Tag: freedom

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budgets & spending cuts ideological culture national politics & policies

Pleistocene Politics

socialism, resolve, soldiers, America, freedom

Back in the Eocene — I mean the 1990s — Senator Chuck Schumer and President Bill Clinton and most other Democrats insisted that “healthcare” benefits not be distributed to “those who’ve entered the country illegally.” Now, the party is united behind the opposite notion, in which benefits — paid for by resident taxpayers — must be delivered generously to all comers. 

This was most clearly demonstrated in 2019, during one of those huge panels of presidential hopefuls on the Democratic side, all raising their hands on whether they supported giving tax-funded medical assistance to illegal aliens. 

Yesterday I quoted Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) on how Democrats want to “save people.” 

What I didn’t quote was the question she was asked — “Do Democrats want to prioritize the healthcare for illegal aliens over a government shutdown?” — or how she initially responded: “Excuse me; stop it right there. We’re not prioritizing; what we’re doing is saying, simply, we wanna keep the government open and we wanna work with the Republicans and have a bipartisan agreement to keep this government open and healthcare is at the top of our agenda.”

Whew. While denying she’s prioritizing what’s at “the top” of her “agenda” — what prioritization means — her desire for a “bipartisan agreement” is just as fake, for what she and her fellow Democrats demand is that the Republicans completely agree with their most extreme agendum: subsidized medical assistance for all comers.

 That’s not “bipartisan.” There’s no compromise. It’s a tactic of intransigence.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote about this in terms of an “intransigent minority rule,” positing that in complex systems — such as societies, markets, or Congress — a small, highly committed minority (as little as 3-4 percent) can impose its preferences on a flexible majority due to an asymmetry of choice.

Meaning that the opponents of “limitless” subsidies (socialism) must become intransigent themselves to win.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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regulation

Ban Banning Gas Stoves

gas stove, fuel, regulations, freedom

Not long ago, you would’ve been labeled a conspiracy theorist if you suggested that a government report about how terribly unhealthy gas stoves are and how they ought to be banned meant that plans were in the works to ban gas stoves. 

“No, the government’s not taking your stove,” CNET said in January 2024.

What were we all worried about?

Tightening regulations, that’s what.

Absent a Trump administration, we would have witnessed a long series of ever-stricter regulations — always ratcheting up — to save us from the horrors of gas stoves.

Though we have been reprieved from many anti-energy Biden administration initiatives, a gas-stove ban may yet be coming to a state near you. 

Do you live in New York State? Well, your anti-gas-stove politicians want to ban installation of new gas connections. You need a connection to the gas to get the gas into the stove.

It’s being litigated right now. An Empire State regulation forbidding new gas infrastructure will take effect next January unless a court challenge succeeds. Even though it’s all just a conspiracy theory. . . .

Judge Glenn Suddaby is giving plaintiffs, who argue that the impending regulation imposes arbitrary hardships, time to submit new arguments. Then, if he’s not persuaded, he’ll dismiss their challenge. 

Unfortunately, the facts being promoted in New York State aren’t enough by themselves to motivate this judge to make a rational ruling.

No, government isn’t going to take your stove. But politicians and activists do seek to force you to give up your stove in the future. For want of fuel. Or because they’ve added sin taxes on the fuel or the stoves. Or both. 

Or something else.

That’s how the progressive regulatory agenda works.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs

Brazilian Censors Banned!

liberty, freedom, censorship, Brazil, free speech

The American government — after years of nurturing a censorship agenda in the South American country — is now penalizing Brazil’s super-censor Supreme Court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, along with various colleagues, for imposing censorship demands on U.S. companies.

The U.S. State Department revoked their visa privileges, preventing them from entering the United States. The general policy had been introduced May 28, when Secretary of State Rubio announced that it would apply to “foreign officials and [other] persons . . . complicit in censoring Americans.”

By then a UK police commissioner, Mark Rowley, had threatened to “come after” Americans who violate UK “hate speech” laws.

The Trump administration “will hold accountable foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of protected expression in the United States,” Rubio says.

“Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes’s political witch hunt against Jair Bolsonaro created a persecution and censorship complex so sweeping that it not only violates basic rights of Brazilians, but also extends beyond Brazil’s shores to target Americans.”

Bolsonaro, a former president of Brazil, is on trial for allegedly seeking to overturn the country’s 2022 presidential election. He has been prohibited from posting on social media or communicating with others under investigation. 

One on this no-contact order is his own son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, currently living in the U.S.

Having ordered social media platforms Rumble and X(-Twitter) to censor opposition figures, Justice Moraes acted to block both services from operating in Brazil when the platforms disobeyed him.

