The state of the world is nothing to sneeze at:
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Watch: Allergic to Trouble
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King John of England
Magna Carta Libertatum (“Great Charter of Freedoms”), commonly called Magna Carta (also Magna Charta; “Great Charter”), Clause 20, as signed by King John of England at Runnymede, first drafted by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury.
For a trivial offence, a free man shall be fined only in proportion to the degree of his offence, and for a serious offence correspondingly, but not so heavily as to deprive him of his livelihood.
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The Weekawken Duel
A few hundred years ago, not far from Deas’ Point near Weehawken, N. J., was a ledge eleven paces wide and 20 paces long, situated 20 feet above the Hudson on the Palisades. This ledge, long gone, was the site of 18 documented duels and probably many unrecorded ones in the years 1798–1845. The most famous is the duel between General Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury, and Colonel Aaron Burr, third (and sitting) Vice President of the United States, which took place on July 11, 1804.
Paul Jacob has allergies. The world is troubled. Put the two together and you have the latest episode of This Week in Common Sense:
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George Reisman
Socialism cannot be ruled for very long except by terror. As soon as the terror is relaxed, resentment and hostility logically begin to well up against the rulers. The stage is thus set for a revolution or civil war. In fact, in the absence of terror, or, more correctly, a sufficient degree of terror, socialism would be characterized by an endless series of revolutions and civil wars, as each new group of rulers proved as incapable of making socialism function successfully as its predecessors before it. The inescapable inference to be drawn is that the terror actually experienced in the socialist countries was not simply the work of evil men, such as Stalin, but springs from the nature of the socialist system. Stalin could come to the fore because his unusual willingness and cunning in the use of terror were the specific characteristics most required by a ruler of socialism in order to remain in power. He rose to the top by a process of socialist natural selection: the selection of the worst.
George Reisman, “Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian,” Mises Institute, 11/11/2005.
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Anti-Bankster
On July 10, 1832, U.S. President Andrew Jackson vetoed a bill to re-charter the Second Bank of the United States, in effect ending formal central banking in the United States until the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913.
From the people who brought you “Defund the Police,” prepare yourself for . . . “Throw Billions at the Police!”
“The Capitol Police on Monday announced a multi-pronged plan to expand its operations,” journalist Glenn Greenwald informs, highlighting that “the force intends for the first time to create a permanent presence outside of the Capitol.”
Instead of police defending the national Capitol, the U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) goes national.
“The Department is also in the process of opening Regional Field Offices in California and Florida,” announced the USCP news release, “with additional regions in the near future to investigate threats to Members of Congress.”
Plus, USCP declared it is “moving forward along a new path towards an intelligence based protective agency.” After being unprepared to defend capitol doors from a mob back in January, the force now morphs into yet another “intelligence” agency.
Does that make it the 18th such agency? 19th? Umpteenth?
USCP’s spread throughout the country is made possible by $2 billion in additional funding passed two months ago by the very narrowest of House margins, 213 to 212.
But what about 2020’s Democratic push to “defund the police”?
Three Democratic members of “The Squad” did vote with all Republicans against this expansion of the Capitol Police. Yet, three other Squad members — Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — simply voted “present.”
Had even one said “no,” super-sizing the budget and role of the Capitol Police would have failed.
“No more policing, incarceration, and militarization,” Rep. Tlaib tweeted last year. But she was “present” for $2 billion more.
“Defunding police means defunding police,” Ocasio-Cortez once declared. “It does not mean budget tricks or funny math.”
What about funny voting?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Ludwig von Mises
The gold standard alone makes the determination of money’s purchasing power independent of the ambitions and machinations of governments, of dictators, of political parties, and of pressure groups. The gold standard alone is what the nineteenth-century freedom-loving leaders (who championed representative government, civil liberties, and prosperity for all) called ‘sound money.’
Ludwig von Mises, “The Gold Problem,” p. 185.
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“Cross of gold”
On July 9, 1896, William Jennings Bryan delivered his “Cross of Gold” speech advocating bi-metallist inflationism at the 1896 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, a triumph of rhetoric over reason that solidified the takeover of the Democratic Party by reformers utterly ignorant of basic economics.
“We are all, regardless of where we sit on the political spectrum,” Dr. Jonathan Holloway wrote in The New York Times last week, “caught in a vortex of intoxication.”
Holloway, president of Rutgers University as well as an author and historian, blames social media for encouraging us not “to see and respect one another.” But have no fear, he offers a solution to all or most of our nation’s problems.
“The time has come,” he argues, “for compulsory national service for all young people — with no exceptions.”*
He references FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, LBJ’s Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and today’s “domestic civilian service” programs such as AmeriCorps, asserting, sans evidence, that these “have been enormously successful.”
Effectiveness aside, does this academician see no significant difference between the programs mentioned, which were offered freely to young people who wanted to participate, and a program forced upon young people against their will?
Regardless, Dr. Holloway declares “it is easy to imagine” this one-year governmental control and use of millions of young people as “a vehicle to provide necessary support to underserved urban and rural communities, help eliminate food deserts, contribute to rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, enrich our arts and culture, and bolster our community health clinics, classrooms and preschools.”
In his utopia, mandatory national service would also
- “put young people in the wilderness repairing the ravages of environmental destruction”;
- “dispatch young Americans to distant lands where they would understand the challenges of poor countries”;
- “force all of our young people to better know one another”;
- “shore up our fragile communities”; and
- even unify “America’s races, religions and social classes.”
Ah, the Rutgers president: terminally delusional . . . or only temporarily “caught in a vortex of intoxication”?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The “no exceptions” stance is designed to silence questions of fairness and “equity” . . . even though just a few moments of thought will convince anyone that exceptions must and will be made.
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