On April 28, 1789, Lieutenant William Bligh and 18 sailors were set adrift by the rebel crew of the HMS Bounty, which returned briefly to Tahiti and then set sail for Pitcairn Island.
On the same date in 2001, millionaire Dennis Tito became the world’s first space tourist.
If an ideology produces unhappiness, misery, grief, division, sickness, boredom, and hatred, surely this is not a commendation but an indictment.
John Norman, GorChronicles.com
Yesterday I made fun of Bernie Sanders’ jobs guarantee idea. Today, let’s take it seriously.
Not as policy, mind you. As propaganda.
It’s not worth talking about as a policy because there is no policy yet. “It is not clear when Sanders will announce the plan,” Fox News relates, “and a Sanders spokesperson told the Post that it was still being crafted.”
It is mere advocacy. A press release. Vaporware.
But that’s the key to it, really. The jobs guarantee isn’t policy.
It’s a ploy.
Bernie Sanders knows there is hardly a hope of passing such a bill. He probably understands that the current fiscal mess precludes it. He might even understand that it is literally a horrible notion, the worst policy idea in the world, and he would still have reason to pitch for it relentlessly.
Because what he is really after is the hiking of the national minimum wage to $15/hr. That is the next Democratic ratcheting up of government. And by insisting that the government guarantee $15/hr jobs, he is readying everyone to accept, as a compromise, the hiking of the minimum wage to that very figure.
Yesterday I noted a link between socialism and slavery. But minimum wages link up not with slavery but unemployment.
Which Bernie knows all too well. Before he got in politics, he was a layabout, a bum.
Not like President Trump at all, that way.
But by fixing on one key, “anchor” concept ($15/hr) and demanding the Moon, he might just get his mere lunacy, er, minimum wage hike.
And that is a Trumpian* ploy.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Though Trump’s better. His “linguistic killshots” are far more memorable . . . because funny and (usually) visual.
On April 27, 1759, English philosopher and author Mary Wollstonecraft was born. Wollstonecraft married anarchist philosopher William Godwin and the couple had one daughter, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Wollstonecraft herself wrote one infamous and valiant effort in the emancipation of women, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, in 1792.
English philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, and political theorist Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England, on April 27, 1820. Among Spencer’s most famous books are First Principles, Principles of Ethics (chiefly its first part, The Data of Ethics), The Study of Sociology, The Man versus the State, and two editions of Social Statics. Spencer was an evolutionary theorist as well as a religious and political philosopher, and coiner of the phrase “survival of the fittest.” He called the basic principle of a free political order “The Law of Equal Freedom.”
Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed — and no republic can survive.
Does Bernie Sanders remind you of “Citizen Kang”?
Vermont’s [S]ocialist Senator is whipping up a new plan for America: to “guarantee a job with at least a $15-per-hour wage and health benefits to every adult American ‘who wants or needs one,’” we are told.
What was it that the slavering alien Kang promised* in The Simpsons’ eighth season opening episode? Well, we know how that episode ended, with Homer Simpson revealing the ’90s’-era presidential candidates to be aliens in disguise, Kang being elected, humanity enslaved, and Homer uttering the immortal words “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.”
And then Kodos, in cahoots with Kang, cracking the whip on Homer.
One shouldn’t have to read George Fitzhugh, the antebellum sociologist who attacked the very idea of free markets and free labor, insisting that slavery is a good thing and the very best form of socialism, to know that socialism and slavery go together hand in glove, whip in hand.
In an age of handouts for nothing, at least Sanders’ socialist proposal suggests productivity. But paying for it by nixing corporate “tax breaks”** is absurd. “Republicans have long opposed a federal jobs guarantee,” Fox News tells us, “saying such a plan would be too expensive and impractical.” And it’s productive people who would pay for it, making them de facto slaves to the system . . . even more than they are now.
But when socialists talk about “jobs,” worry about a more direct form of slavery.
And yes, I can imagine Bernie, with his four houses, flicking the whip.
I won’t be voting for him, if he runs.
Or for Kodos.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Actually, Kang was known not for a promise but for his campaign speech (as Bill Clinton), saying, “[W]e must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!”
** The only funding source mentioned in the reports I read.
On April 26, 1777, Sibyl Ludington, aged 16, rode 40 miles to alert American colonial forces to the approach of the British. Her ride was over twice as long as the more famous Paul Revere’s.
On the same day in 1805, United States Marines captured Derne under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, an important event in the First Barbary War. In April 26, 1865, Union cavalry troopers cornered John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, in Virginia, shooting him to death. There was no interrogation.
American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (1920).
The British may spell their words in funny ways, but their political problems do not seem all that foreign. Their left-of-center party has gone far left, Marxoid left; their right-of-center party has gone ultra-incompetent.
A healthy majority of Brits disapprove of both parties. So, no wonder many Brits are looking to create a new one.
A new centrist political party, no less.
Over at The Economist, the columnist writing under the name “Bagehot” (pronounced “badget”) predicts that this hope will be dashed, for at least three reasons:
First, Britain already has a centrist party, and it is not doing very well.
Second, there sure are a lot of contenders — 35 new parties have been formed just this year, including one called, with humble brag, “Sensible” — and all that competition fractionalizes the vote.
Third, the country sports the same system of vote counting and elections as America does, first-past-the-post, which “is hard on startups.”
That last point is worth thinking about. In multi-candidate races, the British-American electoral system declares as winners those who obtain a bare plurality of votes — thus ignoring the preferences of those who vote for minor party candidates. This means that those who “waste” their votes not only hurt the candidacies they like as second-best but also insulate the second-best parties from those voters’ influence. So the parties become narrow-minded and unhinged from an interested group of voters.
Bagehot thinks Britain’s centrists need to rethink, conjure up some new ideas. But what they need to do first is fix a system that prods political parties away from new ideas.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Class after class of men have seen a large part of their employment taken from them by machinery, so that at the present time there is scarcely any demand for the labor which millions of men had to perform a century ago. And yet, in spite of this, the laborer gets higher wages than he did a century ago, and is as fully employed as he ever was. In the whole history of the contest we do not find a case of a general and permanent fall of wages from the introduction of machinery.
Simon Newcomb, Principles of Political Economy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1886), p. 388.