On March 26, 1991, local self-government in South Korea was restored after three decades of centralized control.
Beware the America we see on our screens.
A friend posted something on Facebook tying three recent stories together, what he called “brazenly false narratives many progressives have peddled.”
The first being that those who attacked the Capitol on January 6th were treated more gently than Black Lives Matter activists would have been. Back in January, then President-Elect Biden made a point of offering this stark racial takeaway, sans evidence.*
The second narrative? That the Atlanta shooting spree was motivated by anti-Asian hatred, six of the nine people shot, eight killed, being Asian. But there is yet no evidence of racism; another, quite different motive appears to have spurred the massacre.
Nonetheless, on NBC Meet the Press last Sunday, Princeton University Professor Eddie Glaude Jr. said the Atlanta shooting was part of “this panic around the whiteness of this country.” The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart echoed that emotion in a weekend column, “Asian Americans must not fight white terror alone.”
Yet, weeks ago, The Post informed readers, “Tensions between Asian and Black communities also date back decades and have been reignited by videos that show Black perpetrators in many of the recent attacks on Asian Americans.”
The terror is diverse.
Lastly, the Boulder shooter was taken alive — which “must” mean (if you are catching on) that he
Like me, you probably meet a lot of nice people, white and black and Asian and Middle
But no film at 11.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* I made a point here of calling him on it — thanks to David Bernstein’s excellent analysis at The Volokh Conspiracy.
** The removed tweet by 36-year-old attorney and author Meena Harris, had declared in part: “Violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country.”
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[U]nless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one supra-national totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid technological progress in general and the atomic revolution in particular, and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Aldous Huxley, foreword to a later edition of Brave New World (first published 1932).
On March 25, 1965, civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King, Jr., successfully completed their four-day, 50-mile march from Selma to the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama.
Whatever happened to Portland, Oregon?
Describing two “anarchists” in that riot-torn city, Nancy Rommelmann paints quite a picture in the May 2021 issue of Reason: “They are outfitted in the black bloc uniform of head-to-toe black; the boy carries a steel baton and wants me to know it. There is nonetheless something patrician about them, as if under different circumstances one might encounter them at cotillion. The uniform conceals their identities, but it can’t hide the sense of entitlement that allows them a cheap laugh at the cop, at the fan.”
The mocked cop? Sitting inside a federal building next to an industrial fan airing out the place after being attacked . . . with a thrown bucket of diarrhea.
Ms. Rommelmann wonders why these miscreants think it acceptable to throw excrement around.
“‘Do you believe that property is worth more than human lives?’ asks the boy.
“‘Do you believe the police should be allowed to murder people?’ asks the girl.”
Rhetorically.
For there had been, that year, only “one deadly police shooting in Portland.”
Thirteen years ago, Portland’s anarchist craze was still latte liberal, when 75,000 showed up to cheer on candidate Barack Obama. That was when it was “a little bit goofy, a little bit twee,” as Rommelmann puts it.
What went wrong?
Well, both city and state are solidly Democratic, and the Democrats’ leftist pieties disabled them from ever standing up to the violence of ideologues.
Utopians with every instinct to turn common sense on its head can only take each failure to establish their ideals as an excuse to turn up the volume. And violence.
Our civilization has seen this before. The utopians bring only dystopia.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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One would have thought that in these anti-monopoly days, when the calamities resulting from selfish legislation have awakened public attention, men would take especial care not to permit anything involving an approach to exclusive privileges, to make its appearance upon the political arena, without raising a vigorous outcry against it. But the expectation is not realised. The doctrine that it is the duty of the state to protect the public health, contains the germ of another gigantic monopoly.
Herbert Spencer, The Proper Sphere of Government, Letter IX (W. Brittain of London, 1843), first appearing serially in The Nonconformist.
On March 24, 1765, the Kingdom of Great Britain passed the Quartering Act, which required the Thirteen Colonies to house British troops.
On the same date in 1855, slavery was abolished in Venezuela.
Democratic socialism might seem all fun and games . . . right up until one is forced to choose between democracy and socialism. Those countries that choose the latter, like Venezuela, lose both prosperity and democracy, and then things get really bad.
But what happens when such a society’s dictator wises up?
“Bankrupted by Socialism, Venezuela Cedes Control of Companies,” Fabiola Zerba reports for Bloomberg. “Saddled with hundreds of failed state companies in an economy barreling over a cliff, the Venezuelan government is abandoning socialist doctrine by offloading key enterprises to private investors, offering profit in exchange for a share of revenue or products.”
If that last sounds like less than full privatization, and unnecessarily cumbersome, it is. “Dozens of chemical plants, coffee processors, grain silos and hotels confiscated over the past two decades have been transferred — but not sold — to private operators in so-called strategic
“Strategic alliances” sounds ominously . . . fascistic.
This is not gratuitous, for, as Peter Drucker explained, “Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.” And it is definitely not directly towards “free markets” that Venezuela now moves. Dictators and ruling juntas don’t like free markets. It makes them less integral to the wealth extraction process.
And wealth, in their view, needs to be extracted!
It gives meaning to their lives.
Jon Miltimore, in an article at FEE, also uses the f-word, and quotes my friend Sheldon Richman’s definition: fascism, noun : “socialism with a capitalist veneer.”
Really moving beyond 20th century mistakes would entail reviving actual free markets. Not “so-called strategic alliances.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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[T]he complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.
Peter Drucker (1939), as cited in The Road to Serfdom (Condensed Edition, March 1944), by F.A. Hayek.