The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.
Fred Astaire
Chart of the Day
 |
| Via Casey Daily Dispatch |
Image of the Day
Remy Is Back: The Obama Administration Shakes It Off
Small Business vs. the Government Bullies
The SF Rent Control Progressives Lose One in Court: Levin, et. al., v. City and County of San Francisco
Rent control is an economically clueless, counterproductive policy that makes property rights merely nominal in nature. Below-market price renters in SF and other cities support populist politicians that make it all but impossible for owners to evict renters or to adjust rents to market prices. In SF, one of those pro-tenant policies was to require landlords to buy out the tenant's "rights" to stay with up to six-figure "relocation" fees just to withdraw the unit from the market. Pacific Legal Foundation won a federal district judgment on behalf of the Levins seeking to regain their property for family and friends without paying a huge legal extortion fee.
The Second Amendment and Well-Regulated Militia
It simply doesn't occur to many people nowadays that government could be the source not only of massive economic ills but of human deaths on a scale dwarfing the deaths caused by the worst individual psychopaths. The number of murders attributable to governments around the world in the 20th century, including those resulting from government-caused famines in places such as the Ukraine and Communist China, is estimated to exceed 260 million. Of this total, Communist China is responsible for more than 76 million, the Soviet Union for almost 62 million, and Nazi Germany for almost 21 million (R.J. Rummel, Death By Government [New Brunswick, N.J., Transaction Publishers, 1994], note 1). Of particular note, approximately 2 million of the murders committed by Nazi Germany were in the form of mass shootings, similar in nature to those in Aurora and Oak Creek, but performed on a scale commensurate with the size of military units. - George ReismanNow really, otherwise intelligent people seem to regard the wording of the Second Amendment as an anachronism, as providing a restriction against people to own arms for their own individual purposes: self-defense, hunting, sport, etc., as well as for community defense. In fact, there were separate collective stores of arms and munitions for citizens who, for financial reasons, could not afford their own but were expected to contribute to common defense. Britain knew that their standing occupational army would be outnumbered by the armed colonists which is specifically why they tried to regulate gunpowder going into the colonies and went after arms and munition depots and arsenals:
As the war went on, the British always remembered that without gun control, they could never control America. In 1777, with British victory seeming likely, Colonial Undersecretary William Knox drafted a plan entitled “What Is Fit to Be Done with America?” To ensure that there would be no future rebellions, “[t]he Militia Laws should be repealed and none suffered to be re-enacted, & the Arms of all the People should be taken away, . . . nor should any Foundery or manufactuary of Arms, Gunpowder, or Warlike Stores, be ever suffered in America, nor should any Gunpowder, Lead, Arms or Ordnance be imported into it without Licence . . . .”
To the Americans of the Revolution and the Founding Era, the theory of some late-20th Century courts that the Second Amendment is a “collective right” and not an “individual right” might have seemed incomprehensible. The Americans owned guns individually, in their homes. They owned guns collectively, in their town armories and powder houses. They would not allow the British to confiscate their individual arms, nor their collective arms; and when the British tried to do both, the Revolution began. The Americans used their individual arms and their collective arms to fight against the confiscation of any arms. Americans fought to provide themselves a government that would never perpetrate the abuses that had provoked the Revolution.Obviously a State that could define away militias and their access to individual/collective means of self- and/or common defense would be no better than the hated Redcoats they had just overthrown. Whether the State is in London or even Washington DC, it is impossible to believe that liberated Americans would have replaced one remote centralized government for another, to define away the possibility of rebellion or revolt. The colonists had owned their own weapons through their history. This was an individual right which included common defense as a relevant responsibility and duty. And whether you are looking at heavily armed SWAT teams invading the wrong house or the government systematically killing its own citizens without due process: make no mistake: the State has a monopoly on force, and the State is as serious a violent threat as any citizen it claims to prevent us from.
Proposals
On Swerving the Proposal-Expecting Girlfriend...
Political Cartoon
 |
| Courtesy of the original artist via IPI |
 |
| Courtesy of Glenn McCoy via Townhall |
Linda Ronstadt, "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me". What I remember most about the song is my Navy boss' daughter kept replaying the song to the point it was driving him crazy....
