“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
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Frederick Douglass
“No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”
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Emancipation Proclamation
On Jan. 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the final Emancipation Proclamation, which ended slavery in the rebelling states. A preliminary proclamation had been issued in September 1862, following the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam. As the proclamation freed slaves only in rebellious areas, it actually freed no one, since these were areas not yet under Union control. Yet, the act signaled an important shift in the Union’s Civil War aims, expanding the goal of the war from reunification to include the eradication of slavery.
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Tom Sowell on warm, fuzzy words and phrases
Punching fog, warming up fuzzy phrases, and understanding “social justice”:
“Society” is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. The justice society can provide cannot require either complete knowledge or total power. Pretending it can, or should, is pure folly.
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Edison lights up Menlo Park
On Dec. 31, 1879, Thomas Alva Edison lit up a street in Menlo Park, New Jersey, the first public demonstration of his incandescent lightbulb. Although the first incandescent lamp had been produced 40 years earlier, no inventor had been able to come up with a practical design until Edison embraced the challenge in the late 1870s.
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Ammon Hennacy
“I’m not trying to change the world. I’m trying to stop the world from changing me.”
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Easy to Be Hard
Politicians often try to pass laws making it more difficult for citizens to petition issues onto the ballot, claiming that it’s too easy to gather all those signatures.
Speaking of easy, that’s awfully easy for politicians to say.
If they’re major party candidates, Democrats or Republicans, they usually don’t have to come up with any voter signatures at all to place themselves on the ballot. Even in the few states that require major party candidates to gather signatures, the numbers are nominal, a few hundred at most.
Funny, we certainly don’t hear former House Speaker Newt Gingrich or Texas Governor Rick Perry prattling on about how simple and carefree it is to gather thousands of signatures. That’s because presidential ballot access is sometimes much more difficult and both candidates just failed to collect the required 10,000 valid signatures to gain a spot on the Virginia ballot as Republican presidential candidates.
To place a statutory issue on the 2010 ballot in Nevada, a state sporting about a quarter of Virginia’s population, required 97,000 signatures. That’s ten times more than demanded of Gingrich and Perry. To place a statutory measure on the Arizona ballot requires 172,809 signatures; a constitutional amendment needs 259,213.
Governor Perry is challenging Virginia’s unconstitutional law banning non-residents from helping collect signatures. I hope he wins. But maybe the best way to prevent legislators from passing laws that make petitioning too difficult is to make those laws apply to them and how they get on the ballot.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Daniel Webster
“There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.”
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Gadsden Purchase
On Dec. 30, 1853, American Ambassador to Mexico James Gadsden signed what came to be known as the Gadsden Purchase, a treaty whereby the U.S. bought a 29,670-square-mile region of present-day southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico from Mexico. The purchase was the last major territorial addition to the contiguous United States. Purchasing property is the proper way for a free country to acquire it.
“The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.”