Paul has a few things to say about our free speech rights, and why politicians don’t like them.
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Watch: The Right Kind of Speech
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Auberon Herbert
If you really think that for some purposes we may rightly compel men, and for other purposes we may not, you are bound to arrange your perceptions on the subject and discover what is the dividing line between “the may” and “the may not.”
Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State (1885).
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State of the Union
On January 8, 1790, George Washington delivered the first State of the Union address in New York, New York.
In 1835, on this date, the United States federal government achieved a zero debt for the first and only time.
In 1867, African-American men were first allowed to vote in Washington, D.C.
Paul Jacob celebrates the first week of the New Year according to his old program: truth, common sense, and the American way:
To be totally frank, almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true. Is there a conspiracy theory about Twitter that didn’t turn out to be true? So far they’ve all turned out to be true — if not more true than people thought
Elon Musk, quoted in “Watch: Elon Musk Reveals Most Shocking Thing About ‘Twitter Files,’ Makes Major Confession,” Western Journal (December 27, 2022).
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Winter War
On January 7, 1940, the Finnish 9th Division completely destroyed the much-larger Soviet forces on the Raate-Suomussalmi Road, in a crucial battle during Finland’s Winter War.
In 2019, California imposed a law to force many independent contractors to become standard employees if they wanted to keep working for erstwhile clients.
AB5 threw many gig workers out of work. Many lost all of their clients, who typically could not afford to simply convert contractors from whom they had been buying stuff once in a while into regular employees.
Even in the original legislation, exemptions from AB5 were granted for certain contractors. In response to angry controversy, many more categories of contractors were added to the exemption list. Then passage of Proposition 22 allowed Uber and Lyft drivers to continue as contractors.
But guess who still may not hire independent contractors in California? People running political campaigns and petition drives, who often can’t afford to hire many or any employees. The Wall Street Journal notes that today in California, “people who sell ‘consumer products’ count as ‘direct salespersons,’ while those who work on political campaigns or ballot petitions must be counted as employees.”
Thus, under the state’s current anti-contractor law, political speech is impaired in a way that sundry commercial speech is not.
A group called Moving Oxnard Forward has taken their First Amendment-based complaint about this injustice to court, with the help of the Institute for Free Speech. A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 against the group. But the case can proceed now to the full Ninth Circuit or on to the U.S. Supreme Court.
At the High Court, I think we petitioners and speakers of political speech would probably win.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.
Voltaire, Zadig (1747).
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Montessori & a Mess
On January 6, 1907, Maria Montessori opened her first school and daycare center for working class children in Rome, Italy.
In 1912 on this date New Mexico became the 47th state of America’s United States.
On this date in 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his “Four Freedoms” State of the Union speech, emphasizing vague “freedoms” that enabled government to usurp definable freedoms.
On January 6, 2021, lame duck President Donald John Trump gave a speech in Washington, D.C., aiming to rouse his supporters to pressure the U.S. Senate not to certify some states’ Electoral College votes in Election 2020, to address “election fraud.” Before his speech ended, and under questionable circumstances, some of his supporters (along with some possible false flag agents) broke into the Capitol to set off one of the great political controversies of our time.
What do California and Canada have in common, aside from bone-chilling temperatures?
Well, the fact that they’re trying to chill the discourse of doctors.
In California, a new law empowers medical boards to punish doctors who spread “misinformation” about COVID-19. The misinformative nature of a stated view about the pandemic is allegedly proved by the mere fact that it contradicts a putative scientific “consensus.”
Such laws rely on misinformation for their very existence.
When coping with complex, incomplete, sometimes murky evidence, do scientists and others ever simply disagree, even fundamentally, on the road to scientific “consensus”? Can a consensus ever be wrong? Does anybody ever hew to an asserted consensus out of fearful desire to conform rather than honest intellectual agreement?
To ask these questions is to answer them. But let’s move on.
To Canada — and the case of Dr. Jordan Peterson, whose professional status in the country is being jeopardized because of medical and/or political views, like opinions criticizing “climate change models,” “surgery on gender dysphoric minors,” and Canadian officials who threatened “to apprehend the children of the Trucker Convoy protesters.”
Stated on social media, these opinions are apparently incendiary enough — i.e., candid enough — to vex Canada’s powerful medical censors.
According to Peterson, the Ontario College of Psychologists demands that he submit to “mandatory social-media communication retraining” because of his views. If he doesn’t comply, he may lose his license.
Such repressive impulses, he says, are “way more widespread than you might think.”
It’s cold outside.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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