On August 14, 1765, Sam Adams led the first rebel mob against enforcers of the Stamp Act in Britain’s American colonies.
On this day in 1980, Lech Wałęsa led strikes at the Gdańsk, Poland, shipyards.
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Spain Conquered
On this day in 1898, an Armistice ended the Spanish-American War, a war best commemorated by sociologist and economist William Graham Sumner in his classic essay “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.”
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Frédéric Bastiat
The Socialists say, since the law organizes justice, why should it not organize labor, instruction, and religion?
Why? Because it could not organize labor, instruction, and religion, without disorganizing justice.
Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (1850).
“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
Although less controversial than other constitutional amendments, the much-neglected Eighth Amendment provides important protection from the government. Yet this amendment has been violated, sometimes grotesquely, and not only in the context of criminal sanctions.
The question before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, decided July 22, was whether local governments must comply with the prohibition against “excessive fines” when issuing parking tickets.
“This right to be free from excessive governmental fines is not a relic,” the court ruled. “The government cannot overstep its authority and impose fines on its citizens without paying heed to the limits posed by the Eighth Amendment.” Providing the basis for the present decision was a 2019 Supreme Court decision affirming that the Excessive Fines Clause does indeed apply to state and local governments.
The driver who is the focus of the class-action suit did not win his specific case. With respect to whether the fine he contested was in fact “excessive,” the court said no, it was not. But it sent the question of whether the late penalties were excessive to a lower court for further review.
The principle is crucial here, and the court clearly affirmed the rule that local governments may not impose “excessive fines.”
The many drivers in many municipalities who have been victimized by ridiculous use of red-light cameras to fill government coffers are among those who should take heart.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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James Mill
Every man should be considered as having a right to the character which he deserves; that is, to be spoken of according to his actions.
On August 11, 1972, the last of American ground combat troops exited South Vietnam.
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Of Bats and Debates
How batty is 2020’s politics?
Adding one absurdity upon another, a minor party candidate got attention this weekend for something even more bizarre than Biden’s bumbling or Trump’s trolling:
She got bit by a bat and is now undergoing painful treatment for rabies.
Her name is Jo Jorgensen, Libertarian Party presidential candidate.
So far, reports on this development have focused on her Twitter account, where jokes abound.
But what dominates her Twitter feed are the usual-for-Libertarians demands that she be included “in the debates.”
What debates?
Is anyone certain that there will be debates at all? Behind in the polls, Donald Trump seems eager to debate, but . . . Joe Biden?
Well, the Biden camp has agreed to three debates and the candidate says he is “so forward looking [sic] to have an opportunity to sit with the president, or stand with the president, in debates.” But Trump wants more.
And some Democrats want none, for in that same interview (which has gone more viral than rabies), as elsewhere, Biden made so many bizarre gaffes that most folks are beginning to assume that, against the Donald, Biden might wilt worse than a vampire in sunlight.
Biden, who will not even attend his own ostensible nominating convention, remains largely sequestered, under cover of panicky pandemic protocols. Unless the Democrats somehow replace him, the odds of there being debates at all seem low.
And if Trump’s too much for Biden, what is a Libertarian to the two major parties? The Libertarians have been excluded for a reason.* Introduction of substantive, orthogonal-to-the-duopoly ideas into a national debate might show the major parties for what they are: cognitively challenged.
What a year! Bats.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Amusingly, Donald Trump called the exclusion of challenger parties “disgraceful” . . . back when he was in the Reform Party. I doubt he’d be on board the #LetHerSpeak campaign today — unless he was certain there would be no debates.
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F. Marion Crawford
So far as supply and demand are concerned, books in general and works of fiction in particular are commodities and subject to the same laws, statutory and traditional, as other articles of manufacture. A toy-dealer would not venture to sell real pistols to little boys as pop-guns, and a gun-maker who should try to sell the latter for army revolvers would get into trouble, even though he were able to prove that the toy was as expensive to manufacture as the real article, or more so, silver-mounted, chiselled, and lying in a Russia-leather case. I am not sure that the law might not support the purchaser in an action for damages if he discovered at a critical moment that his revolver was a plaything. It seems to me that there is a similar case in the matter of novels. A man buys what purports to be a work of fiction, a romance, a novel, a story of adventure, pays his money, takes his book home, prepares to enjoy it at his ease, and discovers that he has paid a dollar for somebody’s views on socialism, religion, or the divorce laws.
Francis Marion Crawford, The Novel: What It Is (1893).
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Independence
On August 10, 1809, Ecuadorians attempted independence from Spain with the Declaration of Independence of Quito, but failed with the execution of all the conspirators a few days less than a year later.
Independence finally occurred in 1822.
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Watch: Facts Matter, Don’t They?
The video version of this week’s podcast. Technical recording difficulties led to a less-than-glamorous presentation…