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Today

Smith Wins

On September 10, 1608, John Smith was elected council president of Jamestown, Virginia.

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.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

SF Scheme Scuttled

San Francisco, taxes, income, GBI

The proposed tax was very popular. In San Francisco. It polled at nearly 75 percent in favor. 

But it possessed a fatal flaw. 

And worse.

The fatal flaw? The numbers didn’t add up.

Organizers spent nearly half a million bucks developing and promoting and getting the petition signatures to place Proposition K on this November’s ballot.

The notion? Tax Amazon sales within city limits to fund a guaranteed income scheme in the Golden City.

But then they learned — after it qualified for the ballot — that it was an incoherent tax-and-spend mess. Its chief pusher, John Elberling, admitted, reports The San Francisco Standard, that “he made mistakes in calculating how Amazon earns its revenue in the city.” And, The Standard continues, “the City Controller’s office found that the tax measure would actually harm hundreds of small businesses in San Francisco and cut revenue to the city’s general fund by about $10 million a year.”

So Elberling ate crow, admitting to error (and also, apparently, to misleading petition signers), and a judge removed Prop K from the ballot.

Whew. Disaster averted.

Alas, Elberling promises to “perfect” his scheme, and advance it again.

Which is ominous, for the core idea itself — adding on more taxes to fund a trendy-but-disastrous “guaranteed income” — is not the way out of California’s progressive-induced nightmare. It’s just a vastly bigger version of what’s gone on before.

If Californians don’t develop more common sense about the limitations of salvation-by-government, they are doomed to repeat such folly.

That goes double for San Franciscans.

Who this time have a reprieve, thankfully.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

James Mill

It never ought to be forgotten, that, in every country, there is ‘a Few,’ and there is ‘a Many’; that in all countries in which the government is not very good, the interest of ‘the Few’ prevails over the interest of ‘the Many,’ and is promoted at their expence. ‘The Few’ is the part that governs; ‘the Many’ the part that is governed.

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Today

Leo Tolstoy

On September 9, 1828, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born. Known most commonly in the English-speaking world as Leo Tolstoy, he became the celebrated author of the novels Anna Karenina and War and Peace, as well as the novellas and short stories such as “Family Happiness,” “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and “The Kreutzer Sonata.”

His political and religious ideas heavily influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tolstoy died in 1910.

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media

Collusion!

censorship, mind control, news media

Yes. Active collaboration every step of the way.

Material produced during the discovery phase of a lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of censorship is confirming what was already obvious: Big Tech’s ongoing censorship of social-media opinion about the pandemic has been undertaken largely at the behest of government.

A few of the emails confirming this:

  • April 16, 2021. Twitter emails White House officials about briefing them on “vaccine misinformation.”
  • July 16, 2021. Facebook emails the surgeon general that “our teams met today to better understand the scope of what the White House expects from us on misinformation going forward.”
  • July 23, 2021. The Facebook official tells HHS how Facebook will be “increasing the strength of our demotions for COVID and vaccine-related content that third party fact-checkers rate as ‘partly false’ or ‘missing context.’ ”

There’s mucho mas where that came from.

The public does not yet possess the requested documents from the Department of Justice of communications between DOJ officials and social-media officials. Getting those has been like pulling teeth. Why? Chances are 99.999 percent that they’ll only further confirm our thesis that over the last few years (at least) the federal government has been routinely violating the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. 

To do so, it delegates the job of gagging people to private firms in order to pretend that the coercive power of government is not itself being used to gag people. 

But marching orders are marching orders.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Carl Menger

There is no better means of reducing a fallacious variety of thought to absurdity than to let it live itself out completely.

Attributed to Carl Menger in Ludwig Von Mises, “Comments about the mathematical treatment of economic problems.” Journal of Libertarian Studies, Spring 1977, 1(2), p. 100.
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Today

Statute of Kalisz

On September 8, 1264, Boleslaus the Pious, Duke of Greater Poland, promulgated the Statute of Kalisz, guaranteeing Jews safety and personal liberties and giving battei din jurisdiction over Jewish matters.

On the same date in 1883, former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant drove in the final “golden spike” completing the Northern Pacific Railway in a ceremony at Gold Creek, Montana.

Categories
crime and punishment insider corruption national politics & policies

A Plausible Theory

Donald Trump, deep state, Hillary Clinton, top secret files, fishing expedition

A solid majority of Americans — a supermajority, even — are likely unaware that Donald J. Trump is suing Hillary Clinton and a gaggle of her cohorts for their part in the Russiagate hoax.

Though it has been reported on, here and there and now and then, I wasn’t aware until a few weeks ago.

Most major network news outfits do not make much of it.

Indeed, CNN’s initial coverage was quite instructive in how to downgrade a story in potential readers’ minds: “deep state” is in scare quotes and Hillary crony John Podesta is himself quoted as saying the suit was sure to be a “hoot.”

That’s the dismissive tactic of the current Vice President’s cackle. 

But this lawsuit may be the key to understanding what the FBI was really looking for during its documents raid at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence: the material he had collected to bring this lawsuit against his enemies who had tried to unseat him using farrago, fantasy, and fraud.

In The Epoch Times, Jeff Carlson expounds on this theory that Trump had the goods on Clinton and certain other players on her staff and within the FBI and elsewhere, and that the FBI was trying to confiscate and muddy up the waters about what documents may be used in Trump’s lawsuit.

Calling the raid “a targeted fishing expedition — designed to capture any and all information relating to the Russiagate hoax,” Carlson notes it comes “at the exact time that the DOJ is defending its actions taken in the Russiagate hoax in court against Trump’s RICO case.”

Evidence, over time, has indeed linked Russiagate directly back to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Indeed, the Muller Report was  a jumble of nonsense and notoriously fizzled. The whole mess is indecent.

But the only thing we — outside the halls of power — can count on for sure is that the insiders cannot be trusted to do anything but protect their power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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James Mill

Labour produces its effects only by conspiring with the laws of nature.

James Mill, Elements of Political Economy (1821).
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Today

Fannie and Freddie

On September 7, 2008, the U.S. Government “took control” of the two largest mortgage financing companies in the United States, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Both of these had been created by Congress as part of a concerted plan to make home ownership easier, and both had gotten completely out of hand during the many years of their existence, especially under new rules established by politicians in the 1990s. The after-market that they helped create — the packaged mortgage market — was what imploded in 2007–2008, leading to the economic slump that Nicholas Nassim Taleb referred to as setting the U.S. government on President Obama’s economic policy course of “eight years of Novocain.”