The effect of a protective duty on any commodity is to raise the price, not only of the amount imported, but of the whole quantity sold in the country; it is a private tax placed upon consumers for the benefit of producers.
Yves Guyot (September 6, 1843 – February 22, 1928) was a French politician and economist.
On March 5, 1616, Nicolaus Copernicus’s book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. This censorship notwithstanding, the Earth continued to revolve around the Sun. The book had been first published in 1543 in Nuremberg.
| In 1770, the Boston Massacre took place on March 5.
| Joseph Stalin, the longest serving leader of the Soviet Union, died at his Volynskoe dacha in Moscow on this date in 1953, after a cerebral hemorrhage.
| March 5 is magician Penn Jillette’s birthday. He turns 64 today, beginning his 65th year of life.
Is today’s politics tragic or comic?
Take the current Democratic Party obsession with socialism. There is nothing more tragic than full-blown socialism: mind-control and the snitch society; purges and mass starvation, with millions upon millions dead. But give them credit: the trendy new Democrats say they’re only for the Nordic Model of . . . well, the European term for it is social democracy.*
But they sure seem to push for evermore government.
Worse yet, they too often defend actual Communist countries — as Bernie Sanders (BS) has done.
This suggests an unfunny ending to their mad rush to power.
So the proud proclamations of the s-label from BS and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) should concern us, as should the eagerness with which the majority of Democratic presidential candidates have signed onto AOC’s over-the-top proposed takeover of the economy in her “Green New Deal.”
And yet . . . these politicians are absurd, on the face of it as well as when we drill down.
It’s hard not to regard absurdity as comic.
The b.s. doesn’t end with BS.
Sure, our current president is a comic figure, too. And the pathetic nature of most GOP movers and shakers on Capitol Hill make them worthy of satire.
But it is also the case that Trump is funny in a way no one else is: he is playing a role and making many chortle. On purpose.
Too bad we couldn’t move him from the Presidency to a new Constitutional role, like Troll-in-Chief. There he could ensure, through mockery alone, what he promised in his State of the Union Address: America will never become a socialist country.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Denmark, Sweden, etc., support extensive markets and a surprisingly hands-off approach to business — comparable to that of the U.S., and in some ways more lax — combined with extremely high taxes and vast transfers of wealth. You could call this “democratic socialism,” but . . . why?
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The great difficulty which history records is not that of the first step, but that of the second step. What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but getting out of a fixed law; not of cementing (as upon a former occasion phrased it) a cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching something better.
Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872).
On March 4, 1789, the first bicameral Congress of the United States met in New York, New York, in accordance with the new Constitution.
Two years later on the same date, Vermont was admitted as the fourteenth state of the union.
In a twist in World War II allegiances, Finland declared war on Nazi Germany on March 4, 1945, beginning the Lapland War.
This weekend at Townhall: The rise of self-proclaimed socialists within the ranks of the Democrats is alarming. But is it only tragic? Might not it be a little bit comic?
Here you can find some context:
Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari was born on March 3, 1819. Associated with French laissez-faire economists Frédéric Bastiat and Yves Guyot, he was the longest-serving editor of Guillamin’s Journal des économistes. Today chiefly known in the English-speaking world for his authorship of one article, “The Production of Security” (1849), he was, as Ludwig von Mises described, the most productive economist in his school. Despite this, and his worldwide recognition, only one of his many books was translated from the French into English during his lifetime, The Society of To-morrow (1904), his final book. Molinari died on January 28, 1912.
Social media is a jungle. The most popular platforms are engaged in gate-keeping practices we usually associate with edited publications, not open platforms. And now it is proven that Facebook is conspiring against some of its users for the benefit of an ideology. Proven? Well, there is this, courtesy of Project Veritas:
Meanwhile, Andrew Torba of Gab.com fame — a platform committed to open and free speech — has introduced a new news comment service plugin, Dissenter. Here Dave Cullen of Computing Forever discusses it:
Styxhexenhammer666 talks it up, too:
Interestingly, the Southern Poverty Law Center is pushing a story that Gab founder Andrew Torba and his wife are “going to go to prison” for SEC violations. The story is being pushed also on Gab:
Caveats. It sure looks like the SPLC is very concerned . . . about Gab, or maybe Dissenter.
Man experiences a multitude of needs, on whose satisfaction his happiness depends, and whose non-satisfaction entails suffering. Alone and isolated, he could only provide in an incomplete, insufficient manner for these incessant needs. The instinct of sociability brings him together with similar persons, and drives him into communication with them. Therefore, impelled by the self-interest of the individuals thus brought together, a certain division of labor is established, necessarily followed by exchanges. In brief, we see an organization emerge, by means of which man can more completely satisfy his needs than he could living in isolation. This natural organization is called society.
Gustave de Molinari, “The Production of Security” (1849; J. Huston McCulloch, trans., 1977).
The object of society is therefore the most complete satisfaction of man’s needs. The division of labor and exchange are the means by which this is accomplished.
On March 2, 1793, Sam Houston was born.
On March 2, 1926, American economist and political theorist Murray N. Rothbard was born.
As President of the Republic of Texas, Houston (pictured above) cut the size of the Republic’s budget by a whopping amount, including selling the navy for scrap. Rothbard theorized about even more daring — and more permanent — cuts to (and limits upon) government.
On March 2, 1781, the Second Continental Congress convened as the new Congress of the Confederation, under the Articles of Confederation, ratified the day before. The congress elected no new president upon adoption of the Articles. This Confederation Congress oversaw the conclusion of the American Revolution.