Tag: political illusion

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Iconoclasm Spasms

Jefferson Davis

As America stands upon a precipice of insolvency, as southern European nations undergo the spasms of sovereign debt catastrophe, as many of our citizens call the Chinese devaluations of their money “currency wars,” obsessing about political symbolism seems … a tad … trivial.

First it was the Confederate Flag. Now it’s Jefferson Davis.

He’s dead. And as a result of his 126 years in the “post-​living” state, he quite literally doesn’t matter for the future of the United States.

And yet the Confederacy’s president (1861 – 1865) is in the news again. As Charles Paul Freund relates at Reason, the dead rebel prez has been having a figurative “bad summer.” How? The University of Texas has decided to move his statue into a museum, away from public eyes; some Georgians want to obliterate the Stone Mountain tableau that features Davis along with Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee; there’s talk of renaming Virginia’s “Jefferson Davis Highway”; etc.

Davis died unrepentant, refusing to ask Congress for a pardon for his part in the Confederacy after the secessions of 1860 and ’61. And yet he was pardoned in 1978, posthumously, by the Democratic Congress and President Jimmy Carter, who yammered on in a Fordian “long national nightmare is over” fashion, saying the pardon would, at long last, “clear away the guilts and enmities and recriminations of the past.”

I’m not convinced it did a thing.

And about the current proposals? I don’t think any highway should be named after any politician. Of the other ideas, I don’t really care. Much.

Nevertheless, fights over political symbols have long been important. Why? My guess: to deflect our attention — away from the future, and to the past.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Jefferson Davis

 

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free trade & free markets too much government

Disaster Economics 101

Could House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have spilled the beans, laid bare her party’s vision of economic growth in one offhand utterance?

A terrible tragedy in impoverished Haiti. An earthquake. The scope of the damage staggers the imagination … and spurs outpourings of charitable aid from America, and across the globe.

And this is where Mrs. Pelosi chimes in. As if she had never heard of the Broken Window Fallacy, she just blurted it out, hazarding that Haiti “can leap-​frog over its past challenges, economically, politically, and demographically in terms of the rich and the poor and the rest there, and have a new — just a new, fresh start.”

Over 70,000 dead, Haiti in ruins, and she’s talking about hope for a “real boom economy.” 

Now, I know, politicians like to spend money. They think it does a lot of good — though in Haiti’s case, the billions spent, previously, have sure fizzled. But Pelosi isn’t just arguing that the aid is going to remake an impoverished country. She thinks that scurrying about rebuilding is a net positive. 

If you wonder why politicians so like economic booms, even the most artificial ones, look no further. They cannot distinguish between real progress and the frenzy of making up for disaster.

Perhaps that’s why they are so nonchalant about the disasters their own taxes and regulations so often cause. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.