On September 3, A.D. 301, San Marino, one of the smallest sovereign political organizations in the world and the world’s oldest still-existing republic, was founded by Saint Marinus.
San Marino is bounded on all sides by northeastern Italy.
This percentage has been declining for decades. Even during the Biden administration, when the president and his puppeteers did their best to pump up unions, the percentage declined.
In the private sector, only 5.9 percent of workers are union members.
This is great news because unions are typically bad news. By using government-sanctioned force to compel membership and extract wage rates above the market rate, collective bargaining reduces the number of workers who can be employed in a company or industry — thereby distributing wealth from the many to the fewer — and makes firms less efficient.
Only long-run increases in economic productivity enable wage rates to be permanently and generally increased in real terms.
Now, a union devoting itself only to helping workers cope with problems in the workplace — problems like an abusive supervisor or gratuitously dangerous working conditions — would be fine. But unions as we know them don’t confine themselves to such support and often don’t even offer it. Union bosses prefer to secure above-market wages perhaps because they can then siphon off some of those “rents” (as economists put it).
Meanwhile, unionism is still going strong among public employees. Although government workers constitute only about 15 percent of U.S. workers, these workers “make up about half of the population of union members,”National Review reports.
Who are these government workers protecting themselves from?
Well, from you and me, basically.
We might pay them less and we might fire them more often — if we could.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Nature has provided, by means as simple as they are infallible, that there should be dispersion, diffusion, coordination, simultaneous progress, all constituting a state of things that your restrictive laws paralyze as much as they can; for the tendency of such laws is, by isolating communities, to render the diversity of condition much more marked, to prevent equalization, hinder integration, neutralize countervailing circumstances, and segregate nations, whether in their superiority or in their inferiority of condition.
Frédéric Bastiat, from Economic Sophisms, “To Equalize the Conditions of Production” — the “such laws” mentioned are protectionist measures, and protectionism was the chief target of Bastiat’s famous book.
On September 2, 44 B.C., Pharaoh Cleopatra VII of Egypt declared her son co-ruler as Ptolemy XV Caesarion. On the same day of the same year, Cicero launched the first of his 14 Philippicae (oratorical attacks) on Mark Antony. Just a few years later on the same day, in 31 B.C., the Battle of Actium ended off the western coast of Greece, where forces of Octavian defeating troops under Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Thus ended the Roman Republic, with the consolidation of power by Gaius Octavius (Octavian; Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus), though he was not renamed “First Citizen” Imperator Caesar divi filius Augustus until January 16, A.D. 27.
But now I see that we need the climate change to fight tyranny.
Not everyone agrees. Nina Bookout simply refuses to accept the latest super-sophisticated scientific reasoning about how widespread protests happening in Iran — ostensibly because of a theocracy that is stomping everybody — are secretly being motivated by the climate change!!!!!
You know it’s scientific if it’s in “Scientific” American, a lot smarter now that it has dumbed down its content in recent decades.
But Bookout just won’t follow the “science.”
Scientific American says climate change is “among the environmental challenges facing Iran that helped spark protests in dozens of cities. . . . A severe drought, mismanaged water resources and dust storms diminished Iran’s economy in recent years.”
Protests are happening most in places with “climate refugees.”
Bookout differs: “The Iranian people KNOW that billions of dollars was freighted to Iran on Obama’s say-so. Thus, for several years, the Iranian government has had financial resources available to help those impacted by the drought and the earthquakes. . . . Instead the Iranian government [have been using] their cash . . . to prop up Hamas, Hezbollah, terrorism in Syria, and build up their military. . . . The security forces aren’t attacking protestors because of climate change.”
I’m with Scientific American. Let us have climate change wherever autocrats oppress the people, so that people will resist this oppression.
Thank you for your help, climate change.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Slovakia celebrates a Constitution Day on September 1, for the Constitution passed by the Slovak National Council on September 1, 1992.
The Slovaks place their rights provision early in their document, like most American states, and not as amendments, as in the Constitution of the United States of America.
The real problems of our world are not being confronted by those in power. In the guise of public service, they use whatever comes to hand for personal gain. They are insane with and for power.
Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment (1977).
Our solar system’s third identified interstellar intruder, 3I/ATLAS, continues its course past the planets more-or-less within the plane of the ecliptic, and continues to surprise.
The least surprising thing is that it has finally developed a tail pointing away from the Sun:
On August 27, 2025, deep imaging of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS by the Gemini South 8.2-meter telescope — aided by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS), revealed a weak tail with a teardrop shape in the anti-Sun direction (reported here). At that time, 3I/ATLAS was at a distance from Earth of 2.59 times the Earth-Sun separation. The Gemini South Observatory is located on a mountain called Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes.
Avi Loeb, “Detection of an Anti-Solar Tail for 3I/ATLAS,” Medium (August 30, 2025).
Earlier observations had not seen the usual tail forming away from the point of origination of the solar winds, like a normal comet. Instead, the “coma” of dust or ice or gas or whatnot surrounding the object extended in advance of its trajectory — as if it were throwing out flak to take out dangerous objects ahead of it!
Yes, from the beginning the oddities of this intruder were being considered as possible indications of an artificial object.
While this is heartening for those who itch to relegate 3I/ATLAS to “mere” comet status (it’s already proved to be one weird comet, it comet it truly be), Abraham Loeb notes the accumulating oddities, too, which don’t fit the standard “nothing [challenging] to see here, folks” debunkers’ designations: “Recent spectroscopic data from the Very Large Telescope in Chile (accessible here), reported the surprising detection of cyanide and nickel without iron in the plume of gas around 3I/ATLAS with steeply increasing rates as the object approaches the Sun. Nickel without iron is a signature of industrial production of nickel alloys. Natural comets generically show iron and nickel simultaneously, as both elements are produced simultaneously in supernova explosions.”
And as Loeb just noted, measuring the nucleus of the object remains extremely difficult and uncertain.
Further, though detection of CO2 in the object’s coma (surrounding matter) is indeed what one would expect of a comet, the absence of water and carbon monoxide is . . . peculiar.
Either fraternity is spontaneous, or it does not exist. To decree it is to annihilate it. The law can indeed force men to remain just; in vain would it try to force them to be self-sacrificing.
Frédéric Bastiat, “Justice and fraternity,” in Journal des Économistes (June 15, 1848).
On August 31, 1870, educator Maria Montessori was born.
German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin led aviation progress with his patent for a navigable balloon, on this date in 1895.
August 31 serves as Independence Day for Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, and Trinidad and Tobago.