The governmentalization of charity affects not just the donor but also the recipient. What was once asked as a favor is now demanded as an entitlement. The transformation of charity into legal entitlement has produced donors without love and recipients without gratitude.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, September 6, 2013, at the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, Texas.
On this day in 1903, the Ford Motor Company sold its first car. Less than 30 years later, Aldous Huxley satirized Ford’s assembly line procedures in his novel Brave New World. Arguably, both the assembly line and the satire advanced freedom.
Despite the fact that the Uvalde and Indianapolis mall shootings suggest contrary policies, Congress has just produced a law that actually takes a step . . . in the wrong direction, adding more penalties, for example, on top of existing penalties for convicted felons caught in possession of firearms.*
“Contrary to what you may have read or heard, the story of how that happened is not an inspiring example of bipartisan cooperation to protect public safety,” writes Jacob Sullum in Reason. “It is a dispiriting illustration of how the worst instincts of both major parties combine to produce policies that are neither just nor sensible.”
The deal gave R’s tougher sentences and D’s more gun control, and “both got to pretend they were doing something to prevent mass shootings.”
Not addressed? The insane policy, originally pushed by one Senator Joe Biden, of “gun-free zones.” As anyone with common sense knows, bad guys who want to make a statement by killing lots of people, prefer gun-free zones to other areas.
A more subtle aspect of the cycle is how the topic of gun legislation, as handled by politicians and major media propagandists, itself elicits broken men to break the law and kill, kill, kill.
What if the best way to break the cycle would be to accept the Second Amendment as a given and spurn every demagogue in Congress and the media who persists on defying the Constitution?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Neither the Uvalde nor the Indianapolis shooter were convicted felons.
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Charles Sanders Peirce, Lectures on Pragmatism delivered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (March 26 – May 17, 1903).
There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham’s razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.
On July 22, 1937, the U.S. Senate voted down Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s court packing scheme.
One reason that people donate to organizations anonymously — just as they want their votes and other personal information to remain confidential — is to avoid being harassed by political opponents.
But being bullied in a restaurant is hardly the worst that can befall donors stripped of anonymity.
Jianli Yang is a Chinese dissident. In 2008, after spending years in a Chinese prison for his activism, he founded Citizen Power Initiatives for China, a US-based organization working to advance rights and democracy in China.
Yang notes that Chinese supporters of his organization, even if residing outside of China, “can face extreme consequences when they are identified by the Chinese government.” Without the right to protect donor privacy, affirmed in a July 2021 U.S. Supreme Court decision on the associational rights of donors, donors can end up being punished by the Chinese government.
The risk isn’t just theoretical. In April 2021, one Mr. Lee, a businessman, was forced to appear on Chinese television to “confess” to supporting Citizen Power Initiatives for China. The government also sentenced Lee to eleven years in prison.
We must fight both the CCP and their wannabe branch in DC. Things are nowhere near as bad in this country as in China. But we don’t know what threats we will face the day after tomorrow even from our own government.
We need every First Amendment protection we can get.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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A thing must either exist or not exist — must have a certain attribute or not have it: there is no third possibility. This is a postulate of all thought; and in so far as it is alleged of phenomenal existence, no one calls it in question.
Herbert Spencer, ”Mill versus Hamilton — The Test of Truth,” The Fortnightly Review (July 1865).
On July 21, 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution in a public school classroom, and fined $100. The ambiguous legacy of the trial would continue — for decades, even to the present — to reveal the tensions inherent within a school system run by government and funded by taxpayers.
Interesting fact rarely noted: Scopes was teaching a heavily “eugenics” view, which would hardly be considered scientific by most modern standards.
Pictured above, publicity for Inherit the Wind, a 1960 movie about the trial, but with the names changed, fictionalized. The movie starred Spencer Tracy in the Clarence Darrow (lawyer for the defense) role; Frederic March in the prosecutorial part, “Matthew Harrison Brady,” the pseudonymous name for politician William Jennings Bryan; Dick York as the defendant, Mr. Scopes; and Gene Kelly as the Baltimore journalist, a stand-in for H. L. Mencken, whose infamous coverage of the story shocked the nation almost as much as the trial itself. It was Mencken who dubbed the affair “The Scopes ‘Monkey’ Trial.”
At the end of the movie (spoiler alert!) the famous prosecutor dies in the courtroom. In the historical case, Bryan died five days after the verdict. The movie was based on the 1955 play of the same name, written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, directed by Stanley Kramer. The script was adapted by Nedrick Young (originally as Nathan E. Douglas) and Harold Jacob Smith.
Today is the 53rd anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission’s perambulation upon the Moon, on July 21, 1969. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked upon the surface of Mare Tranquillitatis for about two hours and 15 minutes. They spent over 21 hours on the surface, total, most of it inside the Lunar Module, at the site they called Tranquillity Base, before launching to rejoin astronaut Michael Collins in lunar orbit, and returning to Earth on July 24.
The Sunday shooter might have killed many others, his apparent plan, but another young man shot and killed him early in his rampage.
“The real hero of the day,” said Greenwood Police Chief Jim Ison, “is the citizen that was lawfully carrying a firearm in that food court and was able to stop the shooter almost as soon as he began.”
The 22-year-old man with a gun is Elisjsha Dicken. Careful observation that Dicken was carrying a firearm lawfully was perhaps necessary to preempt concern about any legal jeopardy for him.
Indiana’s concealed carry law had only recently been liberalized.
But if I’d been there that day, perhaps spared by Dicken’s quick action, I suspect that my only thought would have been: “Thank God he was there, had a gun, and knew how to use it.” And if it turned out that my savior was carrying unlawfully, well, so what?
Alive is alive.
This sentiment, however, is not universally shared. Folks who support citizen disarmament are unsurprisingly uncomfortable with honoring someone who does precisely what those of us who support citizen armament expect armed citizens to do: save lives when needed.
Leah Barkoukis, writing at Townhall, notes that some leftist Twitterati objected to Dicken’s carrying a gun into a mall that declares itself to be “a gun free zone.” A few even demanded prosecuting Mr. Dicken!
Understandably, mall spokespeople have evaded discussion of using their creaky legal grounds to do anything so preposterous.
As anyone with sense knows, making a large public venue “gun free” is not an effective way to keep people safe. As Mr. Dicken demonstrated.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Charles Sanders Peirce, The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, selected and edited with an introducton by Justus Buchler, p. 49.
True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men.