Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.
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Henry David Thoreau
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Democracy and China
The Hong Kong situation rings around the world, with the keywords being “freedom” and “democracy.”
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Free to Choose
On August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing women’s suffrage.
Eighty-eight years later, Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharaf resigned under threat of impeachment.
The next year, Rose Director Friedman, economist, wife of economist Milton Friedman, sister of economist Aaron Director and mother of economist David D. Friedman, died. With her husband she had written one of the most popular pro-liberty books of our time, Free to Choose. She had been born in late December, 1910, in Staryi Chortoryisk, in Ukraine, to the Director family, prominent Jewish residents.
With her husband she co-authored their memoirs, Milton and Rose D. Friedman, Two Lucky People, which appeared in 1998. Together they founded the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, with the aim of promoting the use of school vouchers and freedom of choice in education. She also helped produce the PBS television series, Free to Choose, and assisted her husband in writing his 1962 political philosophy book Capitalism and Freedom.
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John Adams
Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.
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Jeffrey Epstein is dead, alas
The week started out with a big story….
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David Crockett
On August 17, 1786, American backwoods hero and politician, David Crockett, was born. Famous as a politician, he brought personal principle and honor and a “common sense” approach in representing Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives. He later served in the Texas Revolution, dying at the Battle of the Alamo.
Crockett grew up in East Tennessee, where he gained a reputation for hunting and storytelling, which helped make him a legend in his own time. After being made a colonel in the militia of Lawrence County, Tennessee, he was elected to the Tennessee state legislature in 1821.
In 1825, Crockett was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he vehemently opposed many of the policies of President Andrew Jackson, most notably the Indian Removal Act.
Crockett wrote a number of books, including a biography of Martin Van Buren.
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Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
We have seen how wealth spreads everywhere when trade enjoys full and permanent freedom. It pours continuously from one province into another. Agriculture is flourishing: people cultivate the arts even in the hamlets: each citizen finds a comfortable existence in work of his choice: all is brought to value; and one does not catch a glimpse of those fortunes out of all proportion which bring luxury and wretchedness.
From the concluding chapter to Commerce and Government considered in their mutual relationship, by the Abbé de Condillac of the Académie Française & Member of the Royal Society of Agriculture of Orléans (1776).
Everything changes in step with different causes which bring blows to freedom of trade. We have run through these causes, which are wars, tolls, customs, guilds, exclusive privileges, taxes on consumption, variations in coinage, exploitation of mines, every kind of government borrowing, the grain police, the luxury of a great capital, the rivalry of nations, finally the spirit of finance which enters every part of the administration.
Then disorder is at its height. Wretchedness grows with luxury: the towns fill with beggars: the countryside loses population; and the state which has contracted huge debts appears to have no further expedients except those which bring about its ruin.
Poised to gobble up Hong Kong whole, completing the process Britain began when it ceded the colony back to China in 1997, the government of China remains concerned about world opinion, for it engages in massive propaganda.
“When a projectile struck a Hong Kong woman in the eye this week as protesters clashed with the police, China responded quickly,” explains an article in the New York Times. “Its state television network reported that the woman had been injured not by one of the police’s bean bag rounds, but by a protester.”
But that’s not the only kind of propaganda. If you have spent any time on Instagram, for example, you have probably seen the posts of Chinese people decrying the scandal and shame of how Hong Kongers resist government efforts at hegemony.
There is a name for this latter form of propagandist, “the fifty cent party” because the Communist Party is said to pay social media users for each pro-government post . . . though almost certainly not 50¢.*
The basic idea, according to General Secretary Xi Jinping, is to “to strengthen media coverage … use innovative outreach methods … tell a good Chinese story, and promote China’s views internationally.”
And managing its own population, as when, according to the Times, state media “posted what it said was a photo of the woman counting out cash on a Hong Kong sidewalk — insinuating, as Chinese reports have claimed before, that the protesters are merely paid provocateurs.”
These young street protestors are almost certainly not mercenaries, though they have sometimes faced what appear to be hired thugs.
The protests are a kind of insurrection. Strong resistance, at least, to being totalitarianized.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On August 16, 1841, U.S. President John Tyler vetoed a bill to re-establish the Second Bank of the United States (pictured). Enraged Whig Party members — feeling betrayed by the WINO* Tyler — rioted outside the White House in history’s most violent demonstration on White House grounds.
* “Whig In Name Only,” anachronistic joke term. A play on the contemporary initialisms “Republican in Name Only” (RINO) and “Democrat in Name Only” (DINO).
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David Crockett
Statesmen are gamesters, and the people are the cards they play with.
David Crockett, first sentence of The Life of Martin Van Buren, Heir-apparent to the “Government” and the Appointed Successor to General Andrew Jackson (Tenth edition, 1836).