The old Romans all wished to have a king over them because they had not yet tasted the sweetness of freedom.
Titus Livius, History of Rome, Book I, §17.
On March 14, 1900, the Gold Standard Act was ratified, ending the long practice of bimetallism by placing the United States Treasury — and banking and currency — on the gold standard.
Has DEI “killed the CHIPS Act”?
The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 created a giant package of subsidies that shouldn’t exist to begin with and is made even worse by all the strings attached.
The Act authorizes giving $52 billion of taxpayer money to microchip manufacturers to make chips in the U.S. The boost to domestic production will supposedly help us if China invades Taiwan and disrupts Taiwan’s globe-leading microchip industry.
But chipmakers eligible for the largesse are recoiling from all the embedded DEI mandates. “DEI” means “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” It’s a collectivist mantra and ideology designed to make employers fret about racial and gender quotas and DEI indoctrination at the expense of hiring qualified people and making high-quality microchips.
According to Matt Cole and Chris Nicholson, writing for The Hill, nineteen sections of the Act are devoted to DEI. One gives the Department of Commerce a mission that Commerce describes as “strengthening the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem” by ensuring “significant investments to create opportunities for Americans from historically underserved communities.”
The authors believe that CHIPS is “so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move.” Worse, it’s making it hard for chipmakers to move, forced to focus away from making microchips and, instead, onto the wasteful exercise of appeasing regulators.
Now that they are finally about to get CHIPS funding, Intel and others are delaying announced factories and foundries on U.S. sites and instead going ahead with more overseas plants.
I guess they want to get stuff done.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Simone Weil
Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947; 1997 edition), p. 120.
On March 13, 1862, the U.S. federal government forbade all Union army officers from returning fugitive slaves, thus effectively annulling the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation.
President Biden may be doddering, dithering, and cranky, but his writers are mis-educated dolts.
The State of the Union address, last week, was performed before Congress by a man so hopped-up on stimulants that . . . one looks for precedents. Not among the U.S. Presidents, though, but among the Chancellors — the “schkankily clankily” guy, as Norm Macdonald referred to him; the man who is known to have
I bring up precedents because Biden’s writers
The address began by memorializing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1941 address before Congress, in which FDR used the word “unprecedented.” Biden’s speech writers take this as an occasion to use the word. “Now it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union.”
And then proceed to mention more precedents for the “unprecedentedness” of it all.
It’s almost as if they don’t know the meaning of
The biggest precedent is the pure partisan nature of the message, which — instead of performing a sober constitutional duty to give Congress the president’s view of the union of the states — has become, in recent years, a simplistic barrage of invective against the president’s opposing party.
This year’s SOTU address was worse than ever on the partisan divide, with “populist” attacks upon the SCOTUS for allowing Roe v. Wade to fall, and relentless attacks on Republicans. The most interesting and substantive topic was Social Security, with the usual (quite precedented) promise to shore it up with tax increases . . . on the rich. (Reason magazine took the idea seriously and found its fault.)
Thankfully, Biden’s writers avoided the biggest State of the Union cliché of all: the traditional pronouncement that the state of the union “is sound.”
It is not.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Law is a thing which is insensible, and inexorable, more beneficial and more profitious to the weak than to the strong; it admits of no mitigation nor pardon, once you have overstepped its limits.
Titus Livius, History of Rome, Book II, §3.
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Two Criminals
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.
How to get school choice reform? Keep fighting.
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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Friedrich Schlegel
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.