Tag: freedom

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too much government

The Big Lesson

lab rat, Covid, lockdowns, freedom

“Panicked Americans surrendered a lot of power during the pandemic,” wrote J.D. Tuccille last Friday. “Now they want their country back.”

On the same day, Matt Welch concluded his somewhat more caustic piece, “They Just Keep Closing Schools and Mandating Masks,” with a warning: “If you think Tuesday was a bad day for Democratic busybodies, let them keep trying to squeeze the walls in on this rat cage of an American life.”

The main theme of these two Reason pieces is about right. Americans got snookered into giving up too much; the only silver lining is that we may have learned a few things.

One lesson? People who talk up “follow the science” are least reliable at relaying scientific findings, much less “following” those findings . . . or sticking to scientific method.

During the pandemic, the Science Pushers lied to us, hid truths, spun us helter skelter, pushed government force willy nilly, and stuck out on limbs with less reason than the hokey pokey.

But, through all the deception, fear-mongering, and downright bullying, one thing became clear: elite pharmaceuticals, bureaucrats, politicians and corporate media shills nurture interests wildly at variance of the American people’s. 

For those who have read the economics of Public Choice, X-efficiency, and old-fashioned “political economy,” this is hardly a shocking lesson. It is as familiar as a well-worn slipper.

Yet this lesson, pretty clear to most sane folks, needs driving home. Repetition will help it really sink in.

It’s too important to forget, for it was liberty that Americans surrendered, power being what was unconstitutionally expanded and exercised — making the limiting of government the proper response.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom local leaders too much government

Intrusive, Improper, Offensive

in-n-out burgers, Covid, mandates, papers

The In-N-Out Burger restaurant won’t kick out customers who fail to display a “vaccine passport” proving they’ve been vaccinated against COVID-19.

In-N-Out has restaurants in California and the Southwest. And it has one in San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed has ordered restaurants to enforce the city’s vaccine mandate.

Arnie Wensinger, an attorney for the chain, has explained the company’s defiance.

“We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government,” he said on KPIX-TV. “It is unreasonable, invasive, and unsafe to force our restaurant associates to segregate customers into those who may be served and those who may not, whether based on the documentation they carry, or any other reason. [This is] intrusive, improper, and offensive.”

In an age of weasel words and abject apologies for non-wrongdoing, In-N-Out Burger is forthright in defense of itself and its customers.

Not without cost. The health department closed the restaurant for mandate violations, and it was able to partially reopen only for takeout and drive-through orders. 

Indoor dining is verboten.

The San Francisco health department says that the restaurant was informed “multiple times about the proof of vaccination requirement,” as if the mere repetition of such an order were enough to justify it. The “outreach team provided information so the restaurant could comply. . . .”

Of course, the folks at In-N-Out Burger know that they “could comply.” And the San Francisco government has also been provided with information on why they should leave In-N-Out alone. Would repetition help?

Leave In-N-Out alone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom international affairs national politics & policies

Taiwan in Two Words

Taipei, Taiwan, China, freedom

“Two words from Taiwan’s leader threaten to upend U.S.-China ties,” headlined The Japan Times’ story.

Weeks ago, China’s totalitarian leader Xi Jinping mentioned his itch for peaceful “reunification” with Taiwan.* Or else. No pause in his warplanes crossing into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, nor withdrawal of the continual threat of military invasion. 

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen offered that the two countries were “not subordinate” to each other — which deeply hurt Xi’s feelings because . . . well, his Chinazis have their hearts set on subordinating Taiwan. In fact, the only thing preventing that deadly, freedom-suffocating Sino-subordination is the united weight — military and economic — of allied countries.

Japan, for instance. And the European Union, too — which just voted to deepen ties to Taiwan, ignoring Beijing’s demand to shun the island nation. 

At a CNN “town hall” last week, President Joe Biden vowed the U.S. would defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack. Diplomatic folk tried to walk that back to “strategic ambiguity,” but billions of Asians heard him say it.  

