Liars ought to have good memories.
Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (1689).
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Algernon Sidney
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Buchanan & Vidal
On October 3, 1919, James M. Buchanan was born. Buchanan would develop the theory of “Public Choice,” and receiving the 1986 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work. His books include Cost and Choice, The Calculus of Consent (with Gordon Tullock), and The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan. Some of his most interesting research was into the realm of constitutional theory and practice.
He died January 9, 2013.
In 1925, on this date, Gore Vidal was born. Vidal would go on to become one of the leading post-WWII liberal essayists as well as a major novelist and screenwriter. His most famous novels include Burr, 1876, and Lincoln, installments in his American history series; his collection of essays, The United States, was one of his many bestsellers. Vidal was an elitist who expressed sympathy for populism and socialism, but also was a radical civil libertarian, and may occupy the extreme of the “liberal” quadrant in American political ideology: great on personal liberties but quite bad on market/property liberties.
He died on July 31, 2012.
“Metro is dangling from a fiscal cliff,” hollers last Saturday’s Washington Post editorial headline. The “transit system faces a ‘death spiral’ starting next summer,” according to “the usually stolid pages of Metro’s financial projections.”
The Post informs that Metro’s “systemic budget problems have been compounded by pandemic-driven revenue shortfalls, inflation and the upcoming expiration of a federal bailout for transit systems.”
Oh, what a cruel turn of events, Washington’s ill-mannered and unsafe transit system needs a bailout from local politicians . . . because the current financial bailout it receives from federal taxpayers is about to fizzle out.
Life is tough.
Metro has only about 70 percent of the funding it needs, so get ready for blood-curdling cries of “drastic service cuts”— until or “unless the region’s elected officials, along with Congress, devise a fix,” The Post tells us.
Hell of a way to run a railroad — not earning a profit. Constantly failing customers and just as regularly begging for more money from politicians who get that moolah from folks like me . . . who rarely if ever use the mass transit we are told is so essential to us.
There’s a better way.
“Rail company Brightline began operating trains Friday from Miami to Orlando,” reports The Post, “using the fastest American trains outside the Northeast Corridor to become the first privately owned passenger operator to connect two major U.S. metropolitan areas in decades.
“The debut of the 235-mile, 3.5-hour ride completes a $6 billion private investment in Florida.”
With speeds “quicker than Amtrak’s” and fares “comparable to Amtrak’s and competitive with airfare,” Brightline chief executive Michael Reininger talks of “the beginning of a new industry and a blueprint for expanding rail in America.”
Two approaches. One uses my tax dollars and fails. The other uses private investment.
And seems to be expanding.
Rather than complaining. And begging.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Glenn Greenwald
So crucial is the online censorship regime to Western power centers that one thing is certain — any individual or company that even thinks about defying it will be severely attacked and punished, often with weapons we have long been taught to regard as despotic when used by our nation’s enemies.
Glenn Greenwald, System Update, September 25, 2023.
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Stroke of Luck
On October 2, 1789, George Washington sent the proposed Constitutional amendments (the United States’ Constitution’s Bill of Rights) to the States for ratification.
On the same date in 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed, preventing him from reacting to the economic downturn following the Great War in a Progressive fashion — making his response de facto laissez faire. One insider, and skeptic of Progressive hubris, archly referred to Wilson’s incapacitation as “a stroke of luck.”
His successor in office, President Warren G. Harding, would go on to massively cut spending as well as taxes, and take on regulation as well. He also released Woodrow Wilson’s domestic war prisoners — ranging from journalists, ordinary folk to socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs — who had dissented from Wilson’s involvement in the war.
The Depression of the early 1920s, though as deep as the early 1930s, proved remarkably brief, thanks to Harding . . . and a “stroke of luck.”
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Watch: Dysfunction (from A to Z)
All our lives we have seen the continuing decay of America’s public schools. Especially in inner cities.
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John Callahan
It’s a question of who you going to believe: your lying eyes or the government?
Former Federal Aviation Administration investigator John Callahan, who, as part of an international panel of two dozen former pilots and government officials convened at a National Press Club conference, “said the CIA in 1987 tried to hush up the sighting of a huge lighted ball four times the size of a jumbo jet in Alaska” [Reuters, Former pilots and officials call for new U.S. UFO probe,” November 12, 2007].
On October 1, 1908, Ford produced the first Model T at a plant in Detroit. The auto could travel 40 miles per hour and ran on gasoline or hemp-based fuel. (As oil prices fell, Ford phased out the hemp option.) The Model T was the first car designed for a mass market, rather than as a luxury item. By 1927, Ford had built 15 million Model T cars – the longest production run of any car model until the Volkswagen Beetle surpassed it in 1972.
On October 1, 1918, Lawrence of Arabia (T.E. Lawrence) helped lead a combined Arab and British force that captured Damascus from the Turks during World War I.
Paul focuses on how public schools have failed us.
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Niccolò Machiavelli
He who desires or wants to reform the State [government] of a City, and wishes that it may be accepted and capable of maintaining itself to everyone’s satisfaction, it is necessary for him at least to retain the shadow of ancient forms, so that it does not appear to the people that the institutions have been changed, even though in fact the new institutions should be entirely different from the past ones: for the general mass of men are satisfied with appearances, as if it exists, and many times are moved by the things which appear to be rather than by the things that are.
Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, XXV (1531).