As we turn the page to a new calendar year, here’s hoping that 2020 is (a) as interesting as the year just past, while being (b) a bit more productive of freedom, accountability, and all the good stuff we strive to achieve in our personal, family, business and community lives.
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Legislation introduced last April to allow the extradition of criminal suspects from Hong Kong to mainland China motivated millions into the streets in protests that have not yet ended . . .
. . . including a major pro-democracy rally scheduled for tomorrow in Causeway Bay.
Traveling to Hong Kong and Taiwan months ago, the glimpse I caught of Hongkongers’ courageous struggle spurs me to applaud George Will’s judgment in Sunday’s Washington Post: “Nothing more momentous happened” in 2019.
The extradition bill has been withdrawn, sure, but Hongkongers know well that without real democracy they have no long-term hope of avoiding the repressive rule of the Chinese Communist Party . . . which may no longer be “communist,” but remains totally totalitarian.
Ask a million Uighurs.
Carrie Lam, the city’s Beijing-installed chief executive, has long labeled the protesters “selfish rioters.” But new pro-democracy candidates won nearly 90 percent of seats in last month’s local elections, demonstrating which side the public is on.
This year began with newly un-term-limited Chinese President Xi Jinping threatening military action against Taiwan. The island nation of 24 million, some 100 miles off the coast of the mainland, has been offered the same “one country, two systems” arrangement China has with Hong Kong . . . what Mr. Will dubbed “a formula for the incremental suffocation of freedom.”
Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, is “loathed by Beijing,” reports the South China Morning Post, “because her party refuses to accept the idea that Taiwan is part of the so-called one-China principle which denies the island’s independence.”
Her opponent in the upcoming national election on the 11th, like some in the NBA, “favours much warmer relations with mainland China.”
The Taiwanese, however — like Hongkongers — appear increasingly resistant to being totalitarianized.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
2019 Commentaries on Hong Kong and Taiwan
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There’s a quiet on Christmas
A moment to stop and think.
I hope they’ll like their presents; they always do. There’s so much love my wife and I want to share, to give to them.
Of course, the biggest gifts are never under the tree. The most important being a staple home, with love, and the freedom for children to grow into themselves.
My parents gave me that . . . along with the bicycles and baseball gloves and some really good books. I’ve tried to be the same kind of parent.
Another incredible endowment I’ve enjoyed is to be born in a country “conceived in liberty.” A place where individual citizens are the sovereigns, creating government to be a servant and not a master. Land of the free.
What a gift!
But Tom Paine told us that, “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly, ’tis dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”
Freedom is under siege. And, therefore, we who love freedom, grateful for our historic luck, must come together to protect our “expensive” gift.
Some may get discouraged after setbacks, recent and not-so-recent, but none of us got involved in politics because we like “the game” and figured we’d pile up a shelf of trophies. We’re engaged because we must be and we seek victories because, as Churchill once put it, “without victory, there is no survival.”
In 1776, on this very day, General George Washington and his soldiers of the American Revolution crossed the Delaware River to score a surprise military victory against the British at Trenton, New Jersey.
Thank goodness, for these brave patriots and their muskets. Three Americans gave their lives in the battle. To secure our liberty.
Today, the Gift has been handed to us. Not to play with on Christmas morning and forget about, not to let get broken without our fixing it, but to protect and defend and cherish.
My commentary strives to illuminate, to amuse and to motivate toward action, bringing citizens together. Citizens in Charge protects the initiative process — the best weapon citizens have to cut taxes, term-limit politicians, stop the drug war, protect property rights, and place limits on government. The Liberty Initiative Fund partners with leaders across the nation putting measures on the ballot to protect freedom and hold government accountable.
Thanks for your gifts to these efforts and to the many other important ones. We aim to protect the precious gift of freedom.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays!
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“All around the world, earnest fans of socialism insist it has never failed, as critics claim, since ‘true socialism has never really been tried,’” the New York Post editorial board wrote on Tuesday. But socialism has been tried. It just doesn’t turn into the utopia socialists promise.
And the State certainly does not do under socialism what Karl Marx said it would: wither away.
In Venezuela, “Bolivarian” dictator Nicolás Maduro sure isn’t withering away. In defiance of terms as well as term limits, he is not stepping down even as his country spirals downward into starvation and squalor.
His method and madness are not mysteries: he keeps power the old-fashioned way, sheer force.
The Post’s editors note his latest stay-in-office procedure: “He’s going to expand his massive private army to 4 million gunmen by the end of 2020.”
He might be able to do it, since his ruthless regime is supported not only by a well-stocked military, but also boasts an alleged 3.3 million gang-members in the “Bolivarian militia,” exempt from the gun confiscation of 2012.
It turns out (to neither your shock nor mine) that key to making socialism work is the threat of confiscation, control, murder. “Maduro is showing that the sure way to make it ‘succeed,’” says the Post, “is for the self-proclaimed socialists to have all the guns.”
By definition, socialism is the “public” ownership and control of the means of production. By necessity, socialism requires the governing class’s ownership and control of the means of destruction.
And we see that now being used to destroy any opposition.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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“Something is going on,” writes The Washington Post’s Adam Taylor. “From Baghdad to Hong Kong, Santiago to Barcelona, sites around the world have seen major protests over recent weeks.”
What is that something?
“Global protests share themes of economic anger and political hopelessness,” reads the headline to Taylor’s article.
He’s way off.
Hope, not hopelessness, drives people to demand change.
“Income inequality seems to have added an economic insecurity that helped lead to anger and protests,” Taylor informs . . . in keeping with a consistent Post narrative.
The millions who have marched in Hong Kong didn’t take to the streets over income equality. Their five clear and reasonable demands are about justice and basic democratic citizen control of government.
The protests and violence in Catalonia stem from the central Spanish government denying self-determination and trying to bully the people by imposing long prison terms on Catalonian officials who committed the crime of holding an “illegal” referendum for independence.
Even where economic concerns are far more prominent (or the main driver of demonstrations, such as in Chile) the frustration is much less about inequality than a lack of opportunity in a stagnant and corrupt system.
“They promise changes every time we protest, but it’s not a new law or a concession that we want,” Iraqi student Ali Saleh explains. “It’s our rights. It’s a fundamental change in how we’re governed.”
The current global explosion of political unrest isn’t about income inequality or even economic insecurity alone. It is about the desire for more fundamental freedoms — economic as well as political — in an unfree world.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Three measures on ballots today are particularly worth watching.
Two issues in Washington State represent the only citizen-initiated measures out of 32 propositions voters will see in eight states: Washington Referendum 88 allows voters to re-decide the issue of racial and gender preferences, so-called “affirmative action,” while Washington Initiative 976 offers voters a chance to cap their vehicle taxes.
More than two decades ago, in 1998, Washingtonians passed Initiative 200 to end racial and gender preferences in state employment and education. This year, the state legislature enacted a virtual repeal of I-200, by allowing the state to employ such a preference provided it was not the “only factor” used.
Washington’s vibrant Asian-American community, which stands to be discriminated against should affirmative action return, rose up to petition Referendum 88 onto the ballot. A “yes” vote upholds the legislature’s new pro-preference policy; a “no” vote restores the prior voter-enacted policy prohibiting such preferences.
Initiative 976 is yet another effort from Tim Eyman, the state’s most prolific initiative practitioner. “This measure,” as the official summary states, “would repeal or remove authority to impose certain vehicle taxes and fees; limit state and local license fees to $30 for motor vehicles weighing 10,000 pounds or less, except charges approved by voters . . .”
Like virtually every Eyman initiative, powerful opponents have dramatically outspent supporters — by greater than a 6-to-1 margin — funding ads that have been less than truthful. Additionally, government officials have broken campaign laws in pushing a “no” vote.
Nonetheless, a mid-October poll showed 48 percent of voters support I-976 against 37 percent who oppose it. Could Eyman again thwart the state’s behemoth Blue Establishment?
Lastly, New York City voters will decide a ballot question on whether to use ranked choice voting in future primary and special elections for mayor, city council and other offices. It would mark a major victory for a reform growing in popularity.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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