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national politics & policies term limits

Power to the Last Grasp

term limits, politicians, age

Remember congressional term limits? The idea, I mean. I know we don’t have them yet, though U.S. Term Limits is starting to make real progress through the states.

There was a big push or pseudo-push for congressional term limits in Congress in the mid-1990s. Later, first-term President Trump sort of promoted congressional term limits for a little while.

Don’t we all wish we had congressional term limits or age limits, or both, whenever a congressman of extremely advanced tenure or age, or both, drags himself through yet another reelection campaign?

Age limits would have been academic for Chuck Grassley, however, had he been subject to limits of, say, two six-year terms when he first became a senator in 1981. This is not an issue of people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s getting elected to Congress for the first time.

Grassley, for example, has been in Congress for the last 52 years: 46 years in the Senate and six years before that as a U.S. Representative. And let’s note 16 years in the Iowa State Legislature before that. Grassley has been in elected office non-stop for 68 years. 

Five years ago, we were told that Grassley, filing to run for yet another term, would be 95 by the end of that term if he ran and won and survived. Now, at 93, he has just filed paperwork to run for yet another term. He would be 101 by the end of it if he runs and wins . . . and survives.

Which, accordingly, would be 74 consecutive years in public office.

Time to give someone else a chance? Or will Grassley run again in 2032?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

George Orwell

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

George Orwell, “The Art of Donald McGill” (1941).

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Today

At Harpers Ferry

On this day in 1859, abolitionist John Brown led a group of 21 men — 14 white, seven black — on a raid of the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (then; since 1863, West Virginia), to capture weapons and initiate a slave revolt in southern states.

Brown’s forces initially captured the armory, which had only one guard on duty that night, but the expected uprising did not occur. Soon the raiders were blocked from any escape by townspeople and local militiamen and then overwhelmed by federal troops sent into the town (commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee, who would later lead the Confederate armies). The siege ended on the 18th of October.

Ten of Brown’s men were killed during the incident; seven were captured, tried, convicted and executed, including John Brown; and five escaped. Two enslaved African-Americans joined Brown’s cause and also died in the fighting. Battling against Brown’s raiders, a Marine and four townspeople lost their lives, including the town’s mayor and a free African-American. 

Though the raid on Harpers Ferry was a failure, it set the states on the road to disunion, war, and the eventual end of slavery. 

“John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic,” Frederick Douglass would write in remembrance of this event. “Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises. When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone — the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union — and the clash of arms was at hand.”

Print out a commemorative poster:

Categories
ideological culture international affairs

This Stage of Democratic Socialism

DSA, socialism, CCP, China

A nearly 1200-word article at The Epoch Times exploring linkages between the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and what DSA members call “Chinese socialism” reminds me of two concepts:

  1. “Useful idiot”; and
  2. What happens to socialism after communism fails.

The article is more exploratory than incendiary. Only a few DSA activists have taken part in the party’s China Working Group, visited China, or signed a public statement in support of the “continued survival of Chinese socialism.”

These “democratic socialists” qualify as “useful idiots” because they do not seem to realize that “Chinese socialism” — called “socialism with Chinese characteristics” by the Chinese themselves — is not democratic. The government is run by the Communist Party, a single entity, no competition allowed.

Why would people who insist on calling themselves “democratic” support this?

Because, as with all democratic socialists, at some point one is required to choose between the two ways of doing government. If you call yourself “socialist,” you’ve committed yourself, and you will have to choose tyranny at some point, or give up the socialist idea.

Democratic socialists in America are certainly useful to the Chinazis. And they are idiots. Thus the old term for moon-eyed westerners supporting Asian anti-democratic regimes carries on, still applicable after all these years.

But remember that China is not run as a centrally planned economy. It’s run like a fascist state, with party members working within businesses, only occasionally taking full control and ousting (even executing) owners and entrepreneurs and “uncooperative” managers . . . when the State requires. Just as did the National Socialist Party during Germany’s “Third Reich” period. As Peter Drucker sagely noticed, “Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.”

Democratic socialists may think they are not fascists, but fascism is indeed what they are pushing in America . . . and applauding when seen in China. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Aldous Huxley

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

Aldous Huxley, in Reader’s Digest (1934).
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Today

The Dreyfus Affair

On October 15, 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested for spying. In December he was convicted of treason, sentenced to life imprisonment, and sent to Devil’s Island in French Guiana.

In 1896, new information came to light that would exonerate the 35-year-old Frenchman of Jewish descent, thus beginning a scandal that divided Third Republic France and brought anti-Semitism into the spotlight of European moral criticism.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies political economy regulation subsidy

Progress Regardless

electric cars, subsidy, markets

There’s an easy way to know when people want various products and services: they pay for them using their money. It’s true! We have markets, and people buy and sell on these markets, even often risky investments as sellers and spending their own money as buyers.

Goods aren’t always procured this way. But market exchanges are common in any country containing even much-hampered markets.

One feels a need to remind the world of such truths whenever one, for example, peruses The New York Times.

According to a recent Times article on how “E.V. Road Trips Went From Impossible to Easy,” this transition to ease happened even despite alleged Trumpian hostility to electric vehicles!

Huh? Yawp! “E.V. fast-charging stations in the United States have soared in number from around 1,000 a decade ago to 12,000 today. . . . And despite the Trump administration’s hostility toward electric vehicles, and its attempts to end federal funding for public chargers, new stations are still going up — around 2,000 so far this year.” [emphasis added]

The correct wording is “despite reversal of federal hostility to gas-powered vehicles.”

Those fast-charging stations may be going up for a variety of private and public reasons. But no industry that emerges to meet persistent consumer demand requires any impetus to succeed beyond the desire and ability of capable producers to earn profits by satisfying that demand. 

In the early days of automobiles, gas stations didn’t spring up by government edict or subsidy.

Let consumers decide which mode of transportation, gas, electric, hybrid, if any, will triumph.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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George Orwell

Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?

George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939), Part 1, Ch. 3.
Categories
Today

Against the Coercive Acts

On October 14, 1774, the First Continental Congress denounced the British Parliament’s Intolerable Acts and demanded British concessions.

Called the “Coercive Acts” in Great Britain, the Intolerable Acts were a series of five punitive programs directed against the American colonies after the Boston Tea Party. Opposition to them led to armed conflict in April 1775 and to a Declaration of Independence in July 1776.

Categories
Fourth Amendment rights

The Fight Against Flock

flock, surveillance, police, law, cameras

“Many locales that try Flock cameras end up pulling them down,” I wrote in July. “None should ever begin to use them.”

A month later, I called the Flock camera/a.i. system a big move towards a “total roadway surveillance state,” and noted the hypocrisy of employees of Flock Safety (the company that sells the scheme to local governments) objecting to being surveilled by citizen activists: “While we say that ‘it’s only a conspiracy if they do it in secret,’ what is it when the people who seek to destroy the last vestiges of our privacy demand their own privacy even as they plot against us?”

On Sunday, the story received a major update: A court in Oklahoma ruled against the use of Flock cameras by the police on the grounds of the Fourth Amendment.

Meanwhile, the monkey-wrenching by disgruntled citizens of the spy cameras is real, geographically dispersed, and increasingly resulting in arrests and felony charges — while simultaneously being celebrated in some online communities.

One hates to see law-breaking and property damage, but governments that choose to defy the American tradition against unreasonable searches should expect some Tea Party-ish pushback.

And then there is the aptly named Will Freeman, a Colorado-based software engineer and privacy advocate. He founded DeFlock in October 2024. Freeman had noticed cameras on his drive from Washington to Huntsville, Alabama, and started mapping them himself. Leveraging open-source mapping technology, his effort expanded nationally and then globally. It’s become huge. And has expanded beyond Freeman’s own control. 

You can get a good idea of the state of the resistance by going to deflock.org and deflocktheusa.com. 

I am not telling you to do anything illegal. I merely note that finding out where the cameras are in your driving range gives you options.

Like knowing to which government you should direct your protests.

And avoiding being spied upon.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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