On December 22, 1989, Communist President of Romania Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown by Ion Iliescu after days of bloody confrontations. The deposed dictator and his wife fled Bucharest with a helicopter as protesters erupted in cheers.
The couple was quickly caught and, on Christmas day, tried by a military tribunal and executed by firing squad.
No matter how “not as bad as we feared” President Donald Trump may be appearing, as we close out the year let’s remember why some of us did not trust him in the first place: his knee-jerk reactions are too often witlessly statist.
The speeding Amtrak train that derailed over I-5 in Washington State on Monday was a horror show, sure. And we have come to expect the President — any President, either party, all administrations — to provide words of comfort after such events. Trump conformed to expectations.
And, admittedly, his initial Tweet was all very proper. But his verbal response was . . . very . . . Old School. After mentioning the federal government’s role in handling the tragedy — “monitoring” and “coordinating with local authorities” — he used the event as an excuse to expound upon the idea that the event provides “all the more reason why we must start immediately fixing the infrastructure of the United States.”
This is bad, old-fashioned policy opportunism. The worst time to cook up “solutions” is right after a tragedy. That’s when emotions are highest and reason is lowest.
More importantly, the train was going through its initial run over newly upgraded infrastructure!
One could more reasonably surmise that the recent infrastructure upgrade was the cause of the derailment — though, let us be honest, it looks like the train was way above the stretch’s speed limit.
Note to Donald Trump: just because there’s a microphone in front of you doesn’t mean you are required to “make a point.” That’s not the President’s job.
Mister, we could use a man like . . . Calvin Coolidge again.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On December 21, 1620, William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims landed on what is now known as Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
American settlers in Nacogdoches, Mexican Texas, declared their independence on December 21, 1826, starting the Fredonian Rebellion.
Avant-garde rock ’n’ roll guitarist, band leader, and composer Frank Zappa was born on this date in 1940. In 1985, Zappa testified before the United States Senate Commerce, Technology, and Transportation committee, attacking the Parents Music Resource Center or PMRC, a music organization co-founded by Tipper Gore, wife of then-senator Al Gore. Zappa was a passionate advocate for freedom of speech, self-education, political participation and the abolition of censorship. Describing his political views, Frank Zappa categorized himself as a “practical conservative,” or “independent.” He died in 1993.
Society . . . as it becomes more enlightened, should be very careful not to establish bodies of men who must necessarily be made foolish or vicious by the very constitution of their profession.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), chapter one.
“Olympia can’t restrain itself,” Tim Eyman wrote the other day, a judgment on legislative irresponsibility hardly unique to the Evergreen State. Citizens around the country have cause to lament the difficulty of obtaining anything close to a good legislature.
Too often the merely “bad” would constitute a significant improvement.
Which is why legislators need to be put on a short leash. Limits on government must be written into law, where possible into either the U.S. Constitution or state constitutions, so the limits cannot be tampered with by legislators, good or bad.
Washington State initiative guru Tim Eyman, cited above, has made a career of working for just those kinds of limits. In 2007, Eyman and the citizen group Voters Want More Choices petitioned onto the statewide ballot a requirement that any tax increase must receive a two-thirds vote from both legislative chambers.
Voters passed the measure* in 2007, 2011 and 2012.
In an email to supporters this month, Eyman presents data — an “amazing real-world comparison” — to help us understand how effective the limits were . . . while they lasted.
He notes that “with the 2/3 rule in effect from 2008-2012, those 5 legislative sessions cost the taxpayers $6.894 billion” in increased taxes.
And he compares that to the five years (2013-2017) since the state’s highest court struck down the voters’ two-thirds mandate: “WITHOUT the 2/3 rule, those 5 legislative sessions cost the taxpayers $23.679 billion.”
“Without the fiscal discipline imposed by citizen initiatives,” Eyman concludes, “politicians cannot hold back.”
Now we have hard evidence for what unlimited government costs us: more than three times more!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Washington State’s ballot initiative process allows voters to pass simple statutes but not constitutional amendments. For two years after passage, legislators must garner a two-thirds vote to override a ballot initiative. After those two years, only a simple majority is required.
Most government and corporate leaders would have trouble getting people to follow them out of a burning building. One way you can tell the worst of them is that they talk about leadership a lot. I doubt Winston Churchill ever used the word. Or, for that matter, Attila the Hun.
Jack McDevitt, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 5.
On December 20, 1740, Arthur Lee — Revolutionary Era diplomat, spy, and Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress — was born. He practiced law in London from 1770 to 1776, where he wrote polemics against slavery and in defense of the American colonies’ resistance to the Townshend acts and other tyrannical British policies.
He was brother to Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee.
This just in: oblivious little boys still play cops and robbers.
Just as in days of old.
Wait. Hold on. Breathe. Just breathe. This sociological fact doesn’t mean that we’re a nation of incipient international terrorists but for the galumphing grace of grumpy zero-tolerant schoolmasters.
Common sense says you don’t suspend toddlers from school for wiggling their fingers as if wielding a gun, or for sculpting a “gun” out of a slice of Wonder Bread or Freihofer’s. Yet evidence continues to mount that all too many teachers and administrators are immune to considerations of reasonableness when it comes to kids who misbehave. (Or “misbehave.”)
Such enemies of childhood innocence must be hindered. So let’s give two and a half cheers to Ohio lawmaker Peggy Lehner, who proposes to legislate an end in her state to suspending children in the third grade or younger who aren’t threatening anybody. (I’m not sure why kids in grades later than third can’t catch the same break.)
A new, probably imperfect government regulation is not the only way to counter blunderbuss government-school policies. The most fundamental alternative is the free market.
Ideally, no public-school monopoly plagued by mandatory insane rules would exist. Ideally, all K-12 (and university) educational offerings would be provided by an unregulated market economy, making it much easier for families to drop insane schools and patronize sane ones. The pressures of market competition would encourage school officials to become students of common sense.
We are not there yet.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The very essence of a free government consists in considering offices as public trusts, bestowed for the good of the country, and not for the benefit of an individual or a party
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On December 19, 1776, Tom Paine published one of a series of pamphlets in the Pennsylvania Journal titled The American Crisis. Exactly one year later, George Washington’s Continental Army went into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
On December 19, 1828, Vice President of the United States John C. Calhoun penned the South Carolina Exposition and Protest, protesting the Tariff of 1828, a key moment in what became known as the Nullification Crisis.