Tag: progress

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free trade & free markets progress

The Car That Could

TESLA, Elon Musk, freedom, markets, progress

A little later than expected, flying cars have arrived.

Welcome to the 21st century.

A rockets-enhanced Roadster can zoom up a nearly vertical ramp and execute a flip in mid-air before landing. Also, “on cold gas thrusters,” the prototype can jump into the air from a stationary position on the ground, fly for a few seconds, and do a flip before landing.

Take a look.

Gunther Eagleman writes: “Two nights ago I saw a flying car. This morning I saw a taxi without a driver.” Earlier he had seen a rocket caught in mid-air. During floods in Texas, he’d used Starlink to connect to first responders. “Elon Musk is changing the future.”

Matt Margolis sees a lesson about free enterprise: “This is what happens when people are free to dream big and put their own talent and money behind those dreams. No government program or committee was ever going to build a car that defies gravity for the fun of it. It took an entrepreneur willing to chase an idea that sounded crazy even to him, and a team of engineers determined to prove it wasn’t.”

Says one X commentator: “Bernie Sanders says billionaires should not exist. . . . A flying car is what men do when they are free. A wealth tax is what politicians do to the men who built it. One of them needs the other to survive, and it isn’t Musk.”

“I’ve seen a lot of things,” Musk himself asserts. “But I’ve never seen that before.”

We, too, have seen a lot. And, if governments do not ruin everything, we should expect to see a lot more.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

Will the West Awaken?

Marco Rubio, western culture, progress, America, freedom

“The most magnificent speech in the last 50 years,” is how journalist and novelist Robert Bidinotto described U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s address last week from the Acropolis.

“Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory,” Rubio told his audience.

“The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly, become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat,” he said, adding that “we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.”

The Secretary refreshingly sounds a bit like Ayn Rand.

“Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world. Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. . . . we condemned our own history. And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit.”

Of course, one of our central tenets is the right, even duty, to criticize our government. But only a woeful lack of historical perspective or a perverse ideological malice (or both) allows some to pretend that ripping apart our society is a thoughtful critique.

Europe, Rubio urged, must “awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago.”

So, too, should America. 

We must stand up for our core values. Or watch them expire.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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term limits

The World Wants Term Limits

Armenia, term limits, freedom, progress, The Economist

The Economist magazine has announced its “Country of the Year.” 

It’s Armenia.

The idea behind the award is to recognize the nation that has “improved the most” during the past year. The honorific implies no rosy assumptions about the future. Obviously, a country can backslide. The Economist’s editors admit that this proved to be the case with prior winners France and Myanmar.

This year, Malaysia and Ethiopia were in the running. Malaysians managed to oust a corrupt prime minister, and the new leader of Ethiopia has sought to encourage freedom of speech and liberalize the economy. But, all things considered, the magazine regards the advances in these countries to be too contradictory or uncertain to merit the Most Improved designation.

Progress seems more definitive in Armenia, where former President Serzh Sargsyan did his darnedest to escape presidential term limits — as is attempted by so many heads of state around the world.

Sometimes the power-grabbers succeed and sometimes they don’t. But everywhere, most voters oppose such shenanigans. They know how easy it is for an incumbent to shove his way to perpetual power no matter how unhappy they may be with him. Citizens know the value of term limits.

Armenia’s good news is that Sargysan’s attack on term limits failed — dramatically. He resigned after massive demonstrations. An opposition figure, Nikol Pashinyan, won power “on a wave of revulsion against corruption and incompetence. . . . A Putinesque potentate was rejected.”

Just what the world needs to see — a lot more often.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Armenia, term limits, freedom, progress, The Economist

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free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

The Two Americas

Dear Reader: This “BEST of Common Sense” comment originally aired on July 4, 2007. A longer version published at Townhall.com was picked up by Rush Limbaugh and read on his radio show. —PJ

Could Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards actually be right about something? Not where to go to get a haircut, mind you, I mean about there being two Americas.

There is the vibrant America . . . and the stagnant one.

There is the America of ever-increasing wealth, innovation, creativity, new products and services. Choices galore.

And there is the politician’s America: The regulated America, the subsidized America, the earmarked America. The failing America.

