Common Sense with Paul Jacob

What Is It?

America’s founding fathers talked a lot about virtue. Freedom requires it; there can be no liberty without virtue, they said.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” insisted John Adams. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

“No government can continue good but under the people’s control,” Thomas Jefferson explained, declaring that the citizens’ must “be informed by education what is right and wrong; to be encouraged in virtuous habits and deterred from vice.”

These were not isolated sentiments. But what did they mean?

It’s time to renew discussion, as rioting expands from Paris to Milan to . . . all over Europe. Here is one notion of a virtuous people: folks who, when they protest injustice or folly do not themselves foolishly commit injustice. Virtuous people do not run riot, wreak havoc, commit mayhem . . . just because they have grievances.

If they have complaints about farming regulation, or school funding, they do not burn down shops.

Or the Louvre.

Whatever “social justice” is, it too requires a virtuous population.

The fact that there is increased political violence suggests that some folks are not virtuous.

There’s this notion that in France, at least, violent protests are just a part of French culture. A culture warped by the disastrous French Revolution centuries ago? My bet is that, if we inquired deeper, we’d discover that this is not exactly so. That certain groups push violent protest every now and then for reasons of political goals that are not about either social justice or liberty.

We in America, who have been blessed with the freest society on the planet, are not quite as prone as Europeans to the vice of violent protest. But we are not immune, and we must start taking virtue — responsible self-government — seriously. Again.

Make America Responsible Again.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags civilization, freedom, virtue

Thought

Wicksteed

The buyer and the seller have usually been opposed to one another, and the interplay of their rival interests has been regarded as the source of the phenomena of the market. But we shall try to go below this. The obvious and universally recognised fact that the same man may be a buyer under one set of circumstances, or a seller under another, and that even in the same market a man who would buy if prices were low may sell if prices are high, will lead us to a decisive simplification of the theory of markets, based on the consideration of buyers and sellers as a homogeneous group arranged and graduated on a single principle.
Philip Henry Wicksteed, The Common Sense of Political Economy (1910), Introduction.

Today

An Uprising

Budapest (10/23/1956) — The Hungarian Uprising begins when a delegation of students enter the building of Magyar Rádió to broadcast their demands for political and economic reforms to civil society, but are detained by security guards.

crime and punishment fraud national politics & policies

Fraud’s a SNAP

Seattle, EBT, scam, welfare, crime, corruption

This may shock you . . . or not . . . but independent reporters led by Nick Shirley have confirmed that food-stamp fraud is rampant. At least it is in the streets of Seattle. Their work supplements a police investigation reported in October 2025.

One scheme involves fraudsters approaching “groups of unsheltered individuals . . . who had an EBT [electronic benefits transfer card] with money on it,” a Seattle police captain reported last year. They would “then take that person to a store with a shopping list.”

The fraudsters keep the goods for resale while paying the original card holder half the card value in cash. Alternatively, the fraudsters buy EBT cards at half-price directly from card holders.

Sometimes fraudsters let drug dealers know which persons living on the street have just gotten cash for their cards. The dealers then swarm into a homeless camps to sell their wares.

Shirley’s work shows that although police arrests of eleven of the scammers made a dent, the scams still go on — in Seattle and doubtless many other cities.

He found that local store clerks proved willing to adjust food prices charged to match the balance on an EBT card, say $120. Then, if all goes “well,” the clerk and the fraudster presumably split the take.

Shirley’s video doesn’t document the last part of the process because, to avoid being complicit in the scam, he kept entering a false PIN.

Welfare fraud is, apparently, easy to perpetrate, hard to patrol.

It used to be understood that the only way to distribute general benefits to the poor was to refuse to make it easy to receive, and to administer such programs as locally as possible. Incentives for bureaucrats and disincentives for abusers must always be made painfully clear. And punishments swift.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags corruption, crime, EBT, scam, Seattle, welfare

Thought

F. A. Hayek

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means as De Tocqueville describes it, ‘a new form of servitude.’
F. A. Hayek, “Individualism: True and False” (1945), in Individualism and Economic Order (1948).

Today

Sartre’s Nobel

On October 22, 1964, philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but turned down the honor — establishing a precedent that should have been followed by numerous Peace Prize winners, including Barack Obama and the European Union.

Sartre rejected the award on account of having rejected previous honors. In this he was not dissimilar from philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) who refused many doctorates late in life, on the grounds that such awards did an old man no good, and perhaps because he was a cantankerous old coot — a judgment that surely applied also to the later French philosopher.

Sartre is best known for his novel Nausea (1938), his play No Exit (1944) and his treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943). One of his main themes was freedom, a concept better explored at the fundamental level of the individual human being than politically, since he become a “Marxist” of sorts . . . the precise nature of which he elaborated in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). He failed to complete his tetralogy of novels, Roads to Freedom, never finishing the final volume.

ideological culture

France’s New Look

One Parisian woman has become the poster child for French politics. Antifa and Middle Eastern and African Muslims are rioting in the streets — burning, stealing, breaking, bullying, and worse — presenting us with the full panoply of protest gone completely wrong.

A distraught woman pled with masked men not to destroy a store, identified by reporters (not memesters) as a Franprix supermarket on Rue du Faubourg du Temple. “Why are you doing this?” she demanded, then screamed “this is not the cause!”

All for naught. The rioters brushed past her, breaking windows, looting, committing mayhem.

The mob cheered.

Her look — of bewilderment and betrayal — has become the new face of France. FAFO, in French fashion.

The “FA” part of the principle is what most of the “meme”-based commentary has been about. The French elites and their rah-rah brigades on the far left — or merely in the “liberal” class — have pushed a thousand bad policies, none worse than allowing refugees to swamp the country, placing them on the dole, while demanding of them nothing in return: no loyalty; no appreciation; not even civility.

A breeding ground for a revolt of the imported masses.

In sum: the elitist French political and liberal classes “effed around” and “found out”: FAFO in its purest political form. President Macron himself asked “how can French people do this to France?” as if the rioters think of themselves as “French.”

“Inclusion” in its most absurd form.

This woman, and so many like her, have supported extraordinarily foolish policies for decades, presumably because it makes them “feel good” and “look good.” You know, “morally,” pharisaically.

But the current look? Bafflement.

Yes, a million French women can be wrong.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags FAFO, immigration, Paris, riots

Thought

Wicksteed

A man once boasted that he had been offered the whole site of Chicago for an old pair of boots, and when asked why he did not close with the offer, replied, “I didn’t have the boots.” The conditions, therefore, for mutually advantageous direct exchange are that two men, who have access to each other, should differ in their estimates of the marginal significances of some two commodities, and that each should possess a supply of that commodity which he relatively underestimates.
Philip Henry Wicksteed, The Common Sense of Political Economy (1910), fourth chapter.

Thought

George Eliot

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
Mary Ann Evans, writing under her pen name “George Eliot,” Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Ch. 4 (1879).

Today

Harding Spoke Out

On October 21, 1921, President Warren G. Harding delivered the first speech by a sitting U.S. President against lynching in the deep South.