Tag: freedom

America, the Debatable?

liberty, freedom, independence, debate, American,

“A divided America gathers for Fourth,” The Washington Post headlined its lead story about the Independence Day celebration on the National Mall.*

Give me two minutes to unite us.

On the night of July 3rd, stuck in horrendous holiday traffic, I stumbled upon a National Public Radio broadcast discussing the punk rock song, “’Merican,” by Descendants. The operative lyrics being:

I’m proud and ashamed
Every fourth of July
You got to know the truth
Before you say that you got pride

“Truth,” now that’s heavy, man. What’s the truth about ’Merica — er, America?

It is certainly true that our government — in our name — has done some terrible things. And, accordingly, to suggest that criticism is unpatriotic is, well, to miss the point of why I feel very proud to be an American.

On the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, President Calvin Coolidge called July 4, 1776 “one of the greatest days in history” and “not because it was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles.” Those being “that all men are created equal, . . . endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that . . . the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.”

What this offers us is a standard to criticize America.

That is why it seems strange to witness folks criticizing current policy and behavior based on principles derived from the Declaration, yet, in the same breath, spurning America in the process. When America is wrong, let us right it — in true American style.

We may be divided on many issues, but on the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence we should all stand united.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* This was the headline in the print edition dropped on my driveway July 5th; the online version carried a different headline: “Trump’s Fourth of July celebration thrills supporters, angers opponents.”

** Love him or despise him, Rep. Justin Amash made a similar point in his op-ed about leaving the GOP to become an independent: “Our country’s founders established a constitutional republic . . . so ordered around liberty that, in succeeding generations, the Constitution itself would strike back against the biases and blind spots of its authors.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags American, debate, freedom, independence, liberty

general freedom Popular Regulating Protest too much government

I Am Hong Kong

Hong Kong, protests, extradition, freedom, democracy,

“I love my students so much,” a protesting teacher in Hong Kong told a BBC reporter, wiping tears from her eyes. “I worry about they cannot have the freedom we have before. They cannot speak what they want to speak like us. So, I don’t want . . . this.”

Her English grammar notwithstanding, she speaks a language we should all understand: Liberty.

“If there must be trouble,” Tom Paine wrote in The American Crisis, “let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” As usual, it is the young, whose idealism and courage has not been worn down and compromised — and who have their own future children to fight for — who lead the effort, facing tear gas and truncheons. That is precisely what they’ve encountered in Hong Kong . . . along with pepper spray and rubber bullets . . . for now.

It can get worse.

Nonetheless, millions of Hong Kong residents have taken to the streets against Hong Kong’s legislature considering a bill to allow Mainland China the power to extradite criminal suspects. People well understand that, if the bill passes, their civil rights will be extinguished in China’s crooked, totalitarian justice system.

What to do? Hope and pray for Hong Kong.

But let’s draw some lessons. Freedom requires not merely bravery, but also unity. An attack on the rights of anyone is an attack on us all. And attacks on precious democratic checks on political power are attacks on everyone’s freedom.

Instead of the United Nations, we need an organization of united citizens across the globe. People everywhere want to be free and democratic. We should work together . . . bypassing our governments.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags democracy, extradition, freedom, Hong Kong, protests

ideological culture

Not Your Mother’s How-To Manual

Post author By Redactor
Post date June 20, 2019
No Comments on Not Your Mother’s How-To Manual

communism, socialism, freedom, capitalism, motherhood, family,

“Want to Dismantle Capitalism?” asks The Nation headline for a recent interview with feminist Sophie Lewis, immediately answering: “Abolish the Family.”

In a world of YouTube videos on how to do almost everything, apparently the progressive publication noticed something missing: There is no reliable guide for going full commie.

Rosemarie Ho prefaces her discussion with Ms. Lewis, author of “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family,” by observing that “the most infamous demand of The Communist Manifesto is the ‘abolition of the family.’”

“The family, Marx and Engels noted, was where patriarchy and capitalism worked in tandem to produce willing, alienated workers,” writes Ho, “where women became little more than ‘instruments of production’ for the men who lorded over them.”

Ah, “little more” — how depressingly reductionist.

Ho applauds that Lewis “takes up this forgotten struggle” and “gives us an account of the material conditions — the biological and societal violence — that gestators, or people who are carrying fetuses, have to bear.”

“Mothers nurture,” acknowledges Lewis, “but they also kill and abuse their wards. That’s why it’s so valuable to denaturalize the mother-child bond. To do anything otherwise is to devalue that work. That’s the horizon that I think opens up the space for a revolutionary politics.”

Through 2,000 words of jargon, we learn that “motherhood is a very powerful ideological edifice,” as Lewis attacks “the idea that babies belong to anyone — the idea that the product of gestational labor gets transferred as property to a set of people.” After all, she informs that we should “think about babies as made by many people.”

Gestators of the world unite! We have nothing to lose but our sanity!

Oh . . . and the family.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags capitalism, Communism, family, freedom, motherhood, socialism

meme Popular

Are You Truly Free?

Tags Bernie Sanders, freedom, socialism

ideological culture Popular too much government

Cuban Slave Doctors

Cuba, doctors, Brazil, freedom, slavery, slaves,

Did Cuba and Brazil just prove Sen. Rand Paul right . . . about socialism?

Eight years ago, the ophthalmologist-turned-politician raised progressive ire in a subcommittee hearing.

“With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have to realize what that implies,” the junior senator from the state of Kentucky said. “It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.”

To many, this seemed preposterous. Doctors would be paid! They wouldn’t be forced to work.

Well, consider Brazil’s socialized medical service.

In his campaign for the presidency, Jair Bolsonaro promised to make “major changes to the Mais Médicos program, an initiative begun in 2013 when a leftist government was in power,” the New York Times explains. “The program sent doctors into Brazil’s small towns, indigenous villages and violent, low-income urban neighborhoods.”

But there was a catch: “About half of the Mais Médicos doctors were from Cuba.” Brazil paid a hefty price tag for those doctors — to the Cuban government, not the doctors.

None too pleased with Bolsonaro’s talk of “freeing” the doctors, the Communist dictatorship pulled them out.

Maybe Kentucky’s senatorial physician was right. When a government seizes the control of the means of production, as socialists want and communists demand, at some point somebody in charge will notice that labor is a means of production.

Slaves don’t set the terms of their own employment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Photo credit (chain): Hernán Piñera

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags Brazil, Cuba, doctors, freedom, slavery, slaves

general freedom term limits

What Tiananmen Inspired

Tiananmen Square, China, Goddess of Democracy, term limits, freedom,

Why did term limits spring up in the 1990s?

Term limitation has a long history in America, of course — and all the way back to Aristotle — but why the resurgence? I remember opponents suggesting that Americans were frustrated with slow economic growth.

Not likely.

In “Restoring Faith in Congress,” a 1993 article in the Yale Law & Policy Review, authors Kimberly Coursen, Thomas Mann, Norman Ornstein and Todd Quinn recognized that “the 1990s are different” because “the climate for far-reaching political reform is ripe.”

But why?

For seven weeks in 1989, Chinese students protested for freedom and greater democracy, joined by others until more than a million people filled Tiananmen Square. Americans were deeply moved by their makeshift Goddess of Democracy, resembling our Statute of Liberty, as well as by the students’ demands, which read much like our Declaration of Independence.

Then, all that hope was doused, courtesy the Butchers of Beijing.

Five months later, the Berlin Wall came down, followed by the overthrow of communism throughout Europe, then the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

No more Cold War.

Americans, lacking an external enemy for the first time in decades, and with Tiananmen’s “tankman” fresh in our minds, could at last safely take a good look at our own government.

We did not like what we saw.

In 1990, Americans in three states — California, Colorado and Oklahoma — used direct democracy by petitioning term-limit initiatives onto the ballot. All three won. In 1992, U.S. Term Limits rallied voters to pass initiatives in a record 14 states.

Sadly, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests did not usher in freedom for China. Yet, they lit fires in hearts across the globe.

Including mine.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags China, freedom, Goddess of Democracy, term limits, Tiananmen Square

general freedom ideological culture Popular

What It Means

Goddesss of Democracy, China, freedom, protest,

The most inspiring political event of my six decades on this planet remains the pro-freedom and democracy protests of three decades ago, when for seven weeks first students and then other Chinese citizens occupied iconic, historic Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

“In the history of communist China,” said a CNN correspondent as a million people swelled into the square, “there has never been anything like this.”

The students’ demands were strikingly similar to those articulated in America’s Declaration of Independence, and their symbol was the Goddess of Democracy and Freedom, something of a replica of our Statue of Liberty.

Now, one might ask what the protestors knew of liberty and democracy. “To them,” offered Princeton Professor Perry Link, “democracy just meant ‘get off our back.’”

What, it doesn’t mean that?

“We probably don’t know what democracy is, living in China,” acknowledged student leader Wuer Kaixi, “but we have a pretty good idea what totalitarianism, what non-democracy, is.”

That totalitarian tyranny exploded late this very evening 30 years ago, when Chinese troops fired on unarmed protesters and tanks rolled; the massacre continued into the wee hours of June 4, 1989. Death counts range from 300 to several thousand, and there’s uncertainty as to whether the carnage took place in or out of the square, killing mostly workers or students. Regardless, it is all-too-typical behavior from an illegitimate regime.*

The saddest news is that, as a survivor told the South China Morning Post, “What happened [30] years ago in China . . . is still happening now in China.”

Over a million Uighur Muslims are, reportedly, confined in concentration camps right now.

