“Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”
Wikipedia surprised a lot of people, changed a lot of minds: Online collaboration can accomplish great things. Following Wikipedia, other interactive, collaborative, not-quite-commercial Web-based projects have offered more evidence that the Internet can transform everyday life.
Take Kickstarter.com. It’s really ramped up to something impressive, as Carl Franzen points out at Talking Points Memo:
One of the company’s three co-founders, Yancey Strickler, said that Kickstarter is on track to distribute over $150 million dollars to its users’ projects in 2012, or more than entire fiscal year 2012 budget for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which was $146 million.
Lots of folks around the world — including shirttail acquaintances of mine — have successfully used the Internet service to fund outré projects. Basically, they drew up proposals and placed them on Kickstarter, and people the world over chipped in to get the projects off the ground. As Franzen explains, all sorts of projects find funding that way, “everything from iPod Nano watches to children’s books on reproduction.”
While I look at this as a great development, another way in which free peoples can get good things done without government, not everyone is so positive — the above-quoted Strickler, for instance: “Maybe there’s a reason for the state to strongly support the arts.”
Or maybe not. Maybe Kickstarter is pointing towards the right way to fund projects that, before the Internet, were hard to invest in or otherwise sponsor.
Maybe it’s about time.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“When your outgo exceeds your income, the upshot may be your downfall.”
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ATF’s Waco raid, GOP organized
On Feb. 28, 1993, agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, with media in tow, raided the Waco, Texas, compound of the Branch Davidian religious group, prompting a gun battle in which four agents and six Davidians were killed. The federal agents were attempting to arrest the leader of the Branch Davidians, David Koresh, on information that the religious sect was stockpiling weapons. A nearly two-month standoff after the unsuccessful raid ended with an assault on the compound on April 19, 1993, and a fire that burned the compound to the ground killing 76 Davidians, including Koresh and 20 children.
On Feb. 27, 1854, the Republican Party of the United States was organized in Ripon, Wisconsin.
Complaining about the cost of holding an election is usually done by those who fear the election’s likely outcome, not the price.
I’m not very sympathetic.
Yet, I’m in total agreement with Andrew Wilson, a resident fellow at the Show-Me Institute, whose article “Money Down a Drain: The Millions Spent on Missouri’s No-Show Feb. 7 Election,” states flatly that legislators ought to be “embarrassed” for calling “a statewide election” in which “nobody came.”
Missouri taxpayers forked out $7 million to hold the state’s February 7 presidential primary, which produced only a meager eight percent voter turnout, netting a whopping $25 cost for every vote cast.
The legislature had moved the primary date up to gain a greater edge for the state in determining delegates for deciding the presidential nominee. When that timetable didn’t work with the National Republican Party’s nominating rules, legislation was drafted to cancel the primary.
But the legislature and the governor couldn’t bring the bill beyond the draft stage. Instead, they stuck Show-Me State citizens with spending seven million for, well, show . . . the primary having been rendered absolutely meaningless in terms of winning delegates.
Hence the low voter turnout.
There is a very simple solution. Let political parties have the freedom to run their own affairs, their own primaries. And let them do it without taxpayer subsidy.
Governments (taxpayers) pay for the general election; parties pay for their primaries.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Ralph Nader
Initiative and referendum is the citizen activist’s ‘ace in the hole.’
Ralph Nader was born on February 27, 1934 .
It’s getting to become more and more popular to bash initiative rights — even when those rights are not very relevant. I hear rumblings in California that the hopeless Republicans, there, are gearing up for more of such nonsense. But beware, folks: This puts you in very dangerous company, amongst defenders of outright tyranny. See my column at Townhall.com this weekend.
For references associated with that column, click the links below:
- New York Times: “Why China’s Political Model Is Superior,” by Eric X. Li
- Wikipedia: “List of Countries by GDP”
- MSNBC: “Chair left empty for jailed Chinese Nobel winner“
For last week’s column, view it on This Is Common Sense.
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Robert Novak, born Feb. 26, 1931
“The Republican Congress should have been courageously advancing the Republican agenda and should not have been afraid of it. But they’re not playing to win; they’re playing not to lose.”
“God put the Republican Party on earth to cut taxes. If they don’t do that, they have no useful function.”
“It is up to the government to keep the government’s secrets.”
There’s a lot of interesting talk here at “The Devil’s Advocate”:
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Yellow Revolution 1986 Philippines
On Feb. 25, 1986, President Ferdinand Marcos fled the Philippines after 20 years of repressively ruling the nation and Corazon Aquino became the Philippines’ first woman president in a peaceful revolution sometimes called the “Yellow Revolution” because of the yellow ribbons used during street demonstrations.