Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath, Harper & Row 1979, p. 4.
The Nixon tragedy: A man of unsurpassed courage and outstanding intelligence but without vision. An opportunist who missed his greatest opportunity.
On July 12, 1817, American poet, abolitionist, businessman, and Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau was born. He is perhaps best known, today, for his book of meditations on the simple life, Walden, and his influential essay on civil disobedience.
Suddenly, the Democrats who dominate the Washington, D.C., City Council seem unwilling to increase the minimum wage for tipped workers — despite their official support for legislative minimum wage rate increases.
And a vote of the citizens.
Initiative 77, which passed easily last month, requires restaurant employers to incrementally increase the “tipped wage” until rates “reach what will be the uniform minimum of $15 an hour by 2025.”
“Initiative 77 is something I believe will be very harmful to our restaurants and, more importantly, our restaurant workers,” argues Councilman Jack Evans, one of three council members pledging repeal.
A spokesperson for One Fair Wage DC, calling a repeal “deeply undemocratic,” notes that “D.C. voters don’t like it when Republicans in Congress do it, and we trust council will not stoop to that level.”
Yet it would not be “the first time the city’s lawmakers overturned a decision by the electorate,” the Washington Post reminds readers, citing “a decision in 2001 when the D.C. Council overturned term limits approved by voters.”*
I’m all for ballot measures to decide any issue the people have a right to decide . . . limited by all of our inalienable rights as individuals. Minimum wage laws constitute an abuse of our First Amendment right to association, which neither legislatures nor voters may legitimately abridge.
That the council doesn’t recognize this right of association, yet nonetheless thinks it should nullify a vote of the people tells you everything you need to know about the sorry state of representation.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* And even quoting moi on the incredible hypocrisy dating back 17 years: “If you’re in a city struggling to get representation in the first place, that’s a terrible signal to say that your own local officials don’t respect their own citizens.”
That the people have a Right to mass and to bear arms; that a well regulated militia composed of the Body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper natural and safe defense of a free state, that standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided.
A few hundred years ago, not far from Deas’ Point near Weehawken, N. J., was a ledge 11 paces wide and 20 paces long, situated 20 feet above the Hudson on the Palisades. This ledge, long gone, was the site of 18 documented duels and probably many unrecorded ones in the years 1798–1845. The most famous is the duel between General Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury, and Colonel Aaron Burr, third (and sitting) Vice President of the United States, which took place on July 11, 1804.
“A lot of people would like to say this is an immigration issue. It’s really not,” offered Gary Emineth, the head of North Dakotans for Citizen Voting and a candidate for state senator.
“It’s really about preserving the right for U.S. citizens, and in our case, North Dakota residents, to only be the voters in all elections across the state of North Dakota,” added Emineth. “And that’s why we want it in the constitution.”
Turning in more than 35,000 voter signatures on petitions last Friday, Emineth and others placed a constitutional amendment on this November’s ballot that, if passed, would make voting the exclusive right of U.S. citizens in North Dakota.
Elsewhere in the country, Emineth points out, non-citizens are already voting — in Chicago and San Francisco, and in 11 cities across Maryland. Moreover, campaigns are underway across the country to give non-citizens the vote — in California, Connecticut, New York City, Boston and Montpelier, Vermont.
Opponents claim the North Dakota measure is completely unnecessary, as the state doesn’t currently allow non-citizens to cast a ballot, nor has any city yet attempted to allow non-citizens to vote. But Emineth’s goal is to keep it that way.
Moreover, University of North Dakota Law Professor Steven Morrison acknowledged to The Forum in Fargo that “the proposed amendment does clean up what could be a grammatical loophole since the word ‘every’ doesn’t conclusively exclude non-citizens from voting. . . .”
It is a very simple proposition: Do you want voting to be the exclusive right of U.S. citizens? Or should non-citizens be allowed to vote?
Coming to a ballot near and Fargo.*
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* With some help from Liberty Initiative Fund.
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
Herbert Spencer, “State-Tamperings With Money and Banks,” Westminster Review (January 1858), which is a review of J. S. Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1857), Henry Dunning Macleod’s The Elements of Political Economy (1857), Thomas Tooke’s On the Bank Charter Act of 1844 (1856), and James Wilson’s Capital, Currency and Banking (1847). This aphorism was “memed” on this site at https://thisiscommonsense.org////2015/02/09/something-about-folly/.
On July 10, 1832, U.S. President Andrew Jackson vetoed a bill to re-charter the Second Bank of the United States, in effect ending formal central banking in the United States until the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913.
“Any reporter who has covered Europe in the last decade has written a dozen articles or more,” The New York Times informs us, “about how one crisis or another has exposed the fundamental unsustainability of the European Union.”
I hadn’t noticed. Until recently, haven’t reporters and commentators been downplaying Europe’s looming crisis? But they cannot pretend “far right” separatist, decentralist and nationalist movements are marginal any longer, not after strong showings for Geert Wilders in The Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France, and the Brexit vote.
Now everybody seems to be panicking.
Even the Times is half-predicting an end to what it calls the “European Experiment.”
The Times identifies the tension as arising from “calls for keeping out secondary migrants and demands to keep internal European borders open. It’s a version of the contradiction within the European Union itself: between an open union and a collection of sovereign states.”
Beneath all the brouhaha about freedom of movement across breached borders lies the real contradiction: between massive welfare states on the one hand and, on the other, freedom of movement, speech and all the rest.*
When governments offer freebies, they entice people into un-productive or at least sub-productive lifestyles. Which is not sustainable, especially when extensive. How many productive people must support how many unproductive people?
Then throw those domestic programs open to millions of migrants who lack even rudimentary language and First World skills? That’s how states subsidize their societies’ destruction.
Europe’s governments are way too big for their border breaches.
If you want traditional freedoms, you have to pare down government.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
*Between social democracy (socialism lite) and the old liberal order.
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.