On March 12, 2009, financier Bernard Madoff pled guilty to pulling off perhaps the biggest swindle in U. S. history. One year earlier to the day, in the same city, New York, the state’s governor, Eliot Spitzer, resigned a mere two days after reports had surfaced that he was listed as a client in a high-end escort/call-girl prostitution ring.
The cause of freedom is advanced with every criminal nabbed and every hypocritical illiberal politician disgraced.
Last year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Republican, worked with families and school choice activists to pass school-choice legislation.
SB1 would have given parents who want to take their kids from public to private schools $8,000 a year for tuition, textbooks, and other expenses: taxpayer money that parents would have been able to spend as they saw fit instead of being forced to let public schools get it regardless of performance.
The educrats and their allies were opposed. “Public dollars belong in public schools. Period,” was the comprehensive argument of the Texas Democratic
With his own party constituting a majority of lawmakers in each legislative chamber, it seemed that Governor Abbott and families could have won anyway. The state senate did pass school-choice legislation. As it turned out, though, too many Republican lawmaker in the house were on the anti-choice team.
Which Republicans? The ones that Abbott and other friends of school choice targeted in this year’s primaries. They spent millions of dollars backing challengers who support school choice. And the governor appeared at campaign events to criticize incumbent Republicans who oppose it.
The net result? Of the current 21 anti-school-choice GOP representatives, only six to ten will be returning to the legislature in 2025. (The exact number won’t be known until runoffs on May 28.)
The elections may thus bring enough of a change in the state legislature to let school choice happen for parents and their students in Texas.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Der Künstler darf eben so wenig herrschen als dienen wollen.
Er kann nur bilden, nichts als bilden, für den Staat also nur
das thun, dass er Herrscher und Diener bilde, dass er
Politiker und Oekonomen zu Künstlern erhebe.
The artist should have as little desire to rule as to serve. He can only create, do nothing but create, and so help the state only by . . . exalting politicians and economists into artists.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel, “Ideas,” Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), § 54.
On March 11, 1702, The Daily Courant, England’s first national daily newspaper, was published for the first time. It was a one-sheet, concentrated on foreign news, sans commentary. The reverse side sported advertising. It was produced by Elizabeth Mallet (1672–1706), a printer and bookseller who lived, and published the paper, next to the Kings Arms tavern at Fleet Bridge in London.
Among the biggest stories of the day is the wokification of corporate America.
The update? Corporations’ are pulling back from their activism, at least according to a report in The Epoch Times:
Wall Street titans appear to be having an increasingly hard time reconciling the conflicting goals of progressive activism and shareholder returns.
Until recently, many banks, asset managers, and insurers portrayed these goals as complementary, asserting that climate risk is financial risk and that the competence of management can be assessed by its commitment to social justice goals.
Today, however, those narratives are rarely heard.
Kevin Stocklin, “Corporations Are Losing the ESG Battle, Forcing Them to Hide Advocacy,” The Epoch Times (March 08, 2024).
The story behind the story is perhaps even more interesting, for it shows how easy it is to control America’s corporations: control the investment groups that own most of the stocks.
Which reminds us of Peter Drucker’s claim that socialism was coming to America via retirement funds.
Drucker sounded so . . . optimistic . . . about that. Didn’t he?
But what if socialism is bad no matter how you achieve it?
The day of the android has dawned.
Brian Aldiss, “Are You An Android?,” Science Fantasy #34 (April 1959).
On March 10, 1922, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), activist and theorist of non-violent revolution, was arrested in India, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison, only to be released nearly two years later for an appendicitis operation.
The idea that one needn’t be a citizen to vote in America’s local, state and even federal elections is being flirted with in many of the country’s biggest, “bluest” cities. Coverage here, on this site, includes this piece from last year, about the strange political maneuverings in our “Alien National Capital”:
Now the wackos in Washington, D.C., have enacted a non-citizen voting measure that goes further. It allows Russian nationals working for Mr. Putin at their embassy in our nation’s capital to vote on city candidates and ballot issues and welcomes onto Washington’s voter rolls Chinese citizens here promoting Xi Jinping and the interests of his genocidal regime.
The District of Columbia’s ordinance extends the franchise even to people here illegally, allowing anyone from anywhere in the world able to avoid deportation to cast a ballot. Legally.
We’ve updated this story in a number of ways, but in case you think this isn’t a movement of some kind, here is just one additional city from the current season:
A community which cannot or will not realize how insignificant a part of the universe it occupies is not truly civilized. That is to say, it contains a fatal ingredient which renders it, to whatever extent, unbalanced.
Brian Aldiss, Non-Stop (1958).
March 9 marks the 1763 birthday of British pamphleteer and activist William Cobbett. Cobbett was known for his lifelong opposition to authority, and his later-in-life “radicalism,” which included his opposition to Britain’s protectionist Corn Laws as well as his support for Catholic Emancipation. Cobbett died in 1835.
In 1776 on this date, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which became the first widely accepted landmark work in the field of economics. It was not the first general treatise on the subject, however; that designation almost certainly belongs to banker Richard Cantillon’s Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général, cited by Smith in his more famous book. It is also worth noting that Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s systematic treatise, Le Commerce et le Gouvernement, also saw publication in 1776.
On March 9, 1862, the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia fought to a draw in the Battle of Hampton Roads, the first battle between two ironclad warships. The Virginia was built on the remains of the USS Merrimack, and the battle is often referred to as between “the Monitor and the Merrimack.”