March 15 was “the Ides of March” in the Roman calendar. On that date in 44 BC, Julius Caesar, Dictator of the Roman Republic, was stabbed to death by a handful of prominent senators.
On the same date in 1783, General George Washington eloquently entreated his officers not to support the Newburgh Conspiracy. His plea was successful and the threatened coup d’état never took place.
This Week in Common Sense, March 13, 2021. (Also in audio-only.)
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
On March 14, 1900, the Gold Standard Act was ratified, ending the long practice of bimetallism by placing the United States Treasury — and banking and currency — on the gold standard.
Hello? Uh, hello? Hello, Dmitri? Listen, I can’t hear too well, do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little? [pause] Oh, that’s much better. . . . Now then, Dmitri, you know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb. [pause] The BOMB, Dmitri! The hydrogen bomb! Well now, what happened is, uh, one of our base commanders, he had a sort of, well, he went a little funny in the head. You know. Just a little . . . funny. And uh, he went and did a silly thing. Well, I’ll tell you what he did, he ordered his planes . . . to attack your country. Well, let me finish, Dmitri. Let me finish, Dmitri. Well, listen, how do you think I feel about it? Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dmitri? . . . I’m just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened. It’s a friendly call. Of course it’s a friendly call. Listen, if it wasn’t friendly, you probably wouldn’t have even got it. They will not reach their targets for at least another hour. [pause] I’m sorry too, Dmitri. I’m very sorry. All right! You’re sorrier than I am! But I am sorry as well. I am as sorry as you are Dmitri. Don’t say that you are more sorry than I am, because I am capable of being just as sorry as you are. So we’re both sorry, all right? All right.
President Merkin Muffley, as played by Peter Sellers, speaking to the Soviet premier in Stanley Kubrick’s classic dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), written by Terry Southern and Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel Red Alert (1958) by Peter George.
On March 13, 1862, the U.S. federal government forbade all Union army officers from returning fugitive slaves, thus effectively annulling the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation.
Stop trying to create a zero-risk society.
That’s the sensible advice — indeed, the title — of a Reason think-piece by Veronique de Rugy.
Every action has costs, at the very least in opportunities forgone, and all solutions to problems are better expressed as “trade-offs,” as Thomas Sowell put it. But, specific to this historic moment, “we will suffer many tragic effects from the pandemic-induced changes long after lockdowns are lifted,” Ms. de Rugy argues. First, the lockdowns themselves were a bust, “when all costs are considered, such as the short- and long-term health, educational and psychological harms the lockdowns caused, their costs far exceed[ed] their benefits.”
One humungous tragic effect of the pandemic is what she dubs “the utterly insane expansion of federal spending.” Acknowledging that it is now “traditional for the federal government to expand during emergencies,” de Rugy contends that “the size of the response this time around is both unprecedented and unwarranted.”
Well, hardly unprecedented . . . but it was the biggest over-reaction yet, and definitely unwarranted.
I wonder, though, if Veronique de Rugy may not have missed the biggest thing: the quickness with which we accepted a rushed-to-market-and-subsidized quasi-vaccine.
I say “quasi,” because the Pfizer vaccine is not a normal vaccine . . . it is gene therapy. Experimental gene therapy. But hey: people should be able to try an experimental medicine.
But no one should be forced to take such a thing.
Why? The risk!
Oh, and our rights to medical freedom.
While people line up to take the “jabs” as they become available, surely de Rugy is right to caution that “Americans believing that governments can and must do anything to achieve a zero-risk society” is the riskiest notion of all.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Our lives are getting to be more and more regulated from without, with the effect that we are becoming drained of our individuality and drilled into mere machines. The passive attitude of mind induced by this regime will, if that regime grow in intensity, be fatal to all manliness of thought and manliness of conduct. Discrimination, as any competent psychologist will tell you, is the most fundamental of our mental faculties. Our intellectual and moral natures come into play only when we discriminate and decide for ourselves.
Joseph Hiam Levy, The Outcome of Individualism (Third Edition, 1892), Conclusion.
On March 12, 2009, financier Bernard Madoff pled guilty to pulling off perhaps the biggest swindle in U. S. history. One year earlier to the day, in the same city, New York, the state’s governor, Eliot Spitzer, resigned a mere two days after reports had surfaced that he was listed as a client in a high-end escort/call-girl prostitution ring.
The cause of freedom is advanced with every criminal nabbed and every hypocritical illiberal politician disgraced.