Our politics will become more civil when we find ways to change the procedures for electing politicians and the institutions and environments within which they interact.
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012).
On August 9, 1942, British forces arrested Mahatma Gandhi in Bombay, spurring the Quit India Movement into nationwide action.
In 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin fired his Prime Minister, Sergei Stepashin, and his entire cabinet.
The legislation has emerged from the Judiciary Committee, so there is hope.
The Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration Act (FAIR) would impose substantial limits on federal civil asset forfeiture — on the power of officers to grab someone’s cash or other belongings on the unsupported suspicion that it was involved in a crime.
Currently, this power to steal based on zero evidence and zero due process remains untrammeled. And forfeited funds thus grabbed can then be spent by the agencies that did the asset-grabbing.
Victims must spend years in the courts to get their stuff back, if they ever do.
FAIR would require “clear and convincing evidence” of wrongdoing. It would also prohibit law-enforcement agencies from being able to spend forfeited funds, eliminating a perverse incentive to rob people naïve enough to be carrying “too much” cash for whatever reason.
At National Review Online, Jill Jacobson says that the bill is “a step in the right direction” but doesn’t go far enough. Arguing on the premise of innocent until proven guilty, she insists “there is no reason why federal law enforcement should be seizing personal property from everyday citizens on tenuous suspicion.”
Or even non-tenuous suspicion, I would add, for not everyone strongly suspected of doing wrong can be proven to have done wrong. And citizens caught on the wrong end of a government official’s steely gaze should not be regarded as a public resource.
The reform isn’t finished until civil asset forfeiture is abolished altogether.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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It is not the task of history to project the hatred and disagreements of the present back into the past and to draw from battles fought long ago weapons for the disputes of one’s own time. History should teach us to recognize causes and to understand driving forces; and when we understand everything, we will forgive everything.
Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State and Economy (1919; 1983, Leland B. Yeager, trans.), p. 28.
Francis Hutcheson, philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment and a great influence on David Hume and Adam Smith, was born in Ireland on August 8, 1694. He died on his birthday in 1746.
Followers of Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement against the British rule on August 8, 1942.
On the same day in 1974, President Richard M. Nixon resigned.
The candidate’s a Democrat.
That’s right. Democrats can also be muzzled by social media companies . . . that is, by big corporations that obey the First Amendment-violating instructions of government officials.
Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, for collaborating with the federal government to violate his free speech rights by removing various of his videos from YouTube.
Kennedy’s sins include openly disputing Official Government Doctrines about COVID-19 and the pandemic. Doctrines espoused by, among others, the incumbent he is running against.
The title of the complaint names only “Google LLC” and “YouTube LLC.” But the document makes clear the originating role of the federal government in censoring Kennedy. The complaint is avowedly about “freedom of speech and the extraordinary steps the United States government has taken under the leadership of Joe Biden to silence people it does not want Americans to hear.”
YouTube’s conduct “may be fairly treated as that of government itself,” the filing explains. “For example, although it cited its own COVID vaccine misinformation policies when censoring Mr. Kennedy, the policies rely entirely on government officials to decide what information gets censored.”
The relief that Kennedy seeks includes restoration of the deleted videos and an order declaring Google’s speech-banning misinformation policies to be “unconstitutional on their face.”
Kennedy wants to be able to state his views and distinguish them from the incumbent’s without being routinely censored by the Big-Gov-Google-plex.
Google and other social media companies must somehow be prevented from colluding with politicians and bureaucrats to interfere in the democracy they only pretend to support.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest. The proposition is so very manifest, that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it; nor could it ever have been called in question, had not the interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers confounded the common sense of mankind.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).
On August 7, 1782, George Washington instituted the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle, an award later renamed “the Purple Heart.”
Illustration: “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” Emanuel Leutze, 1851, Oil on canvas (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), depicting an event in 1776, not 1782.
What to do about the gerontocracy:
Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive. Its dynamism has to find an outlet in smashing telephone kiosks, derailing trains, stealing cars and smashing them and, of course, in the much more satisfactory activity of destroying human beings. There comes a time, however, when violence is seen as juvenile and boring. It is the repartee of the stupid and ignorant.
Anthony Burgess, Introduction (“A Clockwork Orange Resucked”) to a later, restored version of his 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. The American publishers of the novel elided the 21st and last chapter to his novel of futuristic “ultra-violence,” and in this introduction the author explained the publication history.