Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St. Alban KC, Apophthegms (1624), no. 36.
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Sir Francis Bacon
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John Calvin & Desmond Tutu
John Calvin [pictured above] returned to Geneva on September 13, 1541, after three years of exile. His subsequent work in church reform and theology became known as Calvinism, and profoundly influenced the course of European and (eventually) American civilization, including several concepts of servitude and liberty.
On the same date in 1989, Desmond Tutu led South Africa’s largest march aganst Apartheid.
“Let me say loud and clear to Greg Abbott and his enablers in Texas with these continued political stunts,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot told a September 1 news conference, “Gov. Abbott has confirmed . . . he is a man without any morals, humanity or shame.”
Abbott’s alleged shame is busing a small percentage of the migrants streaming into Texas on to Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C. The bussed are volunteers: the migrants can choose to go or not.
Not too shockingly, however, the mayors in all three cities are crying foul quite “loud and clear.” Which only makes the Texas governor’s point. Abbott wants to dramatize the cost, seeking federal help so Texas doesn’t bear the brunt of the massive influx of folks illegally crossing the border — a record 1.7 million last year, estimated to hit 2.1 million more this year.
What particularly peeved Mayor Lightfoot was the lack of any “level of coordination and cooperation” from Texas authorities. At issue? “Those huddled masses yearning to breathe free in the United States,” Washington Post columnist Ruben Navarrette, Jr. explains, “usually arrive with empty pockets.” They have needs.
Last Wednesday, 147 more migrants arrived in Chicago, where Lightfoot has declared they will be welcomed. But . . . well . . . within hours she sent 64 of those individuals to a hotel in (Republican-voting) Burr Ridge, some 20 miles from downtown Chicago.
Bussed, no less.
Burr Ridge Mayor Gary Grasso blasted the fact “that nobody from the city, from the state called and told me.”
“This isn’t about them, the migrants are fine,” he insisted, but went on to complain that “they’re being used as political pawns by the governor and mayor.”
Add U.S. congressmen and especially the president to that list of shameful bussers, for Abbott’s tactic mimics the federal government’s transporting of migrants from border areas to other parts of the country.
Sure migrants are pawns in their game. We citizens should sympathize, for we are pawns in their shame.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Carl Menger
Thus human economy and property have a joint economic origin since both have, as the ultimate reason for their existence, the fact that goods exist whose available quantities are smaller than the requirements of men. Property, therefore, like human economy, is not an arbitrary invention but rather the only practically possible solution of the problem that is, in the nature of things, imposed upon us by the disparity between requirements for, and available quantities of, all economic goods.
Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (1871), Chapter II: “Economy and Economic Goods”: 3. “The Origin of Human Economy and Economic Goods” A. “Economic goods.”
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Switzerland federalized
On September 12, 1848, Switzerland became a unified federal state with a constitution limiting central government powers and providing decentralized state (canton) power patterned on the U.S. Constitution.
In 1880 on this date, H.L. Mencken was born. One of his earliest books was a debate with a socialist, The Men versus The Man (1910); his greatest lasting contribution was probably The American Language (1919) and its supplements (1945, 1948). His work has been collected in numerous anthologies, such as Alistair Cooke’s Vintage Mencken (1955) and the author’s own Mencken Chrestomathy.
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Watch: Not the Person to Ask?
Every weekend, Paul recaps the big stories of the week. As they’ve appeared here on Common Sense with Paul Jacob. But other stories get covered, too. In this case, the death of Queen Elizabeth II, about whom Paul once wrote his most-hated commentary!
The controversial column in question can be found at Townhall.com.
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James Mill
The government and the people are under a moral necessity of acting together; a free press compels them to bend to one another.
James Mill, The Edinburgh Review, vol. 18 (1811), p. 121.
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9/11: Ante-, Post-
On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech about an “adversary that poses a serious threat to the United States of America.” Describing it as “one of the last bastions of central planning, governs by dictating five year plans,” and that “with brutal consistency it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas.”
The adversary? “The Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the processes.” And he went on to state that the Pentagon could not account for more than $2.3 trillion.
The next day, September 11, “some people did something,” in the immortal words of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.),* and nearly everybody forgot about Rumsfeld’s alarm. The terrorist attacks on 9/11, in New York and at the Pentagon itself, along with a citizen-led resistance on United Flight 93, resulted in 2,977 fatalities, over 25,000 injuries, and substantial long-term health consequences.
The unaccounted-for spending and receipts of the Pentagon and the Department of Housing and Urban Development increased ten-fold in the next 19 years. It appears to balloon like the federal debt. But we almost never talk about it.
Rep. Omar said these words on March 23, 2019. They were not a hit.
Paul’s conclusion to this weekend’s Common Sense wrap-up of the week is at once humble and outrageous.
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Carl Menger
Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (1871; English translation, 1950), chapter III, “The Theory of Value.”
The determining factor in the value of a good, then, is neither the quantity of labor or other goods necessary for its production nor the quantity necessary for its reproduction, but rather the magnitude of importance of those satisfactions with respect to which we are conscious of being dependent on command of the good. This principle of value determination is universally valid, and no exception to it can be found in human economy.