In one America, it is what you produce that gets you ahead. In the other, it’s who you know.

In one America, to earmark some money means setting aside funds (into savings) for a purchase — a car, house, college.

In the other America, to earmark is to grab from taxpayers to give to cronies. It is the highest rite of career politicians: Buying their votes with other people’s money. Oh, there have been reforms, sure. But a recent bill in the House had 32,000 earmark requests.

In one America, we decide what we pay for. We choose constantly about little things and big. We call the shots. Or we walk down the street and associate with someone else. So we have some faith in those we work with.

In the other America, we vote. But we rarely get what we vote for.

Maybe that’s why the new Democratic Congress just registered the lowest approval rating in poll history.

It surely isn’t because folks love the Republicans.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets

We Need iPads

Every once in a while somebody explains that “we” don’t need this or that product, however great it may be and however great the demand for it. For example, a tech reviewer dubs Apple’s latest iPad models “largely unnecessary,” given last-year models almost as capable.

The charge of unnecessariness is surely false when we’re talking about customers who do want the most cutting-edge technology and can put it to good use. But it’s false in a broader perspective too — unless we suppose that all advances in human civilization beyond the level of the hut and the bearskin are “largely unnecessary” to human survival and well-being.

If technological progress is necessary, so are key aspects of how that progress happens, including the fact that it so often happens by “largely unnecessary” increments. Any given marginal advance in computer or PC tech may have been dispensable. But the same can’t be said of the process of cumulative improvement as a whole. Consider, for example, that some ninety percent of what we now do on our PCs would have been impossible to do with the 1980 PC. Our 2014 laptops could not have been crafted without myriad intermediate advances.

As striving human beings, our needs evolve as our means improve and enable us to pursue ends that we could not have pursued with less powerful means. Ergo, I welcome every little improvement we can get. And I can hardly wait for my 2025 iPad.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets

The New Space Race

We’re on the verge of being virtually connected to every person in the whole world who has a $200 laptop or a $50 smartphone or better.

Private companies Google and Facebook are funneling capital into satellite networks to bring the Internet to millions now utterly without it. Reporters call their competition a “space race.” Google will spend between one and three billion dollars on 180 small low-earth-orbit satellites. Facebook’s game plan entails higher, geosynchronous orbits.satellites in orbit

Google estimates that “two thirds of the world have no [Internet] access at all. It’s why we’re so focused on new technologies … that [can] bring hundreds of millions more people online….”

Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds thinks that Google’s satellites will also make governmental spying and censorship harder, a suggestion readers hotly dispute. In any case, major cyber-companies have been paying much more attention to plugging security holes in their systems in the wake of the Snowden revelations.

What’s indisputable is that dramatically more widespread Internet access will enable a great many people who currently lack that access to enjoy radical new means of knowledge and trade.

The Internet abets everything from communication to scholarship to publishing to broadcasting to stock trading to finding new customers and even new loves. This cyber wealth will be enriched by the contributions of the new surfers of the web. We can also expect the satellite technology backed by Google and Facebook to give us both higher Internet speeds and lower Internet costs.

Globalization is good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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individual achievement

It’s Going to Be a Non-bumpy Ride

Gilad Woolf, an Israeli farmer, had a problem.

He had broken his leg . . . but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the bumpy ride he often had to endure while using a wheelchair until his leg could heal. And so — discomfort and inconvenience being the mother of reinvention — Woolf came up with an idea for a kind of wheel that could soak up the impacts of uneven terrain.

Developed over the last three years by the startup Tel Aviv firm SoftWheel, the hub of this special wheel shrinks or expands as needed to smooth out the ride. The wheel absorbs most of a shock instead of transmitting it to the vehicle and the person driving it.

“Very quickly we understood it’s not just about putting the suspension inside the wheel,” SoftWheel CEO Daniel Barel told The Jerusalem Post. “The beauty of our technology is not only that it’s an integral part of the wheel, it’s selective and symmetric. That’s the game-changer.” (See video of a Softwheel wheelchair on steps.)

The company will first create its wheels for wheelchairs, the bikes and aircraft landing gear. After several more years of work, SoftWheel expects that the technology can be applied to cars.

