Categories
property rights

Into Each Life…

Government is the chief social institution to regularly reduce itself to absurdity.

And by “reduce itself” I do not mean “diminish in size.” I mean “descend the moral ladder.”

Today’s absurdity has been building up for some time. An increasing number of states regulate and even outlaw the collection of rainwater for personal and industrial use:

As bizarre as it sounds, laws restricting property owners from “diverting” water that falls on their own homes and land have been on the books for quite some time in many Western states. Only recently, as droughts and renewed interest in water conservation methods have become more common, have individuals and business owners started butting heads with law enforcement over the practice of collecting rainwater for personal use.

Mike Adams, writing in Natural News, explains the rationale (very weak, even nonsensical) and rightly extrapolates the real meaning of such regulation: “It’s all about control, really.”

Yes. The “governmental mindset” is what you get in when you run for office, and run and run and run for re-election. Just as, if you have a hammer, problems tend to look like nails, for legislators (and their aides and allied bureaucrats) everything looks increasingly like a “government issue” demanding more government, and certainly more laws.

And so it is with rainwater. Politicians want every scarce good that they “provide” to belong to the government from start (clouds and rain, in the case of water) to finish (your kitchen sink, perhaps your gullet). So of course they want to prohibit you from collecting rainwater. That rain must dribble into public drains, enter creek and river, seep into the watershed, and be siphoned off in municipal wells and sold back to you.

Collecting rainwater is like not paying taxes! It’s unthinkable. For a politician.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Patrick Henry

“Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Categories
Today

Patriots gained control of Virginia

On Dec. 9, 1775, the Virginia and North Carolina militias defeated 800 slaves and 200 redcoats serving John Murray, earl of Dunmore and governor of Virginia, at Great Bridge outside Norfolk, ending British royal control of Virginia. The Tory survivors retreated first to Norfolk, then to Dunmore’s ship, where the majority died of smallpox.

Categories
insider corruption too much government

Resigned to Graft?

It has been alleged that Brazil’s Labor Minister, Carlos Lupi, had demanded kickbacks from “charities and non-governmental organizations in exchange for funding from the ministry.” He has also been accused of receiving both a state and a federal government salary. Such talk has undermined his ability to work for the already-beleaguered government of President Dilma Rousseff. So he resigned.

We’ll see what happens to Lupi. But the charges reveal a problem we will always have as long as governments are big. The very ability to “make or break” a project, business or career is itself an opportunity to charge a premium for such service.

The bigger and more arbitrary government is by design, the more opportunity there is for corruption.

So why isn’t all government corrupt?

Well, separation of powers allows one government sector to watch over the others, perhaps jealously. And, as Brazil’s case shows, a free press helps.

But there’s also the cultural element.

A generally honest culture where people follow higher principles as a matter of habit can offset the dangers of governmental arbitrariness. This explains, perhaps, why Scandinavian countries managed under big government as successfully as they did, for so long. Going into the modern welfare state, Scandinavians were generally honest and morally upright.

Over time, though, this element recedes, as opportunities for corruption work their way into every level of society. As has happened in northern Europe generally.

Small, limited, citizen-controlled government is less corruptible. It also encourages a culture of honest dealing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Winston Churchill, First Address as Prime Minister, May 13, 1940

“What is our policy? I will say; ‘It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.’ You ask, What is our aim? I can answer with one word: ‘Victory – victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.’”

Categories
Today

Congress Declares War Against Japan

On Dec. 8, 1941, the day following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt asked for a congressional declaration of war against Japan and Congress passed the declaration that day. (So, that’s how they used to do it.) There was one dissenting vote, that of Jeanette Rankin, the first woman ever elected to Congress. A lifelong pacifist, Rankin had also voted against U.S. entry into the First World War 24 years earlier.

Categories
folly free trade & free markets insider corruption national politics & policies

A $13 Billion Reward

The Federal Reserve, our central bank, hit the news big last week.

Beginning in August 2007 and continuing for the next two and a half years, the Fed lent the world’s biggest banks something like $7.77 trillion dollars at the barely perceptible interest rate of 0.01 percent. With that money, the banks bought Treasury bonds (federal debt) and made $13 billion in profit.