What can we do? Remember, for starters.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

*Firing on one’s own citizens is far too common, and delegitimizes any regime that practices it, as I have pointed out per Nicaragua, Venezuela, and U.S.-subsidized Egypt — the list goes on and on.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags China, freedom, Goddesss of Democracy, protest

crime and punishment

Prisoners All

drug war, prison, jail, prohibition, ban, freedom,

The logic for drug prohibition is direct: to keep people from hurting themselves with recreational drugs, we must prevent them from accessing those drugs.

Voilà!

There are a number of things wrong with that, though, and one is this: governments cannot even keep illegal drugs out of prisons.

In California, nearly 1,000 men and women overdosed last year in “an alarming spike in opioid use by those behind bars,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

Steven Greenhut, writing in Reason, notes that confinement centers are “among the most tightly controlled environments on Earth, yet correction officials can’t figure out how to deal with dramatic spikes in the number of inmates who are dying from drug overdoses and alcohol poisoning.”

Doesn’t this make the prohibitionist “solution” absurd?

“If they can’t keep heroin off of death row,” Greenhut concludes, “then maybe they should rethink their ability to control the rest of us.”

There is a problem, here, though — it is easier to control “the rest of us.”

As with gun control laws, it is the law-abiding folks who fall in line. It is the edgier, less civic-minded people who tend to rebel.

But the two issues remain distinct: generally lawful and level-headed citizens still need to defend themselves from criminals, but do not feel a need to take drugs that can be deadly even in innocent hands. Thus the War on Drugs seems a bit less obviously tragic than gun control.

Which is why conceiving of the War on Drugs as unworkable prison policy writ large remains important.

Why would we want to make our society more like drug-ridden prisons?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Photo credit: Thomas Quine

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags ban, Drug War, freedom, jail, prison, prohibition

free trade & free markets political economy

Bitcoin to the Rescue

Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, Venezuella, freedom, privacy, cash, money

I own no Bitcoin; it’s not my thing. The blockchain concept Bitcoin is based upon seems clever, sure, but I often curse at my “devices,” so only my politics prevents me from full-blown Luddism.

Besides, when I think “the people’s money” I don’t think “private fiat currency.” Which is what Bitcoin sure looks like to me.

But to quote from these very pages, “When times get tough, the tough . . . switch currencies.”

And times cannot get much tougher than in Venezuela right now. No wonder “many are turning to digital assets such as Bitcoin as an alternative to the Venezuelan bolivar,” writes Matthew Di Salvo for the BBC.

“Critics say Bitcoin and other cryptos — there are more than 1,600 globally — are unstable, use too much energy, and are used by money launderers or those wanting to buy illicit goods on the web,” Di Salvo explains.

These points need addressing. I’ll try:

A wannabe money will be as unstable as investor demand. When actually used as money, though, we may expect more stability. And Bitcoin is deflationary, so it should be more stable than government money.
As if our banks and ATMs don’t use energy!
Used by bad people? Well, you can say that about cash. But if we get rid of cash — as many experts want to — you can kiss any hope for freedom goodbye.

Venezuelans, by turning to keeping “their money in a digital wallet in the form of Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dash or any of the others,” are grabbing at something much better than what their malign inflation-happy government provides.

It is a pity that the “free-market” alternative is called “crypto” — meaning secret.

Freedom is the world’s best-kept secret?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags Bitcoin, cash, cryptocurrency, freedom, privacy, Venezuella

crime and punishment general freedom media and media people moral hazard

Porn, Video Games and British Crime

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 12, 2019
1 Comment on Porn, Video Games and British Crime

Great Britain, British, England, knives, violence, freedom, surveillance,

British freedom is eroding. The attack comes from two directions.

First, there is the over-bearing police-state style, surveillance-everywhere government.

Second, there is the increasing violence.

Thing is, the justification for Britain’s mass surveillance, as well as for strict gun controls, was to prevent crime.

Oops.

So of course the Labour Party “shadow home secretary” Diane Abbott points an accusatory finger at porn and video games. These two influences may be “desensitising young people to vicious behaviour.”

Well, porn and video games are changing our cultures, on both sides of the pond. But in America, at least, the crime rate for the past two decades plumetted while video games and Internet porn have become ubiquitous, explicit and . . . admittedly, appalling.

Look elsewhere for the crime uptick.

The Brexit fiasco, with the Tory government messing up implementation of the 2016 referendum results, has surely increased, not decreased, tensions all around, as has immigration policy, the collapsing National Health system, and much more. But worst of all? The nanny state, treating citizens as childish subjects. The police arrest people for nothing more than saying mean or just edgy things online.

If people cannot be free legally, they will take license — illegally.

Previously, we heard about a rash of acid attacks: acid thrown in the faces of pedestrians. More recently, the headlines are about stabbings — after years of knife control, of government crackdowns on even kitchen knives.

Ms. Abbott places the primary blame for rising crime not on the above, however, but on poverty and malfunctioning education. Not mentioned? The possibility that taking away British citizens’ rights of self-defense may have the perverse (unintended?) consequence of increasing offensive violence.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing