Mary Wollstonecraft, from Hints originally intended to have been placed in the second part of A Vindicaton of the Rights of Woman (1792).
I am more and more convinced, that poetry is the first effervescence of the imagination, and the forerunner of civilization.
On March 10, 1922, Mahatma Gandhi was arrested in India, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison, only to be released nearly two years later for an appendicitis operation.
“People are paying tons of money to be kept out of the real world . . . being taught by people most of whom have never even worked in the business world. It’s kinda crazy.”
Well, yeah. There’s a lot of crazy in modern college life.
Which is one reason to work around it. That’s what Isaac Morehouse — quoted above — has done.
Morehouse is the founder of Praxis. You may have heard him on The Tom Woods Show or seen him interviewed on Fox News. “The mindset of ‘obey the rules, follow procedures, chase credentials, chase grades, and wait to be told what to do and you’ll be handed this magical ticket to a job,’” Morehouse told Fox’s Tucker Carlson, “it’s just not true.”
His alternative is simple: leverage the apprenticeship idea, combine it with counseling and instruction, and arrange with participating companies a guaranteed job at program’s end.
Our college system deserves a failing grade. Colleges sponge away fortunes (often borrowed) from students, while neglecting to train them to do much of anything but . . . college work.
This means not only that college grads have trouble finding work, but, as Mr. Morehouse discovered before he hit upon the Praxis idea, there are many, many companies trying to hire competent workers, but unable to find them.
A market opportunity!! Praxis unites demand and supply, connecting companies needing smart, energetic, cooperative workers with willing, eager young folks seeking meaningful (and well-paid) employment.
You can find a good overview of his effort — and a way to sign up! — at discoverpraxis.com.
Praxis’s testimonials are inspiring.
As the future should be.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
March 9 marks the 1763 birthday of British pamphleteer and activist William Cobbett. Cobbett was known for his lifelong opposition to authority, and his later-in-life “radicalism,” which included his opposition to Britain’s protectionist Corn Laws, and his support for Catholic Emancipation. Cobbett died in 1835.
In 1776 on this date, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith first published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which became the first widely accepted landmark work in the field of economics. It was not the first general treatise on the subject, however; that designation almost certainly belongs to banker Richard Cantillon’s Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général, cited by Smith in his more famous book. It is also worth noting that Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s systematic treatise, Le Commerce et le Gouvernement, also saw publication in 1776.
On March 9, 1862, the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia fought to a draw in the Battle of Hampton Roads, the first battle between two ironclad warships. The Virginia was built on the remains of the USS Merrimack, and the battle is often referred to as between “the Monitor and the Merrimack.”
When Edward I forbade all towns to harbour forestallers, and when Edward VI made it penal to buy grain for the purpose of selling it again, they were preventing the process by which consumption is adjusted to supply: they were doing all that could be done to insure alternations of abundance and starvation. Similarly with the many legislative attempts since made to regulate one branch or other of the food-industry, down to the corn-law sliding-scale of odious memory. For the marvellous efficiency of this organization we are indebted to private enterprise; while the derangements of it we owe to the positively-regulative action of the Government. Meanwhile, its negatively-regulative action, required to keep this organization in order, Government has not duly performed. A quick and costless remedy for breach of contract, when a trader sells, as the commodity asked for, what proves to be wholly or in part some other commodity, is still wanting.
Herbert Spencer, “Specialized Administration,” The Fortnightly Review(December 1871).
War was once big news. Now? Not so much.
Which may be a function of the never-ending War on Terror, no end in sight in Afghanistan and an Iraq War that is officially over . . . except for the fighting.
Last October, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein busied fact-checkers by claiming the U.S. was “bombing seven countries.” True, declared PolitiFact: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
Yemen is better known after January’s raid that killed Navy SEAL Ryan Owens, wounded three other SEALs, and killed 14 to 25 Yemeni civilians, including children. Last week, during President Trump’s speech to Congress, Owens’s widow, Carryn, received a thunderous ovation.
But, as I argued at Townhall, “Ryan Owens and his widow and her three now fatherless children deserve more than applause.“ How about thoughtful policies and a Congress that holds the executive branch accountable?
Invading Iraq was a mistake. So was President Obama’s swerve over to destabilize Libya.
“We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,” President Lyndon Johnson once said . . . right before he sent more American soldiers to Vietnam.
Consider that U.S. Special Forces were deployed to 70 percent of the world’s nations in 2016. And, in recent weeks, President Trump asked for a $54 billion increase in military spending, and we have learned of Pentagon plans to seek a “significant increase in U.S. participation” against ISIS.
We owe it to those in uniform to ask tough questions, including: Is what we’re doing really worth a single American life?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Further reading:
Reason: Is the Military Really “Depleted” After Years of Record-High Spending?
The Atlantic: Fighting Terrorism With a Credit Card
The National Interest: America Is Never (Ever, Ever) Ending the War on Terror
Don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
Philip K. Dick, “What The Dead Men Say” (1964).
On March 8, 1775, “African Slavery In America,” the first known essay advocating the abolition of slavery in America, was published anonymously in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser. Thomas Paine (pictured) is believed to be the essay’s author.
The first anti-slavery society was formed in Philadelphia weeks after publication, and Paine was a founding member.
Exactly 120 years earlier, a court in Northampton County of the Virginia Colony ruled that John Casor, then working as an indentured servant to Robert Palmer, must be returned to Anthony Johnson as Johnson’s “lawful” slave for life. Ironically, Johnson was one of the original indentured servants brought to Jamestown, had completed his indenture to become a “free Negro” and the first African landowner in the colony. The case marked the first person of African descent to be legally-recognized as a lifelong slave in England‘s North American colonies. The first official chattel slave in English-speaking North America was of African descent, and was owned by a man also of African descent.
Centenary Dates:
The February Revolution began on February 23, 1917 (Old Style calendar: March 8 by modern reckoning), in Russia: Women calling for bread in Petrograd started riots, which spontaneously spread throughout the city.
On March 8, the United States Senate adopts the cloture rule in order to limit filibusters.
Last week, the other shoe dropped.
When last we touched upon Arkansas state legislator Micah Neal, he had pled guilty to steering hundreds of thousands of state tax dollars to a small private college in exchange for big, fat bribes.
He also implicated the state’s No. 1 term limits opponent, former State Senator Jon Woods, as chief hoodlum in the criminal scheme. Woods is best known for his dishonestly worded 2014 amendment responsible for hoodwinking voters into weakening term limits.*
And it is upon Woods that the shoe fell.
The fingered wheeling-and-dealing Woods, pursued by both the FBI and an angry electorate, chose not to run for re-election in 2016. Now he’s finally been indicted on 13 felony counts of fraud and bribery. Woods helped secure $600,000 in state funds to Ecclesia College, allegedly for tens of thousands in kickbacks.
“I do know this confirms what I’ve always suspected about Jon Woods,” wrote Max Brantley in the Arkansas Times. “He never had a job. He bragged about the good life he lived off state pay, per diem, travel and the hog slopping legislators enjoy. I should mention, too, that he was the architect of the so-called ethics amendment that provided a path to 1) longer terms in office; 2) higher pay; 3) an end-around an end to wining and dining restrictions despite the appearance that’s what voters had done.”
Former Sen. Woods does deserve a longer term . . . in jail.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* State term limits activists are currently gathering the more than 100,000 signatures they need on petitions to place their original, stricter term limits on the 2018 ballot and allow Arkansans an honest vote.
If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves?
Herbert Spencer, “The New Toryism,” The Man Versus the State (1884).