Fatherland without freedom and merit is a large word with little meaning.
Anders Chydenius, For What Reason do so Many Swedes Emigrate Every Year?, 1765.
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Anders Chydenius
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Selma March & Limited Terms
On March 21, 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led 3,200 people on the start of the third and finally successful civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
Nearly two decades earlier, the Twenty-second Amendment (Amendment XXII) of the United States Constitution, passed Congress. The date was March 21, 1947. The amendment, ratified on February 27, 1951, set a term limit for election and overall time of service to the office of President of the United States. This was an obvious reaction to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s more than three terms in office.
The first section of the amendment reads as follows:
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President, when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
Libertarians should avoid taking sides in left-right antagonisms when promoting a principled third position would make more sense.
Regrettably, in “Christopher Rufo Wants To Shut Down ‘Activist’ Academic Departments. Here’s Why He’s Wrong,” libertarian magazine Reason fails to offer that alternative.
“In an essay published this week in City Journal,” author Emma Camp begins, “conservative activist Christopher Rufo argued that universities — or rather, the state legislatures governing these universities — should shut down ‘activist’ academic departments. But rather than protecting higher education, forcibly shutting down left-wing academic departments would be nothing more than routine censorship.”
Tellingly, she never defines “routine” censorship.
Let me help: routine censorship is the governmental policy of preventing or punishing private speech on private property.
State colleges and universities are public institutions, politically established and subsidized by taxpayers. With few exceptions, “private colleges” are also routinely tax-funded at the demand end, and are further supported with research contracts.
Getting rid of Marxist professors preaching political revolution is no more anti-free speech than preventing the CDC and Anthony Fauci from conducting gain-of-function virus research within some college laboratory.
Ms. Camp quotes the Supreme Court about the importance of “safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned.” Freedom sounds great, but as usual, the Supremes forget that taxpayers have an interest, and that constraints on public schools was once routine.
So how not to “cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom”?
Offer a third position: de-subsidize and dis-establish government “education” by empowering higher education’s customers. Let Marxist professors find payers in the private sector.
Instead, Emma Camp effectively tells conservatives they have no choice but to fund every leftist program that politics and the bureaucracy allow. She could have recognized that “Academic freedom” in the context of tax-subsidized schooling is merely ideological license.
Which is itself a sad alternative to real liberty.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Washington Irving
There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm that is not to be doubted.
Washington Irving, “The Adventure of the German Student,” Tales of a Traveller, by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.(1824).
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Uncle Tom’s Cabin
On March 20, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published.
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Watch: The Usual Madness(es)
Just how crazy can our Clownshow Partisanship get?
Well, current news stories reveal just how crazy it’s become.
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George Meredith
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.
George Meredith, The Egoist (1879), seventh chapter.
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House of Lords
On March 19, 1649, England’s House of Commons passed an act abolishing the House of Lords, declaring it “useless and dangerous to the people of England.”
This was during Oliver Cromwell’s rule as Lord Protector, after the execution of Charles I. The House of Lords did not again meet until the Convention Parliament of 1660, under the Restoration of the monarchy.
Not the March Madness!
Paul explains:
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W. H. H. MacKellar
Optimism laid down the railroad, but pessimism made it practicable with the air brake and the block-signal system. Optimism designed a ship to sail daringly into the skies — and fall perhaps at times. So pessimism designed the parachute.
W. H. H. MacKellar, The Rotarian (May 1939).