friday, when a jobs report showed an anemic May during which only 69,000 jobs were added. A higher minimum wage could discourage employers from creating more jobs and that, in turn, could hurt President Obama in the election.”

It turns out that the more clever Democrats are considering, instead, a plan to slowly, gradually raise the rates.

This would mean fewer unemployed right away. The fewer people hurt, all the less likely that voters would put two and two together and blame them, and their minimum wage rate hike.

This is how politicians hurt Americans, most of the time: In increments small enough not to cause an uproar.

In this case, it’s the poorest who are hurt most, those who haven’t yet climbed the proverbial ladder. Democrats, ideologically blind to the results of their regulations, feel nothing.

Besides, they know that, in America, most poor folks don’t vote.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Angelina Weld Grimké

If a law commands me to sin I will break it; if it calls me to suffer, I will let it take its course unresistingly.

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Today

June 10

Apple ships the first Apple II computer on June 10, 1977.

Born on this day: historian, jazz critic and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff (1925); children’s writer Maurice Sendak (1929); scientist and pioneer of “sociobiology” E. O. Wilson (1929).

June 10 deaths include Alexander the Great (323 BC), Angelina Weld Grimké (1958); and Louis L’Amour (1988).

Categories
links nannyism

Townhall: Nannies with badges and guns

The enemies of freedom usually pretend to be engaging in their outrageous and over-bearing coercion “for the people’s sake.” Don’t believe them. See Sunday’s column at Townhall — and then come back here for links and hints on further reading.

One thing not made clear in the column (and it can’t go on forever, eh?) is that the big soda ban only applies to sugary drinks (not juices or diet drinks), and only applies to restaurants, targeting fast food joints, really. So Bloomberg’s ban is, in essence, a stab at the lower classes. Fancy restaurants don’t serve the big drinks, as I point out in the column, and you can still buy big non-fountain drinks at the store, and binge . . . sans the convenience of a fast food establishment, where dumb, stupid people are too easily swayed.

Do you ever wonder if much of the welfare state is just an excuse for well-off folks to rag on poorer folks, for being so, well, icky? “You obviously can’t run your lives — if you could, you’d be like us!”

Categories
ideological culture insider corruption

Video: Greece Fire

When politicians fight on camera — literally slap each other around — you know something is pretty wrong in your country:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVffMcFWj8Y

Categories
Thought

Arthur Goldberg

Law not served by power is an illusion; but power not ruled by law is a menace which our nuclear age cannot afford.

Categories
national politics & policies

Yes, It Can Happen Here

Take a moment from your regularly scheduled dose of daily optimism, and look on the dark side.

The recent political events in Greece, in which a stable government was not formed, requiring whole new rounds of voting, have received some attention on the nightly news. But there’s still a feeling of “it can’t happen here.”

That’s a great disservice. Because it can happen here.Greece on Fire

And this is not just “political instability.” We’re not talking about a political hot potato going nuclear. We’re talking about complete financial implosion. That’s what happens when government is involved in everything.

“Conservatives” and “progressives” have set up for us a house of cards. So what is now happening in one of the great cradles of Western civilization is likely to happen to the whole of today’s big-government-based civilization.

How bad can things get? Well, for chilling reminders of what a true collapse is like, consult the Economic Collapse Blog. A recent article gave us a top ten list of “things that we can learn about shortages and preparation from the collapse in Greece.” The top five are frightening enough:

  1. Food shortages can actually happen (indeed, have already begun in Greece, starting with the prisons — and remember, America has more prisons than anybody)
  2. Medicine is one of the first things to become scarce (which is bad, if you require meds to live)
  3. The power grid goes down (which means almost everything goes down)
  4. You can’t even take water for granted (and you can’t live without water)
  5. Your credit and debit cards will probably stop working

So, congrats to Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, et al. — they won’t have to preside over the next great crisis. Nor we endure them.

Hey, look on the bright side.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Gustave de Molinari

War has ceased to be productive of security, but the masses, whose existence depends upon the industries of production, are compelled to pay its costs and suffer its losses without either receiving compensation or possessing means to end the contradiction. Governments do possess this power, but if the interests of governments ultimately coincide with the interests of the governed they are, in the first instance, opposed to them.

Governments are enterprises — in commercial language, “concerns” — which produce certain services, the chief of which are internal and external security. The directors of these enterprises — the civil and military chiefs and their staffs — are naturally interested in their aggrandizement on account of the material and moral benefits which such aggrandizement secures to themselves. Their home policy is therefore to augment their own functions within the State by arrogating ground properly belonging to other enterprises; abroad they enlarge their domination by a policy of territorial expansion. It is nothing to them if these undertakings do not prove remunerative, since all costs, whether of their services or of their conquests, are borne by the nations which they direct.

Gustave de Molinari, The Society of To-morrow (1899)