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Thought

George Gissing

Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903).
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Today

The Revolution Remembered

October 11, 1890, marks the founding of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

On the same date in 1976, President Gerald R. Ford approved a congressional joint resolution Public Law 94–479 to appoint, posthumously, George Washington to the grade of General of the Armies of the United States, as part of the bicentennial celebrations.

John J. Pershing (1860 – 1948) is the only other American to attain this high title, and the only one to achieve it while alive.

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by Paul Jacob video

Watch: The Last Person to Trust with Power!

Paul Jacob begins with Thomas Sowell and ends with government-supported anarchists. In-between? The big issues of the day: but you cannot watch it on YouTube:

Why? Well, YouTube has taken it down:

No specific claim was cited as in error, nor any medical authority cited to back up the accusation. Of course.

The video is now available on Rumble:

The audio podcast is still available via podcatcher and as hosted on SoundCloud. See yesterday’s post for the link.

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Thought

Ayn Rand

Don’t ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.

Dagny Taggart to Hank Rearden in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged (1957), p. 297.

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Today

Atlas?

On October 10, 1957, Ayn Rand’s dystopian/utopian novel Atlas Shrugged was published. Written to expound and defend an individualist, freedom/free-market point of view, it is one of the most influential and literarily successful didactic novels ever written.

On October 10, 1973, Austrian-born American economist, Ludwig von Mises* (pictured above) died.

Two-hundred fifty-nine years earlier, the French law-maker and Jansenist Pierre le Pesant, sieur de Boisguilbert died.

Both economists were known for their defenses of freer markets: le Pesant for pioneering the critique of mercantilism, arguing that a nation’s wealth consisted in what its people produce and trade; Mises for systematizing economic theory and advancing the critique of both socialism and latter-day mercantilism (what he called “interventionism”).


In January 1958, following the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Mises wrote Ayn Rand a letter of congratulations.

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audio podcast

Listen: Who Not to Trust with Power

Paul Jacob provides the advice, drawing on Thomas Sowell, Gustave Le Bon, and many other astute individualists:

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Thought

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Il faut beaucoup de philosophie pour observer
les faits qui sont trop près de nous.

Much philosophy is needed for the correct observation of things which are before our eyes.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as quoted by Frédéric Bastiat, Harmonies of Political Economy (1850).
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Today

The Banishment of Roger Williams

On October 9, 1635, Protestant theologian Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a religious dissident after he spoke out against punishments for religious offenses and giving away Native American land. He moved south, founding Providence Plantations, where he worked for separation of church and state, the rights of aboriginal Americans, and against slavery.

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general freedom too much government

No Transplants for the Unvaxxed

Because of a rare but dangerous side effect, heart inflammation, Scandinavian countries are now discouraging the use of the Moderna vaccine in younger people.

We’ve seen other reports of severe illness and even death because of, or at least soon after, COVID-19 vaccinations. But we’re assured that serious side effects are so rare and the vaccines so effective that the wisdom of getting vaccinated is self-evident.

But what’s more evident? They’re forcing you. 

If you’re “vaccine-hesitant” for any reason — even if you’ve already got immunity because of a COVID-19 infection — too bad. A public-private partnership to mandate vaccination is already costing many people their jobs.

Now it’s costing people a chance for a kidney.

So ordains University of Colorado Hospital, whose Kidney Transplant Coordinator, Katie Harmann, tells Leilani Lutali that she “will be removed from the kidney transplant list” until she is vaccinated.

Note that the opportunity is not being withdrawn because the prospective recipient is sick with COVID-19 and therefore is about to kick the bucket anyway. The hospital is treating the patient’s assessment of her own risk as irrelevant.

Lutali says, “I feel like I’m being coerced into not being able to wait and see [whether the vaccine is the right thing to do], and that I have to take the shot if I want this life-saving transplant.”

This is the reality of rationed care in a largely socialist medical system.

And this is what Democrats lust for, even demand; and it is what they are working mightily to ensure — that our current messy, mixed healthcare system will soon become even more bureaucratic and restrictive.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Thought

Frédéric Bastiat

Among the new arrangements that feeble mortals are invited to make trial of, there is one that is presented to us in terms worthy of attention. Its formula is: Association voluntary and progressive.

But political economy is founded exactly on the datum that society is nothing else than association (such as the above three words describe it) — association, very imperfect at first, because man is imperfect; but improving as man improves, that is to say, progressive.

Frédéric Bastiat, “Natural and Artificial Organizations (Journal des Economistes, January 1848), and later in Harmonies of Political Economy, book 1, chapter 1 (1850).