If each human being is to have liberty, he cannot also have the liberty to deprive others of their liberty.
John Hospers, Libertarianism: A Philosophy for Tomorrow
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John Hospers
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Nat Hentoff
Apple shipped the first Apple II computer on June 10, 1977.
Born on this day: historian, jazz critic and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff (1925); children’s writer Maurice Sendak (1929); scientist and pioneer of “sociobiology,” E. O. Wilson (1929).
Housing in Oregon’s north-central urban region is becoming more and more like San Francisco’s — out of the budgetary reach of huge swaths of average workers.
“The median rental household can’t comfortably afford a two-bedroom apartment in 28 of Oregon’s 36 counties,” Elliot Njus writes for The Oregonian. But it is worst in Portland and the three counties in the region: Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas.
The findings come from a group called the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Njus quotes Alison McIntosh, of another group, the Neighborhood Partnerships, who not unreasonably concludes that “folks are really struggling to make ends meet.”
Well, yeah. This was predicted, long ago.
The state of Oregon began a comprehensive land-use planning system, decades ago, to prevent urban sprawl. At about the same time the Portland-region’s three major counties began a concentrated effort to . . . concentrate populations within the area. Confine them. Regulate them. Economists and other critics* from the very beginning predicted rising housing costs. And other problems.
Now, of course, the usual groups react in precisely the wrong ways: rent control. The State House in Salem recently passed legislation to uncork rent control. Thankfully for renters, the Senate nixed the idea.
But we can be sure this proven housing killer (a disaster where tried) will resurface. Common sense (as well as reams of economic research) tells folks how bad an idea this would be, exacerbating the problem it aims to solve.
Alas, some folks look at government more as magic than as just another flawed, human institution.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* One set of critics can be found at the Cascade Policy Institute, which describes Oregon’s land-use regulatory system as “the nation’s most restrictive” — adding that “every square inch of Oregon has been zoned by government planners, with the result that development of any type is prohibited on most private land.”
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John Hospers
Roman Emperor Nero committed suicide on this day in June, 68 AD, ending Rome’s Julio-Claudian Dynasty, later written about with verve by Suetonius and Robert Graves.
Also on June 9, James Oglethorpe received a charter from the British crown to start the Georgia colony (1732); William Jennings Bryan resigned his position as Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, disgusted over the handling of the sinking of the Lusitania (1915); philosopher John Hospers — who would go on to run as a Libertarian candidate for the U.S. presidency in 1972 — was born in 1918 on the ninth of June.
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Nat Hentoff
Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices – taking advantage of our freedom of speech – who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do.
Nat Hentoff, The Day They Came to Arrest the Book (1982)
Government policy in Seattle, Washington, is being driven by an outright socialist on the city council. The mayor, apparently starving for attention, proposed a goofy new sin tax last year.
Now, writes Reason’s Baylen Linnekin, “Seattle lawmakers are expected to vote early next week on a citywide soda tax that would add more than $2.50 to the cost of a twelve-pack of soda.”
The tax’s proponents’ rationale is too familiar: sugary sodas are bad for us, so we must be discouraged from drinking them.
Besides, politicians want to spend our money.
The problem, of course, is that the more successful they are at the first task, discouraging the ‘sin’ itself, the less revenue for them to throw at voters to prove their ‘caring’ nature . . . and buy votes.
But it is not as if those are the only competing factors involved. “The tax would undoubtedly drive consumers,” writes Linnekin, “to buy more groceries in the city’s suburbs.” Bellevue and Kirkland are nice towns. And nearby.
Arguing for a tax like this — as a social engineering mechanism — is not only crude, but flies in the face of the very best wisdom, that of Jean-Baptiste Say:
A tax can never be favorable to the public welfare, except by the good use that is made of its proceeds.
But elitist nannyism corrupts politicians, who make it their job to steer our consumption.* And they tend to be resistant to the “best scheme of finance,” which is, as J.-B. Say put it, “to spend as little as possible; and the best tax is always the lightest.”
If the tax goes in, Seattleites, drive to out-of-town Costco or Walmart.
Then drive your greedy nannies out of office.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Considering the mayor’s push to include diet sodas in the sin tax, how competent at this are they? It’s the sugary drinks that are known killers, but the diet drinks are mainly imbibed by wealthier folks. The mayor wants to appease the socialist on the council, and pointedly not favor the “privileged.”
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Jean-Baptiste Say
The multiplication of a product commonly reduces its price: that reduction extends its consumption; and so its production, though become more rapid, nevertheless gives employment to more hands than before. It is beyond question that the manufacture of cotton now occupies more hands in England, France, and Germany than it did before the introduction of the machinery that has abridged and perfected this branch of manufacture in so remarkable a degree.
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Nineteen Eighty-Four
On June 8, 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.
It’s almost as if politicians are hell-bent on expanding government at the expense of our freedoms . . . and grandstanding to ‘look like they are doing something.’
The two proclivities are not unrelated.
Take Theresa May, Great Britain’s Tory Prime Minister. After yet another terrorist attack in her country, this time on the London Bridge, she re-iterated her party’s intent to censor the Internet.
“We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed,” May said on Sunday. But this “safe space,” she went on, “is precisely what the Internet, and the big companies that provide Internet-based services, provide.”
Now, blaming ISPs and social platforms is a crude form of business scapegoating—something I would expect from her opponent in the upcoming elections, Jeremy Corbyn, the much-loathed (but inching ahead in the polls) top banana of Labour.
As a conservative, May should understand markets and the limitations of government interventionism a bit better than a near–communist. She might recall that previous attempts to regulate the means of communication almost never to work, and, in those few cases when they do, never stay scaled to the original target issue.
They expand. To cover more than just terrorism, as in this case.
What’s more, Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group makes the case that such a move would likely “push these vile networks into even darker corners of the web, where they will be even harder to observe” — scuttling the alleged purpose of the Conservative Party’s longed-for censorship.
May knows this. But she is a politician. She has power, and she wants to keep it.
It’s almost as if power corrupts or something.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee presented the “Lee Resolution” to the Continental Congress. The motion was seconded by John Adams, but was tabled for several weeks. The motion was finally passed on July 2, 1776.
During the 1916 Republican National Convention (June 7 – 10), Senator Warren G. Harding used the phrase “Founding Fathers” in his keynote address .; . . and would go on using it in speeches thereafter. It caught on, referring to folks such as Thomas Jefferson and, yes, Richard Henry Lee, who orchestrated the American colonies’ break from England’s imperial monarchy.