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Packing

“Are you proposing taking away their guns?”

“I am,” replied former Texas Congressman Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke to ABC World News Tonight anchor David Muir’s question. If, anyway, “it’s a weapon that was designed to kill people on a battlefield.”

“Hell, yes,” he added, later in last week’s Democratic presidential debate.

“We’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”

Yesterday, I noted that U.S. Senator Kamala Harris seemed oblivious to any consideration of the constitutional rights of citizens to “bear arms.” Today, consider the constitutional work-around both Democrat presidential contenders support. You see, when they talk about confiscating your guns, they do not intend to go to all the hard work of changing the law of the land. They plan, instead, merely to change the High Court — something the president, with a majority of Congress, can do — and have the new justices re-visit the legal interpretation.

O’Rourke “spoke openly after launching his run,” informs Politico, “about expanding the high court to as many as 15 judges.” Fox News reported that he “is open to making drastic changes to fundamentally reshape the Supreme Court — essentially court-packing, with a twist.”

The “twist” is the scheme that I wrote about in March. In a bizarre nod to bipartisanship, O’Rourke would have Republicans select five justices, Democrats select five more, and then have those ten judges select yet another five.

Only tradition and public opinion have kept the highest court in the land from previous hijackings.

Is Republican opposition all that stands in the way now?

Gives a whole new meaning to the question: Are you packing?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense Popular

Chortling Evil

Kamala Harris laughed.

She stood naked on the edge of a . . .

Oops. Wrong story.

The right — or, very wrong — story is Senator Harris (D–Calif.) laughing, sure. But the only thing naked is her powerlust.

Why refer to the opening of the novel The Fountainhead? To call attention to the Chortling Politician.

Harris isn’t the only politician openly contemptuous of treating the Constitution as worth sober assent. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, when asked about the constitutionality of Obamacare’s health insurance mandate, responded with “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

To some politicians — who I wish I could say did not include the current president — the Constitution is so passé, so insignificant, that bringing up the subject as a possible limit to what they seek to do is, well, chuckleworthy.

On her campaign website, Harris assures us that should Congress fail “to send comprehensive gun safety legislation” to her “desk within her first 100 days as president” she would “take executive action to keep our kids and communities safe.”

Included in such a demanded “comprehensive” bill is “universal background checks, an assault weapons ban, and the repeal of the NRA’s corporate gun manufacturer and dealer immunity bill.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden, on last Thursday’s Democratic presidential candidates’ debate stage, challenged the notion of executive orders to ban assault weapons. At issue? Constitutionality. She smiled wide, all teeth and bright eyes, with “Hey, Joe, instead of saying, ‘No, we can’t,’ let’s say, ‘Yes, we can.’”

And she laughed and laughed.

Oh, the wit.

She then explained how she “thinks about” the issue. The Constitution and the rule of law are not part of her thinking.

The empress is naked, yeesh.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling national politics & policies Popular too much government

Biden Under the Bed

Joe Biden, bed, monsters, record player, black child,

Former Vice-President Joe Biden was put on the spot, again, about race. During last Thursday’s presidential candidates’ debate, ABC newscaster Lindsey Davis asked what responsibility Americans should “take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?”

Triple, Biden said, “the amount of money we spend. . . .”

On “very poor schools, the Title I schools.”

From $15 to $45 billion a year.

Dodging the reparations question, he offered a four-part plan for educating poor children that was very . . . educational.

Biden’s second solution is “make sure that we . . . help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home.”

Send in more psychologists!

Step three is to “make sure that . . . 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds go to school. School. Not daycare. School.”

Sounds like forcing every parent to put their 3-year-old into school. Or just “poor” 3-year-olds? Neither sounds good.

If my elementary school math still holds, next comes policy objective No. 4.

And it’s a doozy.

“We bring social workers in to homes and parents to help them deal with how to raise their children,” Sleepy Joe declared. Because as he explained “they”— wealth-challenged parents — “don’t know quite what to do.”

But Biden does. “Play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, make sure that kids hear words.”

The former VEEP explained that children from “a very poor background will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get [to school].”

Language skills matter. But do we really want the next president to station a social worker under every kid’s bed to make sure the record player isn’t skipping?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration adapted from an image by Rusty Clark

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general freedom ideological culture Popular

Slavery Is Not Free-Market Capitalism

Post author By Redactor
Post date August 30, 2019
No Comments on Slavery Is Not Free-Market Capitalism

Tarring free-market capitalism and limited government with the brush of slavery is old hat. What is new is that prominent journals and major media figures now shamelessly slop that brush around.

Indeed, the argument is so often made that addressing it from several angles, as I have — twice in the last few outings of Common Sense — is important. Today I make an additional point.

The fact that human beings were treated as property, to be sold and mortgaged and disposed of at will, does not make slavery “free market.” If we legalized and institutionalized the market in stolen goods, that might make those markets legally above board — but not morally.

It is this moral argument against stolen goods that undergirds the case against slavery.

Always has.

For slavery is stealing the rightful property of the people enslaved — their property in their own bodies.

Richard Overton called this “self-propriety” in 1646, and at about the same time John Locke, following Hugo Grotius, wrote of every man having “a property in his own Person.” This is the old liberal way to think about personal freedom when you are dealing with property: self-ownership.

“Free market capitalism” rests on it just as slavery abridges it.

Unfortunately, there has been a successful campaign to muddy up this logic and its history. Teacher Lawrence Ludlow recently informed readers of American Thinker about the results of this indoctrination: today’s students have “somehow ‘learned’” that “slavery was isolated to the United States instead of practiced worldwide for ages” and that “Westerners were the most enthusiastic practitioners of slavery instead of being among the first to abandon it.”

Freedom is not slavery and the truth shall set us free.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people Popular

The Fifth Century Begins

When socialists and woke scolds talk about slavery, you can almost hear the chains and smell the leather of the slaver’s whip — and not always in a good way.

Project 1619 is the New York Times effort to acknowledge 400 years of Africans in America. Thankfully, the project’s page is more coherent and forthright than Matthew Desmond’s New York Times Magazine farrago of August 14, “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.”

Indeed, that piece (like others in the series) is such a tangle that there is no hope to unravel it in this limited space. Just note that Desmond does his darnedest to help the enemies of liberty tie slavery into the idea of free markets, private property, and free association.*

Project 1619, on the other hand, accepts the complexity of slavery in America without being idiotically tendentious. It recognizes that the captured Africans brought to Virginia shores in August 1619 were treated as indentured servants. Unfortunately, unlike the Englishmen arriving under indentured servitude, the first Africans in Virginia lacked explicit contracts. So negotiating their way out was . . . problematic. Still, one African, arriving two years later, was soon freed and became a landowner. And it was he who was awarded another African as a slave for life, in civil court in 1655, marking the real start of chattel slavery in America.

Which is to say, slavery in America was not exclusively a matter of race.**

Why is this important? Because slavery is wrong not because racism is wrong (as wrong as that is), but because people have a right to freedom.

Could it be that socialists emphasize racism regarding slavery because they fear that focusing on freedom might scuttle their socialism?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* See my discussion of slavery yesterday.

** This becomes clear once you read Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, or learn how Thomas Jefferson’s wife was related to Sally Hemings

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ideological culture Popular too much government

Slaves All?

A bizarre argument is gaining popularity: the United States of America not merely allowed slavery in its first hundred years, it depended upon it, grew rich by it . . . and, “therefore,” not only the federal government but also its constitutional principles and even capitalism are all tainted . . . and . . . “therefore” . . . we must have socialism!

Why long-dead chattel slavery requires political slavery now is hard to figure.

And no, you should not need to read George Fitzhugh’s Cannibals All! or Sociology for the South to see that socialism is slavery.*

But these days it is more common to link slavery with . . . freedom (this is hard even to type) in the form of free markets.

Leftists who make this linkage are helped by some popular historians who argue that since the antebellum South (1) grew faster, economically, than the North, (2) slavery was profitable for slaveholders, and (3) slaves became more productive in picking cotton, the “peculiar institution” was key to American success. Vincent Geloso, a visiting assistant professor of economics at Bates College, writing for the American Institute for Economic Research, ably shows that not one of these three theses hold up to scrutiny.

Most importantly, though, Geloso demonstrates that the slavery system was like all other interventionist systems, with some people (slavers) benefiting at the expense of others (slaves, of course, but also free people . . . through a variety of subsidies).

Geloso uses the term “deadweight loss” to make his case that slavery made America poorer.

He is certainly not wrong. But once you understand why freedom and prosperity are linked, not much economic jargon is necessary.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* This pro-slavery southerner did argue against the very idea of liberty and free labor on the grounds that freedom is bad and socialism is good. Indeed, “Fitzhugh disliked ‘political economy’ (as economics was then called), which he saw as ‘the science of free society,’” economist Pierre Lemeiux explains, “as opposed to socialism, which is ‘the science of slavery.’” That forthright appraisal is about all that’s good in Fitzhugh.

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