The true way to abolish corruption is to suppress the opportunity for corruption. But the more government and municipal undertakings increase in number and importance, the more these opportunities will multiply.
Yves Guyot, Where and Why Public Ownership Has Failed (1914).
What should governments do?
At the very least, and perhaps at the very most, defend our rights.
Now, rights-defense is not easy; folks in government along with folks who demand more government have other plans. It’s easier to attack peaceful people for not doing what you want than to come to the aid of victims who are under attack — or have been conned or kidnapped — by really sick and evil people.
So every now and then it is a good idea to call attention to governments actually doing Job One.
The U.S. Marshals Service put out a press release last week, and it got some attention: “U.S. Marshals find 39 missing children in Georgia in ‘Operation Not Forgotten.’”
This law enforcement campaign “resulted in the rescue of 26 children, the safe location of 13 children and the arrest of nine criminal associates. Additionally, investigators cleared 26 arrest warrants and filed additional charges for alleged crimes related to sex trafficking, parental kidnapping, registered sex offender violations, drugs and weapons possession, and custodial interference.”
The coverage of the operation so far has produced little beyond what’s in the press release. So our job is to praise the effort and hope that the these children are cared for and can begin to heal.
We live in a time of heightened awareness of the “trafficking” of under-age persons for prostitution and sex slavery. We can thank Jeffrey Epstein for that. And the U.S. Marshals and local law enforcement for this rescue.
This is, after all, the reason we have governments in the first place.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The economists observe man, the laws of his organization, and the social relations that result from those laws. The socialists conjure up an imaginary society, and then create a human heart to suit that society.
Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Harmonies, preface: “Letter to the Youth of France.”
Slovakia celebrates a Constitution Day on September 1, for the Constitution passed by the Slovak National Council on September 1, 1992.
The Slovaks place their rights provision early in their document, like most American states, and not as amendments, as in the Constitution of the United States of America.
According to a New York Times report, “American Internet giants are struggling to respond” to China’s recent crackdown on Hong Kong.
For now, the outcome of the struggle is that Facebook, Twitter, and Google have stopped sharing data with Hong Kong officials. Doing so has become tantamount to sharing data with the Chinese government.
If this wasn’t clear before China’s repressive new “national security” laws in Hong Kong, it’s clear now. The Chinese government is systematically working to muzzle and punish anyone who threatens “national security” by openly criticizing the Chinese government.
Yahoo has changed its policies as well, so that users are now governed in their dealings with Yahoo by American law, not local Hong Kong law (rapidly becoming synonymous with the mainland’s edicts).
So far, so good.
Worrying, though, is how inconsistent the tech giants have been. Yahoo once helped the Chinese government to identify and imprison two dissidents, claiming it had “no choice” but to turn over the info. Google and others have worked with China to censor information that the Chinese government doesn’t want its citizens to see.
These companies should never — in no way, shape, or form — help China go after dissidents.
They should never cooperate, rationalize, compromise.
It would be better to pack up their services and leave Hong Kong altogether than to “struggle” to find a middle way that “sort of” cooperates with China’s repression — and “sort of” leaves Hong Kongers in the lurch.
To bolster these companies’ new backbones, we had best leverage our power as customers.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On August 31, 1870, educator Maria Montessori was born.
August 31 serves as Independence Day for Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, and Trinidad and Tobago.
We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.
CIA Director William J. Casey (1981-1987) to Ronald Reagan, as related by Barbara Honegger and first publicly stated by Senior White House Correspondent Sarah McClendon, originally said by Casey in response to the president’s query as to what success for the Central Intelligence Agency would look like. The interchange allegedly took place in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in February 1981.
The video version of the weekend podcast. It’s a doozy, folks!
On August 30, 1918, Fanny Yefimovna Kaplan shot and seriously injured Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Though certainly justifiable on some primary level — evil killers with power probably deserve to be killed in turn — this assassination attempt, like most such, had disastrous consequences, prompting the mass arrests and executions known as the Red Terror.
August 30, 1999, saw East Timor’s referendum vote for independence from Indonesia succeed.
Paul expects this next week to be quite eerie indeed. He explains why by looking back at last week: