On June 4, 1989, student protests at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square were brutally suppressed by the People’s Liberation Army.
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In past episodes of Common Sense with Paul Jacob, you can find
“In Memory of the Fallen” — May 25, 2025 — “Don’t we owe them our freedom? I certainly believe we owe it to the fallen to keep that freedom alive.”
“Memorial Day Questions” — May 25, 2015 — War in the time of President Obama. “Vets deserve, and we all need, more (not fewer) questions of presidential candidates, such as the hypothetical inquiry of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on Iraq, and the hypothetical Libya question Sen. Rand Paul suggests should be posed to Mrs. Clinton.”
“Disneyland vs. Politicians” — May 30, 2016 — “Do congressmen wait months to get a medical appointment? No. Then why not close the VA and give veterans the same healthcare coverage as our (pardon the term) representatives?”
“Of Horror and Honor” — May 25, 2020 — “Last year, when the public relations wing of the U.S. Army asked, on Twitter, “How has serving impacted you?” the bulk of the responses were not what was hoped for. What came like tear drops and bursts of rage were thousands of horrific tales, expressions of sorrow, bitterness and despair.”
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“In stark contrast to several speakers who dutifully acknowledged that the campus sits on land ceded by the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi Nations by the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs (or Treaty of the Foot of the Rapids),” the judge lamented in The Detroit News on Monday, “not a single speaker dared to acknowledge the birthday of our own nation.”
The ceremonies, writes Judge Warren, “could have occurred in any country without missing a beat.”
Warren, a U of Malumnus, sadly notes how thoroughly “in thrall” to the “well-documented anti-West, anti-American sentiments” his old school has become. He also highlights how very different they were from the ceremonies, a half century ago, during the Bicentennial, when the keynote speech was entitled “Welcome to the Revolution.”
Nowadays, any Revolution extolled on campus might best be symbolized not by fife and drum or quill on parchment, but by a raised red fist.
Or hammer and sickle — perhaps painted in rainbows.
Lost on the university class? Any charm to the “near magical words” of the Declaration of Independence. Before the Declaration, Warren explains, all governments “were unequivocally opposed to recognizing that the people had the right to reform or start government anew.”
Today’s university folk, expressing the typical pieties of the center-left, in fact mimic our familiar American model to justify their own, much less impressive and far more dangerous notions of never-ending revolution.
In April, Republic Book Publishers came out with The Revolutionary Words that Forged America: The Definitive Guide to the Declaration of Independence by this very same Judge Michael Warren. I bought a copy. It looks great.
For he takes the founders’ seriously good ideas seriously.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
NOTE: Judge Warren also happens to be a very serious candidate for the Michigan Supreme Court. And, in full disclosure, my friend.
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We must remind ourselves that the word “liberal,” here, is used in its modern, anti-liberal sense: of the ideology of ever-increasing restraints on everybody.
Very illiberal.
Even if Pichette means Canadian dollars, that’s still $360,000 in real USD dollars. Hardly a ten-dollar processing fee. More like extortion. He rationalizes that the kids owe that much anyway thanks to Canada’s heavily subsidized education system.
Terry Newman observes that Pichette “is a Canadian who left Canada for better opportunities himself.” He went to California and Google and now lives in London.
But Pichette and his de facto self-exemption are not the problem. The problem is all Liberals who “want to govern as many aspects [of the economy] as possible, pick winners, and unload the tax burden of the massive bureaucracy onto Canadians, the smartest of which understand this clearly and choose to leave.”
While Pichette’s proposal had his audience of Canadian Liberals cheering, sane individuals rightfully express varying degrees of alarm. After all, punishing people for leaving a country is eerily reminiscent of what totalitarian states do: prevent them from leaving altogether.
Pichette’s rationale itself is based on a misunderstanding. Are the half-million per student subsidies really there to educate? More like to placate well-organized lobbies of too-often ideologically driven careerists.
The idea that Canadian students actually receive half-a-million-dollar educations is not believable.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Not perfect, true, but as political trades go it’s better for equal freedom than slightly lower taxes and a return of the draft, which conscripts some* to benefit (the story runs) “all.”
The all-volunteer force has produced the world’s best military . . . without “slave” labor.
Comedian Rob Schneider thinks differently.
“We must once again recommit ourselves to one Nation under God, indivisible,” he posted to X recently. “Therefore, we must restore the military draft for our Nation’s young people.
“Each and every American, at eighteen years of age, must serve two years of military service. They could also choose to serve part of that time overseas or in country in a volunteer capacity,” he went on.
“Unlike in today’s Universities, our young people will learn how truly great their country is and how unique and incredible are the Freedoms that this Nation bestows upon them.” But wouldn’t the best place to learn of American freedoms be living free in America?
Other criticism leaned to mockery, such as the parody movie poster of Deuce Bigelow Joins the Army.
Schneider later clarified that he aims for less military action: “A military with EVERY SEGMENT OF SOCIETY REPRESENTED would make the DEPLOYMENT of TROOPS and foreign wars LESS likely as there would be MORE accountability at the highest levels of power.”
This notion is, explains The Epoch Times, “part of a public appeal for Americans to return to traditional values.”
But surely the all-volunteer service is more traditional, the norm for most of our history, and, especially in the sense that freedom to join, or not, embodies liberty better than coercion does.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The all-volunteer force is admittedly not an exact replica of our society, representing “every segment.” It is better than that. Better educated. Better motivated. In better shape. Consider that the military cannot use at least 12 percent of the population for any purpose.
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Politics can’t always be reduced to this conflict, of course. But it can pretty often — certainly in a country where socialists have been pulverizing the economy.
Now, this knowledge is not kept by Milei as a dark secret, about which he would be embarrassed to be caught mentioning to a select few supporters.
Milei is not coy! That we learned during his campaign for president; and, no matter what his ups and downs in office, he still seems to be just as candid, just as willing to blast his opponents, to their faces, for —
Well: “Listen up, you ignorant fools! ‘Social justice’ is theft. It implies unequal treatment before the law and is preceded by theft. You bunch of thieves! Criminals!”
Also: “The world has only two kinds of people: those who live off what others produce — that is, the parasites, that is, you — and those who produce everything that is possible in modern life.
“The true battle of our time is cultural, philosophical, and moral. It is about choosing the system that lifted millions out of poverty. It is about ceasing to be an immature nation that squanders the future to distribute benefits in the present. . . .”
Probably even better in the original Spanish.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Ed Crane, the most important libertarian in my lifetime, passed away earlier this week, at age 81.
“On the exclusive list of persons who have had the greatest impact on the pro-liberty movement, Ed Crane’s name is preeminent,” wrote Bob Levy, chairman emeritus of Cato. “He built the Cato Institute from an inconspicuous, small-scale operation into a public policy powerhouse — the world’s foremost proponent of individual liberty and limited government.”
Years ago, my wife worked as Ed’s assistant and in other roles at the Institute. She even convinced him to give me a job in the mailroom. When I left Cato (and my mailroom career), I marched into his office and deadpanned: “Ed, I think I’ve taken Cato just as far as I can.”
We both laughed. He seemed to have it well in hand from there.
Crane had already put the Libertarian Party on the map with Ed Clark’s impressive 1980 presidential run. That’s how I first got to know both Eds, serving (at age 19) as the chair of the Arkansas Libertarian Party and the Clark campaign. So glad to have been part of it; sad that it remains the high-water mark for the party.
In his tribute, Bradley Smith, the former FEC Commissioner and now chairman and founder of the Institute for Free Speech, noted that “Ed was instrumental in helping to found the Institute for Free Speech — originally called the Center for Competitive Politics, a name Ed came up with (nobody’s perfect).”*
Still, as I told U.S. Term Limits head honcho Howie Rich, what comes to mind when I think about Ed is the fact he was the only person who loved term limits even more than we do.
Ed was a tireless advocate and Cato a leading producer of good information on the issue. Speaking about term limits, Ed would repeat the common refrain, “Folks say term limits are not a panacea.”
Only to counter: “Yes, they are.”
Thank you, Ed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
P.S. Love and condolences to Kristina, Ed’s wife, who is spectacularly wonderful. I remember especially the early 1980s when she was the den mother to a motley crew of young libertarian activists and intellectuals then descending upon Washington, D.C.
* Smith tells an interesting story about Ed Crane: “In fact, it is often forgotten that he was one of the original plaintiffs in the landmark campaign finance case, Buckley v. Valeo (he often expressed, with his typical sarcasm, his disappointment that the case had not been captioned Crane v. Valeo.)”
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The mullahs tend to do that when the pressure on their regime reaches a certain pitch. As has certainly happened again over the last few weeks.
Some 500 protesters have been killed so far, according to the group Human Rights Activists in Iran, as the unrest spreads.
Again, the Iranian government has shut down the country’s Internet.
Is Musk stepping in? Middle East Online has reported that Iranians with smuggled Starlink terminals, which are illegal to possess in Iran, will again have Starlink-provided Internet access, asElon Musk’s Space X activated Starlink “as of January 9, 2026.” If the story is accurate, protesters with a terminal will again have free access to the Internet for a limited time.
In the past, Iran has complained to international bodies about Starlink’s satellites . . . and tried to jam their signals, but to no avail.
The few reports on the Starlink access attribute the news to Israeli Channel 14. Other recent reports, though, suggest that President Trump “will speak with SpaceX owner Elon Musk” about restoring Iran’s Internet.
Let’s just stipulate that if Starlink has not yet been made available to the protesters, it would be great if it were.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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“Socialism typically seeks to transfer wealth to the poor, as in the case of Marx’s formulation; but socialism does not do so by definition. The definition of socialism is collective, communal ownership of the means of production and administration for the collective benefit. Depending upon how the collective benefit is imagined, socialists may be quite willing to throw the needy under the bus, in pursuit of some aggregate good.”
–DKM
That good news is a retreat from harassing innocent people for posting online too freely for the taste of British police enforcers.
In the big picture, the change in policy by the Metropolitan Police Service is but a minor tactical withdrawal in the pursuit of a censorship agenda that is otherwise proceeding on all fronts. It’s not so minor for people like, say, comedy writer Graham Linehan.
Several weeks ago, Linehan was arrested at Heathrow Airport by five armed officers.
“I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to hospital because the stress nearly killed me, and banned from speaking online.” His sin was posting a few tweets critical of transgender activists.
The charges against Linehan have been dropped.
And from now on, says the Met, it will stop investigating “non-crime hate incidents.” A spokesperson explains that the commissioner “doesn’t believe officers should be policing toxic culture war debates. . . .”
The “non-crime hate incidents” will still be logged, though.
The policy of harassing Britons for cranky words has been softened before, by the Tories. When Labour came in, the new government promptly hardened things again.
And further caution: Met policy is not government policy.
So this particular hammer for banging upon speakers daring to offend the easily offendable could come swinging down again at any moment.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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