Thus, five or six thousand years after somebody came up with the wheel, we’ve got a smart and flexible solution for the problem of stairways, potholes and other bumps in the road.

Very cool. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture too much government

Progressives’ Progress

Want to understand a political movement? Distinguish between its early proponents and its later followers. The thinking and rhetoric change over time.

Take Progressivism. It started out as an intellectual movement. Its leading lights were Americans who had studied in foreign colleges and universities. They brought back European ideas of an aggrandized state to counteract American notions of limited government.

Though I disagree with their notions almost totally (with interesting exceptions), it’s worth noting that they thought they were “scientific,” and would sometimes even encourage an experimental attitude towards public policy: Devise new programs, test them, chuck them when they don’t work.

Modern “progressives” don’t seem to sport that “testing” idea any longer.

I just received an email from BarackObama.com, which was complaining about the Speaker of the House, who — on TV, of all things! — said that “Congress ‘should not be judged on how many new laws we create,’ but rather on ‘how many laws . . . we repeal.’” My BO correspondent found this “embarrassing”:

We elected our members of Congress to work on the issues we care about: creating jobs, fixing our immigration system, fighting climate change, and passing laws to reduce gun violence.

We didn’t put them in office to sit there and wind back the clock.

Notice the assumption here: All the laws on the books are good, serving the common good; none are worthy of repeal.

Doesn’t seem like an assumption an early Progressive thinker would have made. But for too many of today’s progressives, progress apparently consists in accumulating regulations, rules, prohibitions, and tax programs as if each one were a pearl of great price.

Progress is government growth? That defies common sense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture too much government

Moving to China?

Venture capitalist Eric X. Li, in an op-ed for the New York Times, “Why China’s Political Model Is Superior,” credits the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre with producing the “stability” that “ushered in a generation of growth and prosperity.”

As for America, Li explains that our problem is an “expanded” political franchise, “resulting in a greater number of people participating in more and more decisions.”

“Elected representatives have no minds of their own and respond only to the whims of public opinion as they seek re-election,” Li informs, and “special interests manipulate the people into voting for ever-lower taxes and higher government spending, sometimes even supporting self-destructive wars.”

Mr. Li points to California and predicts an American “future” of “endless referendums, paralysis and insolvency.”

But wait a second . . . Americans have no initiative or referendum powers at the national level. The people didn’t vote for this level of taxes, spending, war or massive debt – our elite political leaders did that. Too much control by the people? Hardly. Too little.

Note that the national government most affected by initiatives and referendums is Switzerland, which also has the world’s highest per capita income.

But, as Li tells us, “China is on a different path. Its leaders are prepared to allow greater popular participation in political decisions if and when it is conducive to economic development and favorable to the country’s national interests . . .” After all, “political rights . . . should be seen as privileges to be negotiated based on the needs and conditions of the nation.”

Those negotiations have left Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo in a Chinese prison.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets

Defrosting the Obamalogic

I thought I was done talking about Obama’s Chamber of Commerce speech. But the Mises Institute’s Jeffrey Tucker has tackled another goofy element in it. The president claimed that government regulators “make our lives better” and “often spark competition and innovation.” In his example, the government’s “modest” regulatory targets imposed “a couple decades ago” allegedly mean that “a typical fridge now costs half as much and uses a quarter of the energy that it once did — and you don’t have to defrost.”

One wonders what profit-seeking folks like the Rockefellers and Carnegies, Edisons and Fords did without regulatory impetus. Hide the innovations people are happy to pay for until regulators come along and force entrepreneurs to make money from them?

As it happens, there’s a history to refrigerators. Patents for auto-defrosting fridges were first issued in 1928, and by 1951 these fridges were making their way into homes. In the 1970s they proliferated. As Tucker explains, this is normal market practice. “A company found a way to package [frost-free freezers] as a luxury good available in some markets. Another company saw the advance and emulated it. . . .”

Nobody had to point guns at fridge makers.

In “Blow Hot, Blow Cold,” Robert H. Miller reveals the usual way government “helps progress” — by struggling to rebuild what it previously destroyed. Example? The electric-generating windmill industry that the New Deal’s Rural Electrification Act so handily suppressed.

Progress is built into markets. Governments? Not so much.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.