On January 22, 1863, the January Uprising broke out in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. The aim of this nationalist movement was to regain the Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian Commonwealth from occupation by Russia. The uprising was not a success, completely crushed the next year.
Beyond subsidized daycare? Health care, home health care, Medicaid.
Fraud, fraud, fraud.
But it wasn’t just a lone Reason scholar saying it. “What we’re seeing in Minnesota … is dwarfed by what I saw in California,” The Epoch Times quotes Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Minnesota, Dr. Oz said, “is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Just in California’s hospice and home health care, Oz figures, fraud rockets up to at least $4 billion.
Add a few billion here and there and soon you’re talking real money.
I titled my commentary quoting Ms. de Rugy “The Tip of the Socialism-berg.” Remember Mr. Socialism? Karl Marx? He introduced to the world a complicated, rather magical theory of exploitation in market society focusing on “surplus value.” While I have trouble making heads or tails of his theory — seems utterly nuts — I do know something about its origin.
Marx nabbed it from classical liberal French scholars who preceded him. But they said the exploitation was through government mechanisms: it’s those who skim off of taxes who exploit the masses.
Marx turned it upside down.
So let’s turn things right-side up: we all know that when it comes to policy, good intentions don’t make up for bad consequences. And those who de-fraud the taxpayers don’t have “good intentions.”
They’re thieves.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Men who can succeed in deceiving no one else will succeed at last in deceiving themselves.
Anthony Trollope, Miss Mackenzie (1865).
On January 21, 1950, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury, with Whittaker Chambers being the main witness in Hiss’s prosecution. Chambers confessed to having been a Soviet spy, and accused Hiss as an accomplice, which Hiss denied to his dying day. Chambers gave a fascinating account of all this in his bestselling 1952 memoir, Witness.
I see one brewing between the new communist mayor of New York City and those judges who respect law and the U.S. Constitution.*
Some say that Zohran Mamdani, though on record admitting his goal of seizing the means of production, is technically not a communist. Well, if allowed to fully impose all he wants on New Yorkers, maybe that would amount to going straight to a fascist model of totalitarian governance — bypassing the Maoist-Stalinist stage.
Giving him the benefit of the doubt.
But we do know that Mamdani was quick to hire such advisors as housing czarina Cea Weaver, who has lamented home ownership as a “weapon of white supremacy” and declared property as such to be something regrettably long treated as “an individualized good” that now must be treated as a “collective good.”
If you don’t own your house as an individual and have a spare room (or half a room), and somebody needs a place to live, could a Mamdani-and-Weaver-run Big Apple compel you to give space to a stranger that you don’t want around? If property becomes a “collective good” and all must cuddle in the warm bosom of the state-managed collective, the answer must be: yes.
But New Yorkers may not be quite doomed.
Not, anyway, if there are enough judges like David Jones, who recently interfered with an attempt by the Mamdani administration to interfere in the sale of many rental properties owned by Pinnacle Group.
Mamdani’s office says they’ll keep trying.
Of course they will.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Or the New York State Constitution, for that matter: see §7 (a), which clearly states that “Private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation.”
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Make sure your plan is foolproof before going ahead with it.
“Franklin W. Dixon,” in The Hardy Boys’ Guide to Life (2002), cited as if from the 18th Hardy Boys’ mystery, The Twisted Claw (1939; 1969), not confirmed.
On January 20, 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union was founded.
The man uttered opinions on social media with which some people disagreed. A Swiss court fined him 500 Swiss francs. He refused to pay — believing that one should not be fined or condescend to pay fines for merely uttering opinions, no matter how annoying they may be.
So the Swiss government sent Brünishol to prison for ten days.
His terrible views?
That skeletons can be only male or female. He also seemed to suggest that trans people are mentally ill.
The post: “If you excavate LGBTQI [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex] people after 200 years, you will only find men and women among the skeletons; everything else is a mental illness that was fostered by the curriculum!”
Agree, disagree, in whole or in part — not the issue. The issue is why Brünisholz’s wading into issues of sex and gender caused the Swiss police to haul him in for questioning “on suspicion of incitement to hatred.”
If somebody’s gonna hate you because you disagree with them on a question, the only alternative to “inciting hatred” is staying mute or uttering opinions so empty that not even the most eager censor would think to call the cops about it. And then how can we ever discuss anything that is both controversial and important?
Of course, none of the sensitive Europeans forwarding Facebook posts to the police are being fined for their own hatred — of freedom of speech.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The easiest person to deceive is one’s own self.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Disowned (1828).
On January 19, 1795, the Batavian Republic was proclaimed in the Netherlands, replacing the Dutch Republic.