September 2 marks the 1839 birth of American economist and reformer Henry George.
George is most famous for his 1879 treatise, Progress and Poverty, but made other contributions, including advocacy of the secret ballot and his able economic policy polemic Protection or Free Trade (1886).
Their low-overhead, low-profit-margin Richmond company, Valancourt Books, founded in 2005, prints long unavailable volumes one at a time, as customers request them. To operate, the publishers must first carefully retype the books, often formerly available only in rare editions or even microfiches.
It’s two guys working out of their home doing everything. They profit only by keeping costs low.
By 2018, the Valancourt catalog listed over 400 books. That’s when the federal government came down upon the company like a ton of bricks. Invoking a 1790 copyright law, the U.S. Copyright Office demanded that Valancourt send it one copy each of hundreds of different books. Otherwise, they’d be fined up to $250 per book and further fines for “willfully or repeatedly” failing to comply.
The publishers’ choice was either spend thousands of dollars and lots of time printing and shipping the books — or be penalized out of existence. Instead of giving up, they turned to the Institute for Justice and went to court.
IJ argued that government “cannot simply force you to turn over personal property on pain of ruinous fines, and they cannot punish you for publishing a book without letting them know.”
Now, years later, IJ and Valancourt have won their case.
It’s a win for all small publishers who might otherwise have been ruined by the whims of bureaucrats at the Copyright Office. That it had to be litigated, however, is more evidence that freedom requires constant vigilance.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The wise man looks into space and does not regard the small as too little, nor the great as too big, for he knows that, there is no limit to dimensions.
Master Zhuang, from 莊子/秋水.
Slovakia celebrates a Constitution Day on September 1, for the Constitution passed by the Slovak National Council on September 1, 1992.
The Slovaks place their rights provision early in their document, like most American states, and not as amendments, as in the Constitution of the United States of America.
Other flags, including the Stars and Stripes, are symbolic without being explicit.
What American could be against it? To oppose the Gadsden Flag is to oppose liberty!
But, these days, there are a lot of people who try to impugn the flag and the concept as being, I kid you not, “white supremacist” and “pro-slavery.”
It’s absurd, of course. Slaves were tread upon. Those who demand not to be tread upon object to their own slavery. And, by extension, others’.
Tell that to the woke mob.
And to public school administrators.
On Monday, a likely lad named Jaiden was removed from his class at Vanguard Elementary in Colorado Springs. He triggered his teacher with a patch on his backpack featuring the Gadsden. When his mother confronted the charter school’s administrator, recording the chat, the administrator defended the action on the usual woke grounds: its alleged “origins with slavery.”
Oddly, not even the school rules gave grounds to remove him for it — even if it were “about slavery.” (To repeat: it’s about slavery’s opposite.)
I smell the stink of partisanship. Many teachers and administrators so object to some people who like the flag that they distort facts to enforce ideological conformity on students.
The story has a happy ending, though. Jaiden was exonerated, walking into school with the patch still visible.
To make the story better, however, the teachers and administrators who thought they could tread upon Jaiden should be severely reprimanded, if not fired outright. For violating his rights.
And for not knowing history.
Flunk ’em!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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For the discovery of truth, your one and only sure or well-founded hope is the possession of this power: you must be able to judge and sift truth from falsehood; you must have the assayer’s sense for sound and true or forged coin. . . .
Lucian, in his dialogue Hermotimus.
On August 31, 1870, educator Maria Montessori was born.
August 31 serves as Independence Day for Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, and Trinidad and Tobago.
But the locals quickly discovered this was not just an unregistered business, or the anodyne testing service the paperwork for the company promised. What they found in the warehouse was a suspicious array of mice, living and dead, and vials of diseases, kept, we are told, in a careless manner.
Almost as ominously, the business — Prestige Biotech, previously known as Universal Meditech Inc. — is Chinese-owned and operated.
And had received government subsidies.
Ours! Who knows what came from China?
“House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Rep. Jim Costa (D-Calif.), who represent congressional districts in California’s Central Valley, wrote a letter to the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee seeking a probe into how and why Universal Meditech Inc. was granted two Payment Protection Program (PPP) loans of $74,912 each in April 2020 and February 2021,” explains The Epoch Times.
The company had previously been awarded — but did not qualify for or actually receive — a $360,000 tax credit under California’s CalCompetes GO-Biz program.
Why wasn’t this tale told for half a year?
“The FBI,” as Mark Tapscott writes, “imposed a blackout on any public statements about the facility.”
“[T]he FBI and the CDC and everybody else in the alphabet soup of state and federal agencies” told locals not to comment, says Reedley City Manager Nicole Zieba.
Curiously, the reporting makes no mention of Homeland Security. What is that agency for, again?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 1103a.33.
On August 30, 1918, Fanny Yefimovna Kaplan shot and seriously injured Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Though certainly justifiable on some primary level — evil killers with power probably deserve to be killed in turn — this assassination attempt prompted the mass arrests and executions known as the Red Terror.
August 30, 1999, saw East Timor’s referendum vote for independence from Indonesia succeed.