On February 27, 1830, American economist and free trade advocate Arthur Latham Perry (pictured above) was born.
The Twenty-second Amendment (Amendment XXII) of the United States Constitution, which sets a term limit for election and overall time of service to the office of President of the United States, was ratified by the requisite 36 of the then-48 states of the union on February 27, 1951.
Congress had passed the amendment on March 21, 1947.
This podcast covers two weeks of Common Sense stories. And quite a bit more:
I know nothing of man’s rights, or woman’s rights; human rights are all that I recognise.
Sarah Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837), Letter 15 (October 20, 1837).
February 26 marks the Dominican Republic’s Independence Day.
Paul Jacob didn’t do a podcast last weekend. Betrayal? Well, he was on the road. But this weekend he makes up for it, covering all the big stories of past two weeks, and a whole lot more.
Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men have the same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights.
Angelina Grimké, “Letter XII. Human Rights Not Founded On Sex” (October 2, 1837); reported in Isaac Knapp, Letters to Catherine Beecher (1838).
February 25, 1805, saw the birth of Angelina Emily Grimké Weld, American abolitionist and feminist. She was the younger sister of the equally famed Sarah Moore Grimké.
On February 25, 1870, the first African-American entered Congress to serve in the U. S. Senate.
Hiram Rhodes Revels (Sep 27, 1827 – Jan 16, 1901) was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a Republican politician, and college administrator. Born free in North Carolina, he later lived and worked in Ohio, where he voted before the Civil War. Revels was elected as the first African American to serve in the United States Senate, and was the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress. He represented Mississippi in the Senate in 1870 and 1871 during the Reconstruction era.
In Law #46 of February 25, 1947, the Allied Control Council formally proclaimed the dissolution of Prussia.
Matt Taibbi wrote a full article, “The West’s Betrayal of Freedom.”
I’m going to quote an anarchist.
For both Taibbi and me, Justice Rouleau’s bizarre defense of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leveraging of emergency powers to freeze truckers’ bank accounts during last year’s lockdown protests leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
If you have a taste for freedom.
Which people in the news media, as well as in government (but do I repeat myself?), decreasingly demonstrate. Mr. Taibbi, reacting to both Rouleau’s report and mainstream journalistic coverage, notes the general tenor of both, which he says read “like all the tsk-tsking editorials in the West you’ve read since Trump, which used every crisis to hype the idea that freedom = danger.”
Rouleau excuses the tyrannical (anti-protest, anti-free-speech, anti-due-process) Canadian government’s attack upon the truckers because it “met a threshold.” You see, “Freedom cannot exist without order.”
But that’s placing the matter downside up. Freedom provides its own order.
It just so often happens to be an order that tyrants don’t like.
Freedom creates order: when neither you nor I infringe upon the other’s sphere of life, that is an epitome of orderliness. Crime and government (but do I repeat myself?) upset that harmony.
“Liberty,” explained P. J. Proudhon, is “not the daughter but the mother of order.”*
When politicians forget that freedom provides the order we need, they make anarchists look good.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Proudhon, the first major writer to treat “anarchist” as a non-pejorative, was arguably not an Antifa-type anarchist — and the full quotation, presented here on Tuesday, talks about a Republic. Make of that what you will.
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Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Chapter 11.
On February 24, 1917, United States ambassador to the United Kingdom, Walter Hines Page, was shown the intercepted Zimmermann Telegram, in which Germany offered to give the American Southwest back to Mexico were Mexico to declare war on the United States.
On February 24, 1803, the Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madison, established the principle of judicial review.