In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.
Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (1958).
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Graham Greene
Have you heard the latest?
More and more peoples around the world these days have the unfortunate misfortune of having adequate food — not merely vegetables either!! — thanks to the ruthlessly profit-seeking food producers and their unconscionable engagement in the division of labor, capital accumulation, and international trade.
It’s right there in The New York Times, which is, as you know, the paper of record.
“DealBook: How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food.”
Dastardly! Those Big American Businessmen must have kidnapped the Brazilians, strapped them into chairs, and pumped Doritos into those poor souls with a syringe. Heaven knows, the fecklessly irresponsible Brazilians can’t be held responsible for their own diets.
How bad is it?
This bad: “As growth slows in wealthy countries, Western food companies are aggressively expanding in developing nations, contributing to obesity and health problems.”
One expert quoted in the story (no hungry people consulted) says, “Part of the problem . . . is a natural tendency for people to overeat as they can afford more food.”
Worse than Hurricane Irma!
Thanks to the Times’s aggressive investigative journalism, we know that these brazenly food-selling companies do not even nag their international customers to be careful about their diets. Ergo, it’s chips and other indiscriminately convenient snacks for everybody, no strings attached.
It’s become all too easy to be well-fed and overfed and mis-fed.
Thanks a lot, capitalism.
Oh for the good old hunting-and-gathering days when human beings spent much of their time starving, and the world had the human population of Binghamton. No problem with anyone gorging on Twinkies and Doritos back then. No problem of epidemics of corpulence.
We’ve lost that swell paradise . . . perhaps forever.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration based on original photo by David Goehring on Flickr.
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Clausewitz
We repeat again: strength of character does not consist solely in having powerful feelings, but in maintaining one’s balance in spite of them. Even with the violence of emotion, judgment and principle must still function like a ship’s compass, which records the slightest variations however rough the sea.
Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1832), Book I, Chapter Three.
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Emancipation proclaimed
On September 22, 1862, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation that he would order the emancipation of all slaves in any state of the Confederate States of America that did not return to Union control by January 1, 1863. None returned, and the subsequent order, signed and issued January 1, 1863, took effect except in locations where the Union had already mostly regained control.
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The Great Faction
Politics isn’t a pretty business.
Frédéric Bastiat called the beast it serves “that great fiction” not because it doesn’t exist — intrusive state power sure persists — but rather because what it promises cannot really happen: “everyone living at the expense of everyone else.”
What can we do? How do we counteract a game that is rigged to increase the insanity, not reduce it?
Last week I indicated one thing a minor party with that goal in mind could do: use its power of spoiling elections to change major party behavior, and thus give citizens a fighting chance to restrain governmental metastasis.
Cancer.
I also suggested “blackmailing” the major parties into setting up a system of voting that . . . ends the power to blackmail! I believe that system — ranked choice voting — holds many positives, not the least of which is ending strategic voting, wherein voters are tempted to “falsify” their own preferences and support candidates they might dislike. This is as corrupting to the citizenry as the Great Fiction itself.
Let’s hope a savvy minor party leverages the major parties, gaining reforms to improve the system. Regardless, we can all — independently — push two other limits on political power:
- term limits at all levels, and
- initiative and referendum rights in all the states, not just the 26 that have it now.
Initiative and referendum rights would give ordinary citizens the leverage to possibly restrain the mad rush to live at each others’ expense. With the initiative, citizens can gain term limits, which produce more competitive legislative elections and lead to fewer legislators captured by the interests loitering in the capitol.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Santa Claus
On September 21, 1897, the “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” editorial was published in the New York Sun. Note how long before Christmas this is. The Christmas season has long been a long affair.
Chief Joseph, of the Nez Perce, died on this day a few years later, in 1904.
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Willa Cather
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
Venezuelans are starving. The country’s children are malnourished and — if something is not done soon — “it will be very difficult for these children ever to get back onto their nutritional growth curve.”
That is the testimony of the director of Caritas Venezuela.
Clearly, “Bolivarian” socialism has failed.
And yet, dictator Nicolas Maduro blames American “sanctions” for “exacerbating” the situation.
And offers up a “Rabbit Plan” to feed the people.
Yes, Maduro has called upon his countrymen to raise rabbits . . . and eat them.
But the source of the dark comedy isn’t just a dictator waxing eloquent on bunnies. “There is a cultural problem because we have been taught that rabbits are cute pets,” said the agriculture czar . . . whose first name is “Freddy.”
Holding a televised press conference with Maduro himself, last week, he insisted that “a rabbit is not a pet; it’s two-and-a-half kilos of meat that is high in protein, with no cholesterol.”
The funny part — the gallows humor, here — is this is what the grand planning of socialism has come to: not mass collaboration and an extended division of labor, but the people feeding themselves on small plots of land.
The Inca had developed a more effective mode of socialism.*
Just as humiliating for Bolivarians must be the trade embargo charge. Socialism is all about how superior government control is to the “anarchy in production” of market life. To blame their problems even a little on a capitalist country >not trading with them doesn’t merely admit defeat, it evades the last shred of responsibility.
I have a better “Rabbit Plan”: the tyrants should hop on down the bunny trail . . . freeing Venezuelans to recover.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* It depended upon radical inegalitarianism, subordination, drudgery, servility, and lack of any meaningful freedom.
All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War (c. 6th century BCE), from Chapter One.
On September 20, 480 BC, Greeks defeated Persian forces in the battle of Salamis.