On July 10, 1832, U.S. President Andrew Jackson vetoed a bill to re-charter the Second Bank of the United States, in effect ending formal central banking in the United States until the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913.
This was mainly a “good news” week, but there remains plenty in the world to anathematize:
Some of us are simply a bit bored of hearing people ripping at closed wounds and then crying about their presumed hurt.
Douglas Murray on Piers Morgan Uncensored, discussing reparations for slavery.
On July 9, 1776, General George Washington had the Declaration of Independence read out to members of the Continental Army in Manhattan. Meanwhile, thousands of British troops on Staten Island prepare for the Battle of Long Island.
It’s been a great week, with Independence Day to celebrate and the court system defending freedom. But there was enough trouble to justify a few anathemas.
Justice? — You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
First words of A Frolic of His Own (1994), William Gaddis’s fourth novel.
July 8, 1776 – Church bells (possibly including the Liberty Bell, pictured) were rung after John Nixon delivered the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence of the United States.
Ambiguous aspects of the decision and the determination of some universities to keep using race as a criterion mean that qualified applicants may, alas, still be penalized for being the “wrong” color. Unambiguous, though, is Justice Clarence Thomas’s rebuke of the decision’s dissenters for, among other things, assuming that only racism can explain the different average outcomes of ethnic groups.
“[N]one of those statistics are capable of drawing a direct causal link between race — rather than socioeconomic status or any other factor — and individual outcomes. So Justice Jackson supplies the link herself: the legacy of slavery and the nature of inherited wealth. This, she claims, locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste. Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds. . . .”
Has Thomas been perusing the work of Thomas Sowell?
One of Sowell’s career-integrating insights is that statistics summarizing differences in average group outcomes are mute about the causes.
One must investigate causally relevant facts.
Consider, for example, differences in characteristics and outcomes between subgroups of a broader ethnic group. Sole possible cause: racism? Or the fact that Asians on average perform better than whites in certain academic or economic categories. Sole possible cause: racism?
Just two of many pertinent questions that Dr. Sowell has asked as he, in his numerous books, surveyed our world’s cultures, lands, and histories.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Make no mistake: It is socialism which lies at the end of this rainbow and, in this rainbow, the predominating color is the red of federal deficit spending under which a whole new generation of Americans has grown and developed.
Sen. Harry F. Byrd, as quoted in a newspaper’s three-dot column some time in the early 1960s.
In 1456, a retrial verdict acquitted Joan of Arc of heresy 25 years after her execution.
In 1928 on July 7, sliced bread was sold for the first time by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.
On this date in 1958, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Alaska Statehood Act into law.