“To whom does Taiwan belong?” asked Pat Buchanan earlier this year, in a column trudging through 70 years of weaselly-worded communiqués and diplomatic understandings.

But comedian John Oliver counters that “people who aren’t Taiwanese making decisions for Taiwan is a bit f***ing played out, historically.”

“So maybe the best thing we can do is move past talking about Taiwan like it’s some kind of poker chip in a never-ending game of us versus them,” he concluded on his HBO show Last Week Tonight. “Because the fact is Taiwan is not a plucky bulwark against the Red Menace, nor is it some island-sized Viagra to rejuvenate the Chinese nation. Taiwan is 23 million people who, in the face of considerable odds, have built a free democratic society and very much deserve the right to decide their own future in any way that they deem fit.”

Let’s call it: Not subordinate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Since Taiwan has never been a part of the People’s Republic of China, there can be no prefix “re” in the threatened unification — by missiles and machine guns. 

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education and schooling First Amendment rights ideological culture

Bright Sheng Dimmed

Lawrence Olivier, Othello, race, censorship

Resolved: pedagogic enthusiasm plus naivety about the likely reactions of the “safe space” brigade shouldn’t be a burning-at-the-stake kind of offense. 

Or any kind of firing offense.

Bright Sheng, University of Michigan professor of composition and survivor of China’s Cultural Revolution, showed his class the 1965 movie “Othello,” which stars Laurence Olivier. Olivier was in blackface. 

Sheng failed to give a trigger warning so that safe-space aficionados could either gird their loins or skip the class.

Uh oh.

As Reason magazine’s Robby Soave notes, Olivier’s use of blackface “was controversial even at the time.”

Given the sub-venial nature of the sin, what might any sane-but-offended student have done? Go up after class and say, “Gee, Professor Sheng, love your class, but shouldn’t you have made some preparatory comment about the blackface? Well, have a nice day.”

But no. It’s got to be a wailing reenactment of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, with rabid students (and others) demanding Sheng be booted. No attention to context, no proportionality, no common sense.

Sheng has offered an abject apology, saying, in part, that “time has changed, and I made a mistake in showing the film, and I am very sorry.”

Was the mob demanding his ouster appeased? No. The mob never is.

The professor has for now stopped teaching his class, and the university is “investigating.”

The investigation actually needed, alas, will not be done. What administrators must discover is a backbone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom media and media people social media too much government

Ceding “Science” to Totalitarians?

Covid, fascism, vaccination

A recent Reason article on New York’s new vaccination passport informs that “there’s a case to be made . . .” yet neglects to mention that the opposite case can also be made. 

What case is it?

Well, the Mayor Bill de Blasio-sanctified case is that “these [totalitarian] measures are important for getting as much of the population vaccinated as possible in order to reduce virus mutation and prevent more harmful variants from taking root.” 

Yet the inverse is perhaps more persuasive. Several important figures in the medical and scientific community have been crying Cassandra* for some time, arguing that an ineffective vaccine, like the mRNA treatments sponsored by Pfizer and Moderna, may, according to epidemiological principles long understood, pressure the spreading viruses into the thing we don’t want: more deadly variants.

The normal course for a new contagion is for it to mutate into easier-to-spread but less deadly variants. Killing a host isn’t good for the virus, so it changes over time. Oddly, I rarely hear this mentioned.

Herd immunity, which is the prevalence in a community of enough people who can fend off the virus preventing transmission to weaker people, can only be helped by vaccination when the vaccines increase hosts’ immunity to obtaining it and spreading it — neither of which clearly applies to the current vaccines.

“From their very first conceptualization,” claims Geert Vanden Bossche, one of the biggest names in the industry to object to the vaccination campaign, “it should have been very clear that these ‘S-based’ Covid-19 vaccines are completely inadequate for generating herd immunity in a population, regardless of . . . the rate of vaccine coverage.”

Sans herd immunity but with universal vaccination, he says, deadlier variants could arise.

Is he right? I don’t know. 

But the case against vaccine passports might reference epidemiology and virology from sources outside establishment-approved “scientific” opinion.

Totalitarians rarely have “the science” on their side.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 * Ineffective because suppressed on major social media, in part. You can find their discussion on Rumble, Brighteon, Bitchute and other upstart sites.

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free trade & free markets general freedom national politics & policies

Subminimal Morality

Matt Thibodeau

He’s been at the job fourteen years. Congress may kill it.

Matt Thibodeau has disabilities that severely limit how productive he can be and thus how much he can contribute to the bottom line of his employer, Associated Production Services.

Under a longstanding exception to the federal minimum wage, Matt is paid $3.40 an hour for tasks like shrink-wrapping and assembling packages. The rate makes his employment feasible. (The current federal minimum is $7.25.)

Some congressmen want to scrap this exception to the mandatory minimum, calling it unfair and “out of date.”

“I felt like they were being targeted because they couldn’t speak for themselves,” says Matt’s mom, “and so that made us parents even more determined to speak for them.”

What’s out of date, or was never justified to begin with, is Congress’s federal minimum wage regulation.

Any mandatory minimum wage discourages employers from hiring persons not yet productive enough to justify the cost of being employed at the dictated minimum. It prevents low-skilled workers — on the outs of the economy — from getting a foot in the door.

Some employees initially paid only a few dollars an hour will soon improve their productivity and earn a higher wage. Others, like Matt, simply cannot advance further but can provide steady, conscientious labor within the compass of their abilities.

That’s fine. Each party to such an arrangement benefits. And his work enables Matt to be productive and valued, which is tremendously important to him. 

As it is important to all of us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment international affairs Regulating Protest

Crackdowns For Lockdowns

Covid, protests, lockdowns, police

Politicians and bureaucrats like some protests, fear others. 

You can tell a lot about a protest movement and its actual agenda by how a government reacts. You can tell a lot about a government by how it instructs police to respond to different protests.

So we should probably take a careful look at anti-lockdown protests around the world, especially in Europe.

And how police are handling them.

Very violently.

Nils Melzer, Professor of International Law at the University of Glasgow and the current United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, has “requested more information on an incident in which a female anti-lockdown protester in Berlin was grabbed by the throat and brutally thrown to the ground by riot police,” reports Paul Joseph Watson of Summit News. 

The response to Melzer’s request was “overwhelming, with over a hundred reports of violence flooding in,” Watson summarizes, citing a report in Berliner Zeitung.

While examples of police brutality are viewable on Twitter, YouTube, and other social media, reportage in America seems muted, perhaps thanks to our lockstep pro-lockdown corporate media.

“Something fundamental is going wrong,” Melzer says. “In all regions of the world, the authorities are apparently increasingly viewing their own people as an enemy.”

There is no mystery. Lockdowns, mask mandates, and mandatory vaccinations amount to quite a holistic assault on personal liberty.

While protests that demand more power for the state, or that would increase the security of the ruling faction, get treated with kid gloves, protests directed against state power, or against a sitting regime — and especially against such a power grab — get cracked down upon.

It’s stands to reason, but not justice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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by Paul Jacob international affairs video

Say My Name

Taiwan, China, citizenship

The term “Shanghaied” dates back to the 1850s, referring to Americans being kidnapped, sneaked onto ships, and transported across the Pacific Ocean, often to Shanghai, China.

Doesn’t happen so much anymore.

Unless you’re Taiwanese.

The subject came up on a just released Common Sense podcast featuring Joseph [last name withheld for his own protection], a sharp young Taiwanese lawyer working in Norway. He expressed concern that one day he might be repatriated to China, rather than returned to his home country of Taiwan.

Mighty big difference. 

The totalitarians running China regularly threaten and bully free and democratic Taiwan, and its citizens. The Chinazis claim Taiwan, just like they claimed Tibet. And just like Tibetans and Hong Kongers and Uighurs, the Taiwanese know well the ruthlessness of the Butchers of Beijing. 

