The greatest escape in human history is the escape from poverty and death
Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (2013), p. 23.
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Angus Deaton
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Ne Win Loses Power
After pro-democracy protests, General Ne Win resigned as leader of the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma’s only legal political party on July 23, 1988.
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Huxleyian A.F.
On this day in 1903, the Ford Motor Company sold its first car.
Less than 30 years later, Aldous Huxley satirized Ford’s assembly line procedures in his novel Brave New World. Arguably, both the assembly line and the satire advanced freedom.
Today is July 23, A.F. 162. The “A.F.” is not what “af” means in popular online abbreviation, but “in the Year of Our Ford” — “After Ford,” specifically.
Last month, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. detailed six billion dollars worth of Medicare fraud, where scamming operations were caught “chasing money from our agencies.”
Some while willfully neglecting patients.
On Friday, he estimated that the HHS “loses $100,000,000,000 a year to theft.” This was from an interview on the Fly Zone Podcast, widely shared by conservatives on X.
“We shut down 800 hospices,” Kennedy explained. “You know what a hospice is? Where you’re going to die. Typically, if you go to a hospice, you leave within 18 days because your dying is terminal.” This is the context. Yet, when HHS investigated taxpayer-funded hospices in Los Angeles, “the people never died. Two or three years later they were there, and we’re paying $6,000 a month.”
The enormity is breath-taking: “We found a hotel room with 29 hospices in it. I mean a hotel, every room was a hospice, and none of them had any patients.” Some of the scams were more ambitious, involving bribery of patients and worse.
“Estonians and Armenians and people from Eastern Europe . . . were getting the patient numbers . . . stealing them from doctors’ offices.” And there were more scams, too, from members of other ethnic groups — remember Minnesota’s Somali fraudsters?
Tellingly, after closing down the operations, the HHS did not receive “a single call from a congressman or from a business owner saying, ‘Oh, you shut down my hospice and all these patients are on the street.’ None of them, because they were all crooked and they knew they were crooked.”
Folks on the left seem oddly silent. Have you heard any denunciations of, say, greed? Or is that vice only attributable to corporations and “the millionaires and billionaires”?
This should be a non-partisan issue.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Destutt de Tracy
We clearly see certain animals execute labours which concur to a common end, and which to a certain point appear to have been concerted; or fight for the possession of what they desire, or supplicate to obtain it; but nothing announces that they really make formal exchanges. The reason, I think, is that they have not a language sufficiently developed to enable them to make express conventions; and this, I think, proceeds . . . from their being incapable of sufficiently decomposing their ideas, to generalise, to abstract, and to express them separately in detail, and in the form of a proposition; whence it happens that those of which they are susceptible, are all particular, confused with the attributes, and manifest themselves in mass by interjections, which can explain nothing explicitly. Man, on the contrary, who has the intellectual means which are wanting to them is naturally led to avail himself of them, to make conventions with his fellow beings. They make no exchanges, and he does.
Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy, in A Treatise on Political Economy (Georgetown, D.C.: Joseph Mulligan, publisher; W. A. Rind & Co., printer, 1817) Thomas Jefferson, ed. of translation, from the section entitled “The First Part of the Treatise on the Will and Its Effects: Of Our Actions,” chapter one, “Of Society.”
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The Nine Only
On July 22, 1937, the U.S. Senate voted down President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s court packing scheme.
President Donald Trump told a prime-time national audience, last week, that the Department of Homeland Security found 278,000 noncitizens on state voter rolls after checking roughly half the states.
“It’s a number,” as my old boss says.
The Washington Post called it “an exaggerated claim that noncitizens are registering to vote en masse.” No, noncitizens are not really registering to vote so much as being registered — without their knowledge or understanding through deliberate government policy that pretends it’s pro-democracy to throw folks on the voter list who are not legally entitled to vote.
Not that there aren’t cases of fraud. There are. But I trust the good intentions of the average non-citizen more than the intentions of the politicians in states regularly facilitating their voter registrations.
Which, incidentally, can undermine an immigrant’s ability to gain U.S. citizenship.
Fully 250,000 of that aforementioned total were found in just four states: California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The other roughly 28,000 noncitizens were discovered on the rolls in “two dozen or so states” by running those voter files against the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database.
Of course, some of these 278,000 identified will likely turn out to be citizens. Some will turn out to be pets. Data is sometimes incorrect. Mistakes happen. But let’s find out.
In a sensible country, every state would (1) check its voter file against the federal SAVE database (and other data at DHS and the State Department), (2) institute a sensible, respectful and lawful process to check with voters so identified to clarify the facts, and then, (3) follow the law to remove each illegal registrant.
Instead of merely arguing about the extent and severity of the problem, why not just solve it?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Angus Deaton
Inequality is often a consequence of progress. Not everyone gets rich at the same time, and not everyone gets access to the latest life-saving measures, whether access to clean water, to vaccines, or to new drugs preventing heart disease. Inequalities in turn affect progress. . . .
Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (2013), first page of the Introduction.
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Monkeyshine, Moonshine
On July 21, 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution in a public school classroom, and fined $100. The ambiguous legacy of the trial would continue — for decades, even to the present — to reveal the tensions inherent within a school system run by government and funded by taxpayers.
Scopes’ biology lessons leaned heavily on a “eugenics” play on Darwinism, at variance both with Darwin and the general thrust of today’s evolutionary thought.
Today is the 57th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission’s perambulation upon the Moon, on July 21, 1969. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked upon the surface of Mare Tranquillitatis for about two hours and 15 minutes. They spent over 21 hours on the surface, total, most of it inside the Lunar Module, at the site they called Tranquillity Base, before launching to rejoin astronaut Michael Collins in lunar orbit and returning to Earth on the 24th.
Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, 84, has been absent from Congress, hospitalized for weeks — first with no comment on his medical condition, still with very little information divulged.
There should be an ethic in public service that when one is incapacitated, one hands the trust given back to the public to fill anew.* Sadly, this tradition has fallen victim to . . . take your pick: incumbency, partisanship, lack of electoral competition, Cicero’s times/mores.
History’s third-oldest U.S. Congress “boasts” 23 members of the House and Senate now eighty years old or older. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, the senior Iowa Senator, is the oldest at 92.
This aging of our decision makers has set up a seniority system of sorts. Hardly healthy.
No wonder polls show overwhelming public support for age limits.
Though I, too, would vote for, say, an 80-year age limit, if given the chance . . . age is not really the problem. I know people in their eighties who could well serve in Congress.
For a time.
The better answer is good old-fashioned term limits, which garner even greater public support.
Mitch McConnell entered the U.S. Senate at age 42. He then spent the next 42 years in Washington, the longest serving senator in Kentucky history.
The six older U.S. Senators — Durbin (IL), Grassley (IA), King (ME), McConnell (KY), Risch (ID), Sanders (VT) — average 33 years in Congress, while the 17 octogenarian House members average 28 years. Only Rep. Jim Baird of Indiana has been there less than a decade, first elected at age 73.
“We don’t think senility is really the problem,” says U.S. Term Limits CEO Nick Tomboulides. “We think incumbency is the problem, and senility is the symptom.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Part of the politics with Sen. McConnell is partisan: he is a Republican but the governor who would appoint his replacement for the rest of 2026 is a Democrat.
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