On September 18, 1793, George Washington laid the cornerstone of the Capitol building.
It has grown, since.
On September 18, 1838, Richard Cobden established the Anti-Corn Law League, which proceeded to bring free trade to Britain.
The Idaho Supreme Court has stated the obvious.
The question was whether legislation passed by the Republican-dominated Idaho state legislature making it prohibitively difficult to run a successful initiative campaign is consistent with the state constitution.
In August, the court ruled that requiring petitioners to obtain signatures from at least 6 percent of voters in every single legislative district of the state — 35 districts — would usher in “tyranny of the minority.”
It said that the new law “conflicts with the democratic ideals that form the bedrock of the constitutional republic created by the Idaho Constitution, and seriously undermines the people’s initiative and referendum powers enshrined therein.”
As the Idaho Statesman observes, the law would have enabled voters of a single district to prevent a question from reaching the ballot.
The Statesman also smashed the silly argument that the current initiative process somehow burdens specifically rural voters in any quest to post a question.
Under current law, petitioners must obtain signatures from 6 percent of all registered voters in the state and also reach that threshold in at least 18 districts, not all 35 districts. The all-35 mandate would have made the job of running a petition drive massively harder no matter what regions petitioners happen to reside in.
Foes of citizen initiative rights also tend to ignore the fact that getting a question on the ballot hardly constitutes its enactment. Every voter, from whatever part of the state, can then decide Yes or No.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The idea of defending, as integral parts of our Empire, countries 10,000 miles off, like Australia, which neither pay a shilling to our revenue . . . nor afford us any exclusive trade . . . is about as quixotic a specimen of national folly as was ever exhibited.
Richard Cobden, a note to Edward Ellice, 1856.
On September 17, 1787, the Constitution of the United States was signed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
In 1849 on this same day in September, Harriet Tubman escaped to freedom in Philadelphia, but soon returned to Maryland to rescue her family. She made at least 13 trips into the slave-owning South to liberate more than 70 slaves before the Civil War (in which she served as a spy for the North).
It was quite the party. All the big names were at the Met Gala, coughing up $30 thousand per ticket. Representative Alexandria “Woman of the People” Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) turned heads with her stunning dress . . . emblazoned with the big red words: “Tax the Rich.”
Other women at the event sported similar ideological markers: “Equal Rights for Women” and . . . excuse me . . . “Peg the Patriarchy.”
The most common comment? The sheer elitist effrontery.
This was of and for the poshest of the posh: celebrity culture. And couture.
The stars and politicians and multi-millionaires presented themselves proudly, smiling, unmasked — while waited on by staff all masked up.
It takes a certain amount of gall to parade before the plebes, maskless while they are masked — though we are told the celebs masked up once the red carpet parade was over. To pretend to be “with the people” and somehow against the rich while hobnobbing with the super-wealthy is one thing, but twirling and smiling and showing off while the lowly servants are not even allowed to show their faces . . . undermines that whole “tax the rich” theme.
Meanwhile, the president expressed pent-up anger at those who resist being vaccinated (“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin”) and the vice president tweeted that one way to “end the pandemic” is by “protecting the vaccinated.”
The vaccinated are allegedly protected — by their vaccines.
All this echoes Marie Antoinette — had she ever possessed the temerity to parade about as Jean-Paul Marat.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Do not ever doubt the ambition of crazed futurists who truly believe in remaking human civilization and the human race itself to conform to their own Frankenstein-like vision of perfection….
Richard Dolan, “We are in a Global Revolution,” The Richard Dolan Show (September 14, 2021).
September 16 marks the Independence Days for Mexico (celebrating the declaration of independence from Spain in 1810) and Papua New Guinea (commemorating the exit from Australia in 1975).
When government pressures private companies to censor people, the government is itself acting to censor people.
That the Biden administration is acting to censor unapproved discussion of COVID-19 isn’t a guess. It has publicly urged social-media companies to prohibit “misinformation.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki, for example, has said that Biden’s administration is “regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans are seeing. . . . You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others.”
The Liberty Justice Center is now suing the administration and firms like Facebook and Twitter for violating the First Amendment rights of people like Justin Hart, a plaintiff in the case.
Hart is a data analyst who questions the effectiveness of requiring children to wear masks in school. For his fielding and repeating those questions, he was booted from social media accounts.
Explaining its litigation, the Liberty Justice Center observes that “dominant social media platforms and the White House are openly collaborating to eliminate social media posts about COVID-19 that the administration finds objectionable, and to cancel or suspend the Facebook and Twitter accounts of people who raise issues about COVID they don’t want the public to see.”
I tend to agree with Hart’s conclusion, but that is not the point.
More fundamentally, I am inclined to discover what we might learn from unfettered discussion of the facts. Which is one of the many reasons we need that First Amendment.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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[C]ommerce inspires in men a vivid love of individual independence. Commerce supplies their needs, satisfies their desires, without the intervention of the authorities. This intervention is almost always — and I do not know why I say almost — this intervention is indeed always a trouble and an embarrassment. Every time collective power wishes to meddle with private speculations, it harasses the speculators. Every time governments pretend to do our own business, they do it more incompetently and expensively than we would.
Benjamin Constant, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns (1819).
On September 15, 1820, an uprising occurred in Lisbon, Portugal, following similar insurrection in Porto the previous month. This was no bloodthirsty mob, but, instead, a popular demand for constitutional government. Unfortunately, the country was beset with imperial and monarchical problems for some time to come.
The United Nations established September 15 as International Day of Democracy, in 2007. An Independence Day is celebrated on this date in Guatemala (a Patriotic Day), El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, commemorating independence from Spain in 1821.