New President, new podcast episode:
On January 23, 1783, journalist and novelist Marie-Henri Beyle, known by his pen name Stendhal (pictured above), was born. Stendhal was a follower of Destutt de Tracy and an attendant at the count’s salons. His most famous works include the novel The Red and the Black and a treatise on romantic love.
Stendhal died March 22, 1842.
On January 23, 1860, the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty was signed between France and Great Britain. The treaty was named after the two main proponents of the agreement, Richard Cobden (in England) and economist Michel Chevalier (in France). The treaty had been suggested the year earlier, in British Parliament, by Cobden’s colleague John Bright, who saw the measure as a peace measure, and an alternate to a military build-up.
How far will the enemies of liberty go?
Well, almost all the way to armed robbery, for the latest outrage by foes of individual rights looks an awful lot like just that, plain armed robbery.
The victims?
The owners and staff of Atilis Gym in Bellmawr, New Jersey.
On January 13, at the behest of Governor Phil Murphy, state officials seized the assets of the gym. These assets included $165,000 in the business’s bank account, all of which, says co-owner Ian Smith, had come from donations and online sales of T-shirts and other apparel.
For months, the owners of Atilis have been involved in a pitched battle with the state of New Jersey over orders to shut down the gym, which they have kept open despite those orders (for which disobedience they were arrested in July). Atilis has been pursuing litigation to overturn the order, revocation of its license, and fines ($15,000+ per day) that the state has imposed to punish the defiance.
Smith is asking for our help as he and his business partner confront Leviathan.
“This was never about protection, it was always about control,” he says. “Please continue to support us in any way possible. Please share as much as you possibly can this story and help us continue our fight.”
Visit the Atilis Gym website to buy merchandise, and visit the gym’s GoFundMe page to “support the efforts to reopen and stay open” and to help staff and members cope with the financial hardships imposed by the shutdown order.
And subsequent armed robbery.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
On January 22, 1920, American neoconservative pundit and author Irving Kristol was born.
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Desperate Times, Measures
Desperate times call up desperate politicians who demand desperate measures which require desperate counter-measures.
But while you might be thinking of Donald Trump, COVID, riots, and Biden-Harris, desperation isn’t just an American problem.
“Italy Government on Verge of Collapse as Renzi Party Quits,” Bloomberg informed us last week. What precipitated Renzi’s exit from the coalition government? The persistence in that government of an anti-immigrant party. Sounds familiar.
In Estonia, “Prime Minister Juri Ratas resigned over an inquiry into a property development,” according to U.S. News & World Report. In the 2019 elections, the Reform Party had won a plurality of seats, but Ratas had to put together a coalition with other parties to form a government. Now Reform will lead a coalition, but, we are told the new coalition will not likely “include the far-right EKRE party, whose leaders denounced the U.S. election result as rigged and called President-elect Joe Biden ‘corrupt.’”
In the Netherlands, the whole government resigned because of a scandal involving government-provided child-care funds. Bureaucrats had “wrongly accused thousands of working families of fraud and ordered them to repay childcare benefits between 2013 and 2019.” But the resignation is somewhat hollow, since officials still hold a “caretaker status” while the country goes through another lockdown.
To cause even more chaos, here’s a fourth example: Belarus. The International Ice Hockey Federation just stripped the nation from hosting its world championship because, as Politico reports, “Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has used the country’s security forces to violently oppress protesters since his disputed election victory in August last year.”*
The crisis appears worldwide. And the answer in each case — including in the USA — is for citizens to have to more constitutional and democratic checks on government.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* In a leaked audio tape to Radio Free Europe, a senior government official can be heard discussing “plans to build an internment camp — complete with barbed wire — for political prisoners.”
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Rose Wilder Lane
In our ignorance, we could not see that the Kaiser’s Germany and the Communist International were merely two aspects of the Old World’s reaction against the new, the American principle of individual liberty and human rights.
Rose Wilder Lane, Give Me Liberty (1936).
On January 21, 1950, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury, with Whittaker Chambers being the main witness in Hiss’s prosecution. Chambers confessed to having been a Soviet spy, and accused Hiss as an accomplice, which Hiss denied to his dying day. Chambers gave a fascinating account of all this in his bestselling memoir, Witness.
Today, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., the former Vice-President and longtime U.S. Senator from Delaware will become the 46th president of these United States. Speaking of being united, or getting united, that’s something the 78-year-old Biden, with 43-years of Washington experience, wants to work on.
Good luck. Let me offer some advice: Recognize when the country is already united, then play into it by advancing policies supported by overwhelming majorities.
Term limits come to my mind, as does another issue, popular left to right: criminal justice reform. Americans are solidly for that . . . but instead of political action, we got a lousy summer of double-digit deaths by riot. And, as civil disorders go, last summer’s unrest was the most expensive destruction ever — over $1 billion in senseless damage.
Unity also suggests not needlessly dividing folks.
Which makes me wonder why, the day after the capitol riot, Biden characterized the police response as “a clear failure to carry out equal justice.”
A woman was shot dead within the capitol building; I’m only glad more people weren’t killed.
Aren’t you, Joe?
“No one can tell me,” Biden argued, “that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the capitol. We all know that’s true, and it is unacceptable.”
Well, at Reason/The Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein calls that gaslighting, rattling off the reality of stand-down orders for police in Minneapolis, Chicago, Indianapolis, Columbus, Louisville, Portland, Denver and elsewhere — not to mention demonstrators setting up a Seattle “autonomous zone” treated to weeks of hands-off non-policing.
Americans, black and white, liberal and conservative, are united against violence, at the U.S. Capitol or anywhere else.
Don’t divide us, Joe.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Arthur Latham Perry
One of the chief charms of Political Economy is the open secret, that it deals not with rigidities and inflexible qualities and mathematical quantities and the unchanging laws of matter, but with the billowy play of desires and estimates and purposes and satisfactions, all of which are mental states, and all of which are subject in the general to ascertainable laws, though laws of a quite different kind from those of Mechanics. Values come and they go. Within certain limits and under certain conditions they may be anticipated and even predicted, but never with the precision of an eclipse or the result of a known chemical combination.