“We do not want to fritter away our short lives in chains, even if they are golden chains of prosperity and power.”
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Committee for Assistance to Jews
On 4 Dec. 1942, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz set up the underground Council for the Assistance of the Jews in Warsaw, Poland, codenamed Żegota. Providing medical care, relief money and false identity documents for those hiding in German-occupied Poland, the organization helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews.
On this day in 2005, an estimated 60,000 to 250,000 people in Hong Kong protested for democracy, calling for universal and equal suffrage, the right to directly elect the Chief Executive and all the seats of the Legislative Council, and am end to the appointed seats of the district councils.
What do you call a defense bill that allows indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay of American citizens accused but not convicted of assisting terrorists without due process? Tyranny. Unconstitutional. Rand Paul compares the now-pending legislation to the hated Egyptian Emergency Law enforced against dissidents for 30 years, which ended with the overthrow of the Mubarak regime:
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Alan Bock born
On Dec. 3, 1943, Alan Bock was born. Bock was an American libertarian author, and a senior editorial writer and former editorial page editor for the Orange County Register. He wrote regular columns for WorldNetDaily and Antiwar.com and was a contributing editor at Liberty magazine. Bock was the author of four books: Ecology Action Guide, The Gospel Life of Hank Williams, Ambush at Ruby Ridge, and Waiting to Inhale: the Politics of Medical Marijuana. Bock died earlier this year, on May 18. He would have been 68 today.
“It has been my observation that going into government, especially in a high-visibility job, lowers a person’s IQ by at least 50 points.”
Politics is often the art of lying about the effects of policy, and Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s Prevaricator-in-Chief, is a master politician. As consumer-price inflation hits a 27 percent per annum rate, he blames capitalism.
One report summarizes his position: “Mr. Chavez said the market had become a perverse mechanism where the big monopolies, the big trans-nationals, and the bourgeoisie, dominate and ransack the people.”
So he’s extended price controls from staples to all sorts of goods, with some prices being immediately subjected to a rate freeze. Big firms will have to report costs to the government, so bureaucrats can determine a “fair price.”
Were it not a ratcheting up of oppression and hardship, I’d say this is all getting rather funny. Price controls notoriously fail to achieve what they aim. In the United States, Nixon-era wage and price controls set stagflation into overdrive. Long lines at the gas pumps, shortages in supermarkets, and rising prices. What a mess.
There’s good theory to explain why price floors and price ceilings cause major problems. But according to the head of the country’s price control board, “The law of supply and demand is a lie.”
Hugo and his cronies deny the relevance of the central bank’s doubling the volume of money in circulation since late 2007. Supply of money increases? No possible effect on skyrocketing prices, supply and demand being a lie, you see.
Meanwhile, people have begun to hoard products. It’s now almost impossible to even find coffee in Venezuelan stores.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Washington warned Brown hanged
On Dec. 2, 1777, according to legend, Philadelphia housewife and nurse Lydia Darragh saves the lives of General George Washington and his Continental Army when she overhears the British planning a surprise attack on Washington’s army.
On this day in 1859, abolitionist John Brown is hanged for his raid on Harper’s Ferry. He wrote, “The crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”
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Frederick Douglass
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
America’s agricultural policies are notoriously crazy. The federal government subsidizes one crop while discouraging its use at the consumer end. The old New Deal program of paying farmers not to grow crops is still in place. The high tariff on sugar artificially increases prices far above the world price.
To compensate, the federal government helped develop a refined sugar substitute, high fructose corn syrup — an even more “sugary” sugar — and then infected nearly the whole food supply with it.
So, some sympathy for the “locavore” movement, the folks who believe we should eat foods grown in the areas we live. It seems more natural. Less goofy.
But it’s also a lot more costly, considering that buying locally tends to forsake gains from trade.
So a law to prop up locavore production and consumption, like the legislation introduced early in November by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME), cannot help but shuffle two steps back for every misstep forward. Basically, it’s about more subsidy, including $30 million for “Value-Added Producer Grants,” $15 million for “farmer food safety training,” $90 million for something called a “Specialty Crop Block Program.” The least obviously bad part would direct the “USDA Research, Education, and Extension Office to coordinate classical plant and animal breeding research activities,” though I don’t see why farmers can’t manage this on their own. This is the Age of the Internet, after all, of Information.
Congress: Forget it; repeal current agribusiness subsidy and protectionism, instead.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?”