On January 26, 1992, Boris Yeltsin announced that Russia would stop targeting United States cities with nuclear weapons.
Abusive investigations that must themselves be investigated are piling up.
In the case commanding our attention today, the meta-investigating organization is the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. It is investigating the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).
Who does FinCEN pursue? True scoundrels? Hapless executives caught in a regulatory net?
Nope. FinCEN has been on fishing expeditions. It hasn’t been going after persons suspected of either willfully committing crimes or even tripping over regulations accidentally, or at least not only such types.
It has been going after anybody whose purchasing history puts them in the category of wrong-thinking rightists — hence, I guess, crypto-terrorists.
FinCEN has been instructing banks to scan customer records for evidence of suspect purchases. Not illegal purchases. Just “suspicious” in light of an ideological filter, unconstitutionally applied.
On Twitter, Representative Jim Jordan reported recently that the subcommittee now knows that FinCEN required financial institutions to screen transactions in which terms like “MAGA,” “Trump,” “Bible,” and “Bass Pro Shop” popped up.
Apparently, if you’re fishing while wearing a MAGA cap and quoting Genesis, you just might be on the verge of shooting up your local post office.
Please don’t ask me to explain what anybody involved with FinCEN could possibly be thinking by engaging in this illegal spying. Or whether they have even a glancing acquaintance with constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
I’m just glad Jordan and his Weaponization Subcommittee are on the job, “watching the watchers.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
There are two parts to good government: one is the actual obedience of citizens to the laws, the other part is the goodness of the laws which they obey.
Aristotle, Politics, 4.8, Benjamin Jowett, trans. (1885).
On January 25, 1787, Shays’ Rebellion experienced its largest confrontation, outside the Springfield Armory, with four of the rebels dead, 20 wounded.
The rebellion was a key moment in United States history. Daniel Shays and his followers objected to Massachussetts’s high taxes and rampant cronyism. The revolt, which was completely suppressed, led to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, drawing George Washington from his retirement to serve as the new union’s president.
Capitalism is better than socialism.
The new libertarian president of Argentina, Javier Milei, recently explained the virtues of the free market to attendees of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Milei said that capitalism generates “an explosion of wealth,” that capitalism and the industrial revolution “lifted 90 percent of the world’s population out of poverty,” that a free market society is both practical
“Far from being the cause of our problems, free enterprise capitalism as an economic system is the only tool we have to end hunger, poverty, and destitution across the planet. The empirical evidence
As its answer to the practicality and justice of a capitalist social system, the left proposes the injustice of “social justice,” according to which “capitalism is bad because it is individualistic” and “collectivism is good because it is altruistic.”
Collectivism hobbles the entrepreneur and “makes it impossible for him to produce better goods and offer better services at a better price.” Which only impoverishes us. This is neither practical nor moral.
The West is in danger because it is allowing capitalism to be destroyed. We need to remember why we need it.
Will any of the dignitaries who heard Milei’s talk learn its lessons? Maybe not if they’re like WEF’s founder, Klaus Schwab, who looks at the international predations of the Chinese Communist Party and sees a “responsible, responsive” state.
But maybe a few others will. And then a few more.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Midjourney and Firefly
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
Elbert Hubbard
Ideal: An excuse for murder, tyranny or self-aggrandizement. Any theory that justifies our secret itch.
Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days (1914), p. 73.
Categories
Beaumarchais
On January 24, 1732, French playwright, watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, horticulturalist, arms dealer, satirist, financier, and revolutionary (both French and American) Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was born. He proved instrumental in securing armaments for the America Revolution, but remains best known for his three “Figaro” plays, Le Barbier de Séville, Le Mariage de Figaro and La Mère coupable. The plays remain memorable today chiefly for their operatic settings by Mozart and Rossini.
Beaumarchais died May 18, 1799.
Markets work and markets for housing work.
This is what the new president of Argentina, Javier Milei, has sought to confirm by means of radically free-market economic policies. He is going as far as he can as fast as he can to make Argentina a freer and more prosperous country.
Can he succeed in the long run?
Many exploiters of the socialist status quo ante are bitterly opposed to his reforms and hope to undo them. We’ve seen before how quickly a relatively anticapitalist administration can kill the freedom-expanding reforms of a relatively procapitalist one.
But at least for now, Milei is proving his point, as witness the market for apartments in Buenos Aires.
The Buenos Aires newspaper El Cronista reports (with the help of Google Translate) that with the end of rent controls, the supply of rental units in Buenos Aires has doubled and prices for units have fallen by around 20%. The paper cites data by the Argentine Real Estate Chamber and the reports of brokers.
Under rent control, by 2023 the supply of rentals had shrunk to just 400 units. “Today we have a stock of more than 800 apartments, and it is growing day by day,” says Alejandro Bennazar, a director at
Eight hundred units is still low given the size of the capital city, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Getting rid of the controls caused supply to double instantly. An excellent start.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Midjourney
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
No government can stand which is not founded upon justice.
Aristotle, Politics, 7.14, Benjamin Jowett, trans. (1885).
Categories
Stendhal, Cobden & Chevalier
On January 23, 1783, journalist and novelist Marie-Henri Beyle, known by his pen name Stendhal (pictured above), was born. Stendhal was a follower of Destutt de Tracy and an attendant at the count’s salons. His most famous works include the novel The Red and the Black and a treatise on romantic love.
Stendhal died March 22, 1842.
On January 23, 1860, the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty was signed between France and Great Britain. The treaty was named after the two main proponents of the agreement, Richard Cobden (in England) and economist Michel Chevalier (in France). The treaty had been suggested the year earlier, in British Parliament, by Cobden’s colleague John Bright, who looked upon the policy as a peace measure, an alternate to a military build-up.