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Today

Fannie and Freddie

On September 7, 2008, the U.S. Government “took control” of the two largest mortgage financing companies in the United States, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Both of these had been created, decades before, by Congress as part of a concerted plan to make home ownership easier, and both had gotten completely out of hand during the many years of their existence, especially under new rules established by politicians in the 1990s. The after-market that they helped create — the packaged mortgage market — was what imploded in 2007–2008, leading to the economic slump that Nicholas Nassim Taleb referred to as setting the U.S. government on President Obama’s economic policy course of “eight years of Novocain.”

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education and schooling folly ideological culture

Expulsion of the Sick

covid, college, quarantine, masks, lock down, hysteria

Due to the nature of a respiratory disease like COVID, mass quarantine efforts were doomed to failure. 

We’ve got to breathe; we are social creatures — so locking everyone down, as started in the Spring of 2020, didn’t appear to “slow the spread” (the original aim) and it certainly did not decrease the overall infected or death counts (something the policy did not originally pretend to do). Yet that policy, enacted as an emergency protocol in many states by many governors and mayors extended lockdowns far beyond Trump’s original call for “fifteen days.” 

The extensions were never squared with the initial rationale. 

Never. 

Quarantining the sick, or those who “test positive” for the virus, makes more sense. But only in context of options and human behavior.

“Students who test positive for COVID-19 at the University of Michigan this fall will be forced in many cases to leave campus,” explains Robby Soave at Reason, “an extreme measure that may well encourage sick people to avoid seeking medical attention at all.” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya dubs it a “cruel policy” seemingly “designed to spread covid from the university into the wild.” 

That is, this quarantine effort “won’t stop [COVID] from spreading,” the doctor summarizes.

“Instead of creating a police state to punish students for contracting COVID-19 — something that is, let’s face it, wholly unavoidable,” Mr. Soave speculates, “perhaps university health officials could work harder to provide accommodations for students who get sick and voluntarily agree to quarantine.”

But administrators rule that out: they don’t have the accommodations.

So the policy will inevitably cause hardship while not promoting public health, much less the health of individual students.

Doesn’t make sense. 

I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Edward Young

And what is reason? Be she thus defined:
Reason is upright stature in the soul.

Edward Young, The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality (1742–45), VII. L. 1,526.
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Today

Yves Guyot

Yves Guyot

On September 6, 1843, Yves Guyot was born.

A journalist, economist, and political activist, he once endured a six-month prison term for his campaign against the prefecture of police. He served as minister of public works under the premiership of P.E. Tirard in 1889, retaining his portfolio in the cabinet of Charles de Freycinet until 1892. A free-trade liberal, he lost his seat in the election of 1893 owing to his militant attitude against socialism. His many books included The Principles of Social Economy (1892), The Tyranny of Socialism (1894), The Comedy of Protection (1906), Socialistic Fallacies (1910), and Where and Why Public Ownership Has Failed (1914). He served as editor of Journal des Économistes, following the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari.

Illustration is a detail from a caricature by artist André Gill (1840-1885).

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crime and punishment property rights

The Tide of Theft

shoplift, theft, store, thief, thieves, robbery

There’s a black market for Tide laundry detergent. Who knew?

Giant Food, a Washington, D.C., area grocer, can’t seem to keep national brands such as Tide or Colgate or Advil on store shelves. Not because customers are buying these products, but because they’re stealing them.

Last week, we discussed the revelation by Dick’s Sporting Goods that thievery was a key cause of falling profits. The National Retail Federation believes that $95 billion is lost each year to public pilfering — something other retailers, including Target, Dollar Tree, and Ulta, are acknowledging is a very serious problem.

“Growing losses have spurred giants such as Walmart to shutter locations,” The Washington Post informs.

If we cannot police our own neighborhoods, and police can’t seem to do it, then we rely on . . . big corporations. With 165 supermarkets, Giant has yet to close any stores. Instead, the chain is “hiring more security guards, closing down secondary entrances, limiting the number of items permitted through self-checkout areas, removing high-theft items from shelves and locking up more products.” 

Most vulnerable is “the unprofitable store on Alabama Avenue SE — the only major grocer east of the Anacostia River in Ward 8,” a poor, largely black area of the city.

“We want to continue to be able to serve the community,” explains Giant’s president, “but we can’t do so at the level of significant loss or risk to our associates . . .

“During the first five months of this year,” Target’s chief executive recently leveled with investors, “our stores saw a 120 percent increase in theft incidents involving violence or threats of violence.”

Apparently, folks who pocket other people’s stuff are more likely to also be violent. 

Who saw that coming?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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James Thomson

While Reason drew the plan, the Heart inform’d
The moral page and Fancy lent it grace.

James Thomson (1700–1748), Liberty ( (1734) Pt. IV, L. 262.
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Today

First President of Congress

Responding to British Parliament’s enactment of the Coercive Acts in the American colonies, the first session of the Continental Congress convened at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia, on September 5, 1774. Virginian Peyton Randolph (pictured) was appointed as the first president of Congress. John Adams, Patrick Henry, John Jay and George Washington were among the delegates.

Categories
defense & war international affairs

New Red Map

China, map, borders, aggression

“China warns US Has Crossed Red Line” began Newsweek’s headline to a report that the Chinese state-run Global Times threatens a “brewing and imminent storm of lethal consequences for Taiwan” in retribution for the U.S. recently providing $80 million in military assistance to the island nation. 

China claims Taiwan and its inhabitants, desiring their patriotic company so devoutly as to contemplate leveling much of the country in missile strikes, killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of Taiwanese to achieve that glorious “national rejuvenation.”

Of course, when the U.S. provides defensive weapons to protect against just such a murderous military invasion, the Butchers of Beijing holler it is “provocative!”

Speaking of . . . the Chinazis were kind enough last week to remind us that Taiwan is hardly the only land they’ve got their eyes on. 

The Communist Party just drew a new map. 

India noticed first that the CCP’s penmanship pinched Indian territory. Japan objected to China’s claim of its Senkaku Islands (under U.S. military protection). 

Countries bordering the South China Sea — Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam — have long complained of China’s ridiculous nine-dash-line, claiming roughly 90 percent of the Sea and building militarized islands in the exclusive economic zones of other countries. 

In recent weeks, Chinese ships have used water cannons to block Filipino vessels attempting to resupply their countrymen on an island that international courts have ruled belongs to the Philippines. Two Vietnamese fishermen were injured last week in yet another water cannon attack by the Chinese Coast Guard around the disputed Paracel Islands.

Last week, Vietnam and the United States reached agreement on a “comprehensive strategic partnership” — something Vietnam has with only four other countries, one being China. Why? The Vietnamese see it, analysts tell The Washington Post, as “necessary given how aggressively China is flexing its military muscle in the region.”

This isn’t U.S. saber-rattling, it’s China rattling its neighbors. 

The threat of war between China and the United States is real . . . and clearly, not just over Taiwan. The Chinazis marked red lines all over the map. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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José Mujica

The philosophy of my heart is libertarian. I don’t like the idea of the exploitation of man by man. I believe that one day human civilization will overcome this somehow. But that is not to say that I favour the state as the owner of everything, no, no, no. I can’t conceive of that. I lean a lot towards self-management, with all of the risks it entails for any important institution.

José Mujica (Uruguay’s president, 2010–2015), from “A conversation with President José Mujica, M.R. and H.C. Montevideo,” The Economist (August 2014).

Categories
Today

Rome Fell

Odoacer, a German “barbarian,” ousted Romulus Augustus, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, thus ending that empire on September 4, 476 A.D.

Many common people did not notice a change.