Happy Independence Day!

 

(Madeleine Stowe as Cora Munro in the great Last of the Mohicans, 1992, on the spirit of America and freedom:

They do not live their lives “by your leave”! They hack it out of the wilderness with their own two hands, burying their children along the way.

)

Stop Making More Jobs Illegal

Minimum-wage laws makes some jobs illegal—by definition, that’s what they do.  Every time you raise the forced minimum wage, you make more jobs illegal.

Given that so many people in the “Millenial” generation are basically permanently searching for work, I have a simple proposal:  Let’s stop making more jobs illegal.

Glass Half Full

From today’s e-mail newsletter from NRO’s Jim Geraghty:

From the way conservatives talk, one would never know that Republicans have 54 U.S. Senate seats, 246 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives (a majority that the party could easily hold for the next decade), 31 governors, and 68 out of 98 partisan state legislatures. Republicans control the governorship and both houses in 23 states; Democrats control only seven.

Abortions have dropped 12 percent nationwide since 2010 and are down in almost every state. The divorce rate declined significantly in the past generation and is staying down, while the marriage rate is up a bit. Slate concedes, “Most Americans have given up on achieving meaningful gun control in their lifetimes or in their grandchildren’s lifetimes.”

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

After they lost the Civil War and were forced to free the slaves, Democrats looked for other ways to bully black Americans.  A significant part of the history of gun-control laws in America is the history of Democrats trying to keep black people from defending themselves (see, e.g., “The Great Equalizer: Civil rights and the Second Amendment” and “Gun Control and Racism”).

Meriam Ibrahim, Sentenced to Death in Muslim Sudan for ‘Apostasy’, Free and Alive with Her Family in America

Sometimes the news that makes headlines is good news; sometimes this story has a happy ending:

“Meriam Ibrahim, Sudan Woman Who Faced Death Over Faith, Receives Hero’s Welcome In U.S.”

MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) — A Sudanese woman who refused to recant her Christian faith in the face of a death sentence arrived Thursday in the United States, where she was welcomed first by the mayor of Philadelphia as a “world freedom fighter” and later by cheering supporters waving American flags in New Hampshire.

NRA Video: More on the Ruling Class’s Double Standard on Guns

Yesterday’s Project Veritas video included a theme of elitism, a ruling class that thinks it can live by one set of rules while imposing other rules on the rest of us—“Guns for Me but Not for Thee”, as the title of John Fund’s column put it.

Apparently the NRA also released an ad yesterday on the same theme:

Liberty Defined, Briefly

A reader recently asked how I would define liberty.  Great question!

I claim no special expertise, but here is how I would outline the topic:  By “liberty” in a broad sense, I mean to comprehend at least three main categories: life, liberty in a narrower sense, and property.  (These three categories are probably not exhaustive, but that may depend on how narrowly you construe them.  They may also not be perfectly separable—if you think about them enough, they may inevitably blur into each other.  I think they are nevertheless useful categories.)

(See also rights to life, liberty, and property in our state constitutions.)

Happy Independence Day

Eleven score and fifteen years ago, a group of visionaries brought forth a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

We’re still here.  America is one of the oldest continuously functioning constitutional republics in the world, and she’s still a relatively free country, at least for now.  I think that’s something to celebrate.

As you celebrate today, here’s something to think about:  Why did we declare independence from George III?  Do you think we should have?  Why or why not? 

Separation of School and State

During my last semester of law school, we read an interesting case for Corporations class, A. P. Smith Mfg. Co. vs. Barlow, 13 N.J. 145, 98 A.2d 581.  In this 1953 decision by the New Jersey supreme court, the question (basically) was whether the corporation was allowed to donate money to charity, or whether donating would be an illegal waste of the shareholders’ money.  I won’t bore you with the legal details (the court found that the corporation was allowed to make such donations), but listen to some of the testimony in the case: