All knowledge is sacred, but it should not be secret.
Susan Cooper, Over Sea, Under Stone (1965).
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Susan Cooper
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Winter War
On January 7, 1940, the Finnish 9th Division completely destroyed the much-larger Soviet forces on the Raate-Suomussalmi Road, in a crucial battle during Finland’s Winter War.
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Milei’s Chainsaw
Among the big stories we have been following is the Javier Milei epic, the tale of of the colorful new libertarian president of Argentina and his attempt to bring prosperity and freedom to the beleaguered South American country.
Once upon a time Argentina — named for the metal silver — was wealthy, its people gaining in prosperity. It was a common phrase, a century ago, to refer to a prosperous person as being “as rich as an Argentine.” But with the rise of fascism and Peronism and “modernism” in general, the old liberal peace and prosperity course of progress became a metastasizing cancer of statism and growing gap between the rich and poor. So the new president has presented a radical new reform bill to the Argentine congress.
The 351-page bill includes 664 articles aimed at deregulating and modifying laws pertaining to several sectors, including labor, commercial, real estate, aeronautics, and health. According to Milei, the omnibus bill contains two-thirds of all of his reform proposals.
Katarina Hill, “Milei Brings His Chainsaw to Argentina’s Regulatory State,” Reason (December 29, 2023).
A big part of the reform bill is a de-nationalization effort:
The bill mentions 41 companies it proposes to privatize, including the flagship airline Aerolíneas Argentinas, the oil company YFP, the country’s largest bank, Banco de la Nación, the news agency Télam, the water company AYSA, the Argentine mint, and the country’s rail system.
Hill, ibid.
While granting the president some huge powers for a two-year period, the bill would prohibit the government from engaging in all sorts of regulatory activity, especially in the energy industry:
Argentine President Javier Milei is seeking to extinguish decades of government intervention in the nation’s oil industry by unshackling crude exports and leaving local fuel prices at the whim of market forces.
Milei included such measures in sweeping legislation he sent to congress on Wednesday, the latest move since the libertarian president took office on Dec. 10 with a mission to deregulate Argentina’s tightly controlled economy. While his bill has far-reaching consequences for a slew of industries, it features a chapter specifically addressing oil.
Jonathan Gilbert, “Argentina’s Javier Milei Seeks Free Oil Markets in New Legislation,” Bloomberg (December 28, 2023).
The bill would increase export taxes, but offer a tax amnesty for Argentinians. It would eliminate the presidential primary. Other political reforms include
Changes to Argentina’s proportional representation electoral system would raise the number of lawmakers in each district to one per 161,000 inhabitants, from one per 180,000 inhabitants. This would give more power to the populous province of Buenos Aires in the lower house of Congress, according to a note to clients by consultancy firm 1816.
Lucinda Elliott, “What is in Javier Milei’s sweeping Argentina reform bill?” Reuters (December 28, 2023).
The “chainsaw” is in the hands of legislators now.
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Søren Kierkegaard
None has more contempt for what it is to be a man than they who make it their profession to lead the crowd.
Søren Kierkegaard, in Walter Kaufmann, ed., Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, p. 96.
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Montessori, New Mexico & a Mess
On January 6, 1907, Maria Montessori opened her first school and daycare center for working class children in Rome, Italy.
In 1912 on this date New Mexico became the 47th state of America’s United States.
On this date in 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his “Four Freedoms” State of the Union speech, emphasizing vague “freedoms” that enabled government to usurp definable freedoms.
On January 6, 2021, lame duck President Donald John Trump gave a speech in Washington, D.C., aiming to rouse his supporters to pressure the U.S. Senate not to certify some states’ Electoral College votes in Election 2020, to address “election fraud.” Before his speech ended, and under questionable circumstances, some of his supporters (along with some possible false flag agents) broke into the Capitol to set off one of the great political controversies of our time.
She insists it’s about the rule of law. And not political. Not in any way.
“Maine Secretary of State Claims Politics Played ‘No Role’ in Booting Trump Off Ballot,” is how The Epoch Times headlined the story.
Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has unilaterally barred former President Donald Trump from the Maine presidential primary ballot. As in the Colorado case, the excuse rests with the January 6, 2021, protest rally and mob entrance into the capitol building. She says that “the weight of evidence” she “reviewed indicates that it was an insurrection.”
Knowing what real insurrections are, and what words mean, and the long history of protests that get out of hand, including in recent times, most non-partisan people, as well as all Trump supporters, must conclude just the opposite: no insurrection was even attempted.
Bellows may actually believe that the January 6 events constituted an insurrection, that her job allows her to do what has never been done in American history, and that this would be good for the nation.
On the insurrection issue, she and Democrats rely upon motivated reasoning. People worked up in a cause can believe almost anything that would aid the cause. Still, the common-sense guess is that almost no one really believes her . . . but of course her Democratic comrades must pretend.
On the scope of her position, prudence would usually steer a partisan such as herself away from doing such a radical thing.
On the good of the nation, the clear hyperpartisan appearance would exacerbate tensions around the country, widening the divide into a chasm.
What may really be in evidence, though, is that leftists are mimicking the radicalism of the pandemic lockdowns, driven by the sheer frenzy of their vision of themselves as embodiments of righteousness . . . always to exercise arbitrary power.
An enthusiasm that spreads virally. As a mania.
Thus does extremism work.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Sinclair Lewis
He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously.
Sinclair Lewis on the protagonist of Elmer Gantry (1927).
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Ford’s Five
On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company announced an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage of $5 for a day’s labor.
Among the deflections littering former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation letter is the claim that major criticisms of her conduct are “fueled by racial animus.”
The controversies have made Gay, a black woman, very visible. She may have been subjected to racial attacks in emails or on somebody’s blog. I haven’t seen reports of such. It’s possible.
But her letter makes it seem as if she feels all of it, all the criticisms of her understanding of policies regarding the treatment of Jews on campus and criticisms of her own treatment of the words of others in her published work, were “fueled by racial animus.”
If only blacks alone were ever charged with ambiguity about antisemitism or committing plagiarism, the implication might be at least superficially plausible.
But it’s not.
Yesterday, I discussed the considerations that properly affect campus speech policies (“The Resignation”).
Here let me note, first, that scholars of all hues and sexes have been plausibly accused of plagiarism. Example: historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, white woman. Male example: Steven Ambrose.
And, second, that Harvard’s backing and filling and own animus in response to documented charges of plagiarism have converted the matter from a problem mostly for Claudine Gay personally to a problem for Harvard as an institution. By violating its own policies for dealing with the charges and by attacking the messenger, Harvard seemed to be saying that standards of scholarship like “Don’t plagiarize” don’t matter.
But they do.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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George Santayana
What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress, Volume II: Reason in Society (1905), Chapter V, “Democracy.”