I reported on this multi-trillion-dollar loan figure in December 2008, a few weeks after the biggest day ever of Fed bailout fever. For some reason this information didn’t become widespread or understood until this December, when Judge Andrew Napolitano and Jon Stewart made a big deal of it on their respective TV shows, after Bloomberg reported the profits banks made off all that bailout money.

What does this figure represent? To me, it represents the outrageous amount of magic money a sick and corrupt fiat-dollar/bailout-based system of moral hazard requires when it implodes.

I think we can all justifiably roll our eyes, now, when some rah-rah boy for big government tells us how absolutely necessary it is to have a central bank. The old gold standard never fell apart this badly. The gold requirement itself placed a huge check on out-of-control banking.

But a $13 billion reward for the biggest financial mess in world history? That’s the very opposite of a check or balance on risk-taking, greed, or downright stupidity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Today

Delaware First State

On Dec. 7, 1787, the U.S. Constitution is unanimously ratified by all 30 delegates to the Delaware Constitutional Convention, making Delaware the first state of the modern United States.

Categories
Thought

Marcus Tullius Cicero, who was assassinated on this day in 43 BC

“The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall.”

Categories
general freedom The Draft

Following My Conscience

Paul Jacob, the draft, selective service, registration

In 1984, twenty-seven years ago this very day, three FBI agents pushed their way into my North Little Rock, Arkansas, home and placed me under arrest.

My crime? Violating the Military Selective Service Act — that is, absolutely, positively, publicly refusing to register for the military draft. (I’d have resisted civilian service just as ardently.)

Some folks might call it dodging the draft. But not so — I met the draft head on, and in the great spirit of civil disobedience, I resisted.

Of course, there was no actual draft of young men into the military, simply a bureaucratic and regimented preparation for conscription. Seemed like the optimum time to let Uncle Sam know not to plan on me.

Rest assured, had the country been attacked I’d have been there lickety-split. It was not the military or defending the country to which I objected; it was doing it as a conscript — a slave — rather than as a free man.

I expressed my rationale in detail in several of my writings below, from 27 years ago as well as more recently. But my view was and remains neither radical nor alien, tracking, as it does, with what Ronald Reagan said in 1980: “The draft or draft registration destroys the very values our society is committed to defending.”

As is par for the political course, it was Mr. Reagan’s Justice Department that prosecuted me for continuing to stand up for those “values.” U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, today a presidential candidate, testified on my behalf at trial.

At the trial, the prosecutors freely admitted they had every stitch of personal information the government needed the better to spit me out a draft notice should they decide to conscript young Americans. They lacked only my signature on the form.

But that is what they wanted most: my acquiescence. The law said I must “present myself and submit” to registration. I had not submitted to it; I would not — could not in good conscience do so.

At 24 years of age, with wife and an eight-month old daughter, it was certainly a bit disconcerting to begin my adulthood, my career, as a felon. Moreover, to take that risk simply on the principle of the matter, that conscription is un-American, a totalitarian idea, and not because I was actually threatened with being drafted.

Had I wished not to serve, I could have signed up only to refuse to go when the draft notice arrived . . . or I could have quietly refused to register, and faced no threat of being prosecuted. But my goal wasn’t to personally escape the draft. It was to prevent the draft from coming back, to prevent the damage the draft does to our freedom and our country by enabling a foreign policy of acting as the world’s policemen.

Some disagree with the politics of my stand. They have a right to their opinion. But I think that what we ask of everyone should be to do what they believe is right. Not to be a silent spectator, but to speak up and, when necessary, to take action.

In the end, I was convicted and served five and a half months in a Federal Correctional Institution. For better or worse, the “correction” didn’t take.

And never for an instant have I regretted doing what I thought was right.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

further reading:

Why I Refuse to Register, 5/17/1985

Draft the Congress and Leave My Kids Alone, 12/28/2003

Americans Gung-Ho to Draft Congress, 1/4/2004