“Free speech,” said X’s Elon Musk, “is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.” 

It’s a wonderful thing to have our government once again defending democratic free speech — from its enemies foreign and domestic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense general freedom obituary

Waiting for the Day

freedom, Independence Forever! Liberty

Towards the end of their lives, former President John Adams asked former President Thomas Jefferson whether he would live his life over again. 

The third president answered in the affirmative: “I think with you, that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us.”

Not everyone agrees, of course. Jefferson called these people “gloomy and hypochondriac minds,” who “always count that the worst will happen because it may happen.”

Jefferson has a challenge to those whom we today call “the black-pilled”: “How much pain have cost us the evils that have never happened!” Jefferson confessed to lacking hope sometimes, but not as often as the perpetually gloomy.

Those of us who follow the news often have occasion for gloom — or alarm. But on July Fourth it is appropriate to remember the council of these two leaders of Independence. 

In 1826, as Jefferson and Adams approached their inevitable demises, both struggled — and succeeded — in their final goals: to make it to Independence Day. 

On the Third, Jefferson inquired, more than once, about whether it was the Fourth yet, wrote Albert Jay Nock at the end of his Jefferson (1926), “and when told at last that it was, he appeared satisfied. He died painlessly at one o’clock in the afternoon, about five hours before his old friend and fellow, John Adams; it was the only time he took precedence of him, having been all his life ‘secondary to him in every situation,’ except this one.”

According to Adams family lore, when Adams died a few hours later, he said, “Jefferson survives.” 

Wrong, as a point of fact. But in spirit?

On Independence Day, we should ask ourselves what of the founding survives.

Unlike the actual lives of those who made our Independence, and, to paraphrase Tom Paine, we can start Independence anew. And as John Adams definitely said on his last day, “Independence forever!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies political economy regulation

Ultra-Absurd?

minimum wage, coins, Walking Liberty, freedom

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) is oh-so-ultra.

USA Today dubs him a “conservative” in the title of a recent article on a proposed minimum wage hike, and then an “ultraconservative” (emphasis added) in the first word of the article itself. 

Why does this “ultraconservative” join a Democratic senator in raising the federal minimum wage to $15? They both seem to assume that minimum wage laws raise wages.

For hundreds of years, economists have argued they don’t. On the face of it, these laws merely prohibit jobs paid below a certain rate. They disemploy. 

When the government prohibits low-wage compensation, businesses shift productive processes to keep afloat; when a factor is suddenly made more expensive, they adjust. With more automation, for example.

At least, the USA Today article mentions, briefly, that the Congressional Budget Office forecasts that some individual workers and families would see their livelihoods diminished by the higher minimum — which is the only part of the coverage of the new, more restrictive (higher) minimum wage regulation that gets to the meat of the issue: what minimum wage laws actually do. 

A related article back home in the Springfield News Leader (a member of the “USA TODAY NETWORK”) explores the question of Missouri’s minimum wage and what activist economists call the state’s “minimum living wage” — and it is relevant at least to this extent: states have different economic climates, and wage rates differ region to region in the United States, so it’s very relevant to a senator from his state affecting his state’s economy with a regulation applying equally to all states.

Which is to say that the minimum wage issue should be a state issue.

If an issue at all.

“Ultraconservative” Hawley’s bill is ultra-misguided.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Today

Remember June 4

On June 4, 1989, student protests at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square were brutally suppressed by the People’s Liberation Army.

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First Amendment rights international affairs

Leave Our Speech Alone

UK, censorship, freedom

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced that foreign officials who act to censor U.S. speech on U.S. soil won’t get visas.

They shouldn’t “issue or threaten arrest warrants on U.S. citizens or U.S. residents for social media posts on American platforms while physically present on U.S. soil. . . . [Or] demand that American tech platforms . . . engage in censorship activity that reaches beyond their authority and into the United States. We will not tolerate encroachments upon American sovereignty, especially when such encroachments undermine the exercise of our fundamental right to free speech.”

The policy is the least the U.S. can do to combat despots of even “friendly” countries who target speech in the U.S. or demand that U.S. firms abet local repression.

It would also be reasonable to tie trade agreements to willingness to abstain from censoring U.S. speech and bullying U.S. companies that protect speech and privacy. But a White House report on a recent agreement with the UK says nothing about these matters.

American companies have sometimes withdrawn from foreign markets or offered truncated products rather than cooperate with censorship or surveillance. When Britain demanded a global back door to iPhone encryption, Apple removed an encryption feature from iPhones for users in the UK. Better than rendering the feature useless everywhere in the world.

But it would be better still if a country like the United Kingdom simply agreed to leave us alone. Pretend we’re allies and so forth; pretend that they, too, think freedom is a good thing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture international affairs

Triumph & Failure

Shen Yun, China, CCP, freedom

“Shen Yun Performing Arts completed its 18th global tour earlier this month,” a May 24th press release informs, “a historic run of 799 shows in 199 cities in 26 countries in front of over a million people.”

This notice, entitled “Triumphant 2025 Shen Yun Season Concludes,” may look like the usual glowing corporate self-congratulatory exercise in unwarranted hype. But it isn’t. “Shen Yun’s eight touring groups and hundreds of performers overcame tornadoes and fires as well as sabotage attempts from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its allies. And yet, not a single performance was missed.”

That is an accomplishment, indeed, for the theater troupe did face back-room political pressure from that great foe of freedom, the CCP.

I had seen several news reports of their troubles. It took a court order, for example, to enforce a venue contract with South Korea’s Kangwon National University. University officials had “greenlit the New York classical Chinese dance company’s application to perform at its Baekryeong Art Center on April 1,” explains The Epoch Times, “only to walk back on the agreement after the Chinese embassy voiced a complaint.” 

The university “stated that its decision to cancel the show had to do with the public interests of the school,” of course. But while“escalating the matter into a ‘diplomatic issue’” obviously loomed large, the center also mentioned the danger from “the roughly 500 Chinese-national students studying at the center who it claimed could stage protests, potentially leading to clashes, should the performance go on as scheduled.”

The Shen Yun Performing Arts organization is made up of many artists who have fled communist China. The communists in China do not like defectors, and their reach is alarming.

Thankfully, in this case, the CCP failed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs political economy

Out of Poverty

China, farmers, agriculture, communism, government, freedom

“So, who brought who out of poverty?” asks Frank Dikötter about China’s economic rise.

The Dutch historian and author of four excellent books on Chinese history — Mao’s Great Famine; The Tragedy of Liberation; The Cultural Revolution; and China After Mao — Dikötter recently spoke at length with Peter Robinson, host of the Hoover Institution’s “Uncommon Knowledge” podcast.

Calling it “conventional wisdom,” Robinson offers that “the number that I found over and over again was eight to 900 million people lifted out of poverty since Deng Xiaoping announce[d] his reforms in ’78.”

“That’s all propaganda,” declares Dr. Dikötter. “The people in the countryside have lifted themselves out of poverty.”

Even before Mao’s death in 1976, the Cultural Revolution ended and the “army, which was deployed in every farm, every factory, every office from 1968 onwards, that army goes back to the barracks and is purged in turn,” he explains. “People in the countryside realize there’s nobody there to supervise them. There’s nobody there to tell them, go and work in the collective fields.”

Mr. Robinson chimes in: “The boot is off their neck.”

“So,” Dikötter expounds “they start operating underground factories; they open black markets; they trade among themselves.”

Deng “merely [put] the stamp of approval on something that escapes them altogether, namely the drive of ordinary villagers to claim back the freedoms they had before 1949.

“Allow ordinary people to get on with it,” he says, “they will!

“But this is not a party,” concludes Dikötter, “that will allow ordinary people to get on with it.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies

Excellence in Success

space, freedom, NASA, SpaceX, DEI, quota

The NASA Jet Propulsion Lab has “parted ways with” — I’m guessing fired, despite the glowing words that attended the parting — DEI officer Neela Rajendra.

The Free Beacon reports that NASA seems to have been nudged in this direction by a Beacon report that despite the anti-DEI policies of the new U.S. administration, the Jet Propulsion lab had tried to retain Rajendra by changing her title. She still had many of the same responsibilities, including managing “affinity groups” like the Black Excellence Strategic Team.

The propulsion lab is now replacing its DEI department with a new one called “Office of Team Excellence and Employee Success.” 

Even assuming that race and gender consciousness are now no more — probably not a safe assumption — we may wonder why such a department, solely devoted to “excellence and success,” is necessary.

If it is, how did the NASA of the 1960s, including Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin, ever manage to reach and land on the moon? Surely this kind of accomplishment must have required pervasive excellence. Maybe, back then, commitment to excellence was one of the requirements for getting and keeping NASA jobs to begin with?

Among Rajendra’s own excellences: hostility to deadlines and criticism of SpaceX for being “fast-paced” and failing to promote DEI, as she complained in 2022. 

A few years later, it was a SpaceX capsule that enabled the rescue of NASA astronauts stranded on the International Space Station. 

Now that’s “team excellence”!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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