Nobody wants to be sent there. 

But in recent years, Taiwanese nationals have been taken to China from Spain and the Czech Republic, despite fierce protestations from Taiwan. 

“I’m afraid of being targeted by the CCP [Chinese Communist Party],” Joseph explained, because “I’m registered as a Chinese citizen here in Norway” and “because we initiated this [legal] case.” 

Months back, I wrote about Joseph’s lawsuit to stop Norway from declaring him “Chinese” on official documents. Denied by a Norwegian court, he appealed to the European Court of Human Rights. 

Last week, the European Court of Human Rights rejected his appeal. Norway and other European countries can continue to misidentify him and others to please Chinese totalitarians.

Still, I strongly sense we have not heard the last of Joseph, and certainly not the name “Taiwan.” You can’t keep a good man down.

Or a free and prosperous people. 

Not even the powerful Chinazis can do that. Not even with help from Western wimps.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies

First, Fire All the Freelancers

freelance, law, Congress

Congress is about to make the lives of an awful lot of people an awful lot harder.

So what else is new?

But the legislation in play does seem new — in suddenness and scope. 

It would impose massive newfangled regimentation on how we make a living. And it would kill the livelihoods of millions of people.

I refer to people who do gigs and freelance assignments for a living. One might ask why Democrats have it in for this kind of worker. Is it to appease unions? Is it the result of the same ideological forces that drove Karl Marx to despise the professional classes, needing to turn everyone into a prole? 

After all, this anti-freelancer agenda is not new. Similar legislation, called AB5, was tried a few years ago in California, instituted at the behest of activists eager to reduce competition with union work and remove chances for non-9-to-5 ways of making a living.

The premier target was ride-share companies Uber and Lyft. But many were caught in the net. AB5 created havoc throughout the state. Even socialist freelancers hated its mass murder of options and opportunity.

AB5-style congressional legislation to outlaw gig or freelance work except under very restricted circumstances is now being discussed in the U.S. Senate after having passed the U.S. House. It would also give unions many ugly new weapons to use to impose themselves on employees and employers.

In California, AB5 was mostly repealed by a citizen initiative.

Will there be a national citizen initiative to also promptly repeal the Protecting the Right to Organize Act? Unlikely, since Americans currently lack the right to enact national citizen initiatives.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Fourth Amendment rights general freedom

Lockdowns Down Under

John Howard, Australia

“Australia is suffering a surge of authoritarianism, in part because of its lack of constitutional protections for liberty,” writes J.D. Tuccille at Reason.

Sydney, Australia, is going through another major round of lockdowns. When you see the popular reaction — the mass protests demonstrate how unpopular the lockdowns are — you might be inclined to think there’s hope.

But Mr. Tuccille finds the hope in Americans’ great historic fortune: we have a Bill of Rights.

Australian politicians, on the other hand, express thankfulness that Australia doesn’t have any deep constitutional limits to their powers.

While it is the current Aussie prime minister who plays tyrant today, Aussie tyranny was cogently expressed by a previous holder of the position, John Howard, whom Tuccille quotes — chillingly: 

  1. “The essence of my objection to a Bill of Rights is that, contrary to its very description, it reduces the rights of citizens to determine matters over which they should continue to exercise control.” 
  2. “I also reject a Bill of Rights framework because it elevates rights to the detriment of responsibilities.”

That first point is not made much less bizarre by the prime minister’s elaboration, expressed in a sentence Tuccille did not include, that a Bill of Rights must fail because it delivers “authority to unelected judges, accountable to no one except in the barest theoretical sense.” Yet, lacking a listing of rights, there are few things a beleaguered citizen can do but bend to the cop’s bludgeon and prime minister’s edict. (Hooray for judges?)

That second point is an old canard. Rights and responsibilities go hand in hand; every right has a flip-side duty.

In the context of a pandemic: people with rights oblige others to negotiate masks and vaccines and the like.

Where? On private property: outside of government. On public property: in legislatures. 

Alas?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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