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insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

Big Guy, Little Guy

Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Ukraine

“Prosecutors are nearing a decision on whether to charge President Biden’s son Hunter with tax- and gun-related violations,” The Washington Post reports. 

Last October, the paper disclosed that, after a four-year investigation, federal agents had “gathered what they believe is sufficient evidence to charge him.”

Hunter Biden’s failure to honestly fill out the federal gun-purchase form, a felony, is punishable by up to ten years in prison. Poetically, that federal law, and penalty, was authored years ago by a certain U.S. senator from Delaware, his old man, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

The tax charges stem from Hunter’s massively lucrative business dealings with corrupt Ukrainian and state-connected Chinese companies — jobs for which Hunter seems to understand his main qualification was proximity to his pop, at that time Vice President of these United States, whom oligarchs and genocidal totalitarians desired to influence.

Both President Biden and his son Hunter deny they ever “discussed” Hunter’s business. But that explanation doesn’t fit even the rose-colored glasses vision of Joe Biden, family man. Plus, it is clearly and repeatedly contradicted by evidence of meetings and favors — and Hunter’s international trips on Air Force Two.

Hunter has complained bitterly about how much money he had to kickback to his father and in one deal records show Hunter asking specifically for 10 percent of proceeds to be held for “the Big Guy,” whom others have identified as his father.

Further, we have long known that Hunter has paid phone bills, house renovations and other expenses for his dad, without scaring up much interest amongst news outlets.

Now, two new whistleblowers emerge: 

  • The first, an IRS employee, tells House Republicans that the Department of Justice is engaging in “preferential treatment and politics” to block Hunter’s prosecution. 
  • The second whistleblower points to a document in the FBI’s possession alleging “a criminal scheme” where then-Veep Biden traded policy for payola from a foreign national.  

I would certainly like to hear more.

On Fox News Sunday, Juan Williams decried Republicans for “going after a relative and a child.”

Hunter is 53 years old. And this isn’t about young Hunter, but “the Big Guy.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Orson Welles

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

Orson Welles, in the published screenplay for The Big Brass Ring (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Santa Teresa Press, 1987).
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Today

Mill & Hayek . . . & bang!

On May 8, 1899, Austrian-English economist and philosopher Friedrich August von Hayek was born. He signed the bulk of his books written in the English language as “F.A. Hayek,” and is best known for The Road to Serfdom, The Constitution of Liberty, The Fatal Conceit, and many essays, several of them widely cited, including “Individualism, True and False” and “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”

Years earlier, on the same date in 1873, English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill died. Now best known for On Liberty (1859) and Utilitarianism (1861), he was and is considered one of the most important economists and philosophers of the Victorian age, with other classics including A System of Logic (1843) and Principles of Political Economy (1848). Mill’s letters to his wife were edited into book form by Hayek.

On May 8, 1946, two Estonian school girls (Aili Jõgi and Ageeda Paavel) blew up the Soviet memorial which stood in front of the Bronze Soldier in Tallinn.

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by Paul Jacob video

Watch: Word Is Brazenness

Joe Biden

Our leaders’ lack of legitimacy is not unrelated to their open contempt for traditional republican norms:

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Thought

Walt Whitman

When liberty goes out of a place it is not the first to go,
nor the second or third to go,
It waits for all the rest to go, it is the last.

Walt Whitman, To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire (1856;1881).
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Today

Belated Amendment

On May 7, 1992, the State of Michigan ratified a 203-year-old proposed amendment to the United States Constitution, thereby fulfilling the terms of amending the document, adding it as 27th Amendment. The amendment had been written by James Madison. He had presented it as part of the original twelve amendments that became the ten making up the Bill of Rights. It bars the U.S. Congress from giving itself a pay raise until after the next election, so that voters have a chance to decide whether those voting for the raise would remain in Congress to receive it.

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audio podcast

Listen: The Word Is “Brazenness”

Joe Biden, war, deep state

Paul Jacob is worried about how little legitimacy our leaders have:

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Thought

C. S. Lewis

The only people who object to escapism are jailers.

C. S. Lewis, as quoted by Arthur C. Clarke, God, The Universe and Everything Else (1988).
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Today

Good Sailing

On May 6, 1862, American author, philosopher and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau died, after many years of tuberculosis. 

Aware he was dying, Thoreau’s last words were “Now comes good sailing,” followed by two lone words, “moose” and “Indian.” Bronson Alcott planned the service and read selections from Thoreau’s works, and Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at his funeral. 

His remains, as well as those of members of his immediate family, were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.

His most famous works are An Essay on Civil Disobedience (1849) and Walden (1854).

Categories
free trade & free markets media and media people political economy too much government

Incredulity Doesn’t Cut It

dumpster fire, regulations, privatization

One of the objections people often make to the idea of private enterprise as a solution to government inefficiency is The Argument from Incredulity.

It’s not an argument at all, actually, just a harrumph and a guffaw: we cannot have free-market police, or fire suppression, or . . . garbage collection!

But of course all those things are successfully managed in the private sector.

No media outfit has a longer history of pointing this out than Reason magazine. So when the editors of Reason brought us Joe Lancaster’s “Government Waste Monopoly Pits Private Dumpster Business Against Garbage Bureaucrats,” yesterday, I hope they took a moment to revel in a little nostalgia. For this is the kind of story that made Reason what it is today, one of the best sources for retail political economy.

The tale tells of Steven Hedrick, an Arkansas man who put together a business renting out dumpsters — like you often see on construction sites, but smaller — which he would haul away after customers filled them. He built the business without ever going into debt, and then . . . came the government. 

“[I]n April 2022, the City Council in Holiday Island passed Ordinance 2022-004, which required all residents and businesses within the city to contract with the county sanitation authority, Carroll County Solid Waste (CCSW), for trash pickup and disposal services,” Reason informs us. “Anyone using private companies would have to switch, and anyone who did not have contracted trash service would have to sign up.”

And Hedrick’s little business must be . . . dumped.

What this is, at base? Sheer bigotry: preferring monopoly government to competitive private services.

For those of us who’ve been reading Reason for decades, it sports a familiar smell.

Just not a good odor, for the drive to monopolize everything stinks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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