Frias on RI’s History of Voter Fraud

Steven Frias had another must-read article in the Providence Journal, earlier this week, detailing the longevity of the problems that have brought Rhode Island to its current condition — this time, voter fraud:

In the 1938 election, Rhode Island experienced it on a massive scale. A bipartisan legislative committee investigated the elections in Pawtucket and Central Falls. The committee unanimously determined that over 10 percent of the votes cast in these two communities were irregular and that hundreds of votes had been cast by floaters. In four Pawtucket precincts, there were more ballots cast than there were eligible voters. Voter fraud was also uncovered in North Providence and in the 13th Ward of Providence, which encompasses the Federal Hill neighborhood.

What followed appears to have been an example of “elect your savior” in the person of a conspiring attorney general.

Eventually, Rhode Islanders became so fed up with the fraud that they insisted on signature verification. Anybody who’s voted recently knows how weak of a protection that really is.

In our digital age, requiring a photo ID is neither overly burdensome nor, as the history shows, unwarranted.

The Revolution in Ukraine

Two weeks ago the question was how far would the government go beyond Russian-style anti-protest laws in restricting the civil liberties of the people, in order to protect the economic arrangements of a few. We learned at the start of this week that the Ukrainian government then in place was willing to murder its own citizens, rather than let them have the same options for making their way in the world that an average European has. This is the attitude of an unfree government, one that believes that people are disposable when they impede government priorities.

Because the Ukrainian people are standing firm, they are taking meaningful and necessary steps to show their government and the world that it is government that becomes disposable, once it becomes harmful to its citizens, and the people rise up to demand that it change its priorities as a result. Free people everywhere have common cause with those seeking freedom in Ukraine — literally today — to help ensure that the government there respects this reality, as Ukraine attempts to move forward.

Living Through an Echo of History

I have a somewhat miraculous view of literature. It seems more often than not to be the case that when I reach into the many boxes of books that I’ve inherited and pick out something to read, almost at random, it has a direct relevance to things I’d already been thinking about.

This time, it’s Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941). Fewer than 100 pages in, I’ve already got notes for myriad essays scribbled in the margins, but the following quotation, I just had to share. It’s actually something Fromm quotes from Jacob Salwyn Schapiro’s doctoral dissertation Social reform and the Reformation (1909).

The time period described is the later part of the Middle Ages, as medieval society gave way:

Notwithstanding these evidences of prosperity, the condition of the peasantry was rapidly deteriorating. At the beginning of the sixteenth century very few indeed were independent proprietors of the land they cultivated, with representation in the local diets, which in the Middle Ages was a sign of class independence and equality. The vast majority were Hoerige, a class personally free but whose land was subject to dues, the individuals being liable to services according to agreement … It was the Hoerige who were the backbone of all the agrarian uprisings. This middle-class peasant, living in a semi-independent community near the estate of the lord, became aware that the increase of dues and services was transforming him into a state of practical serfdom, and the village common into a part of the lord’s manor.

Frankly, I don’t think I’ve read a better description of what’s happening right now in any modern punditry. All that’s required is to update the language and replace “Hoerige” with “productive class” and the lord with the government.

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust?

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I-it” relationship for an “I-thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

— From “Letter from Birmingham Jail“, by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Frias Mainly Describes What’s Now Entrenched

Put Steve Frias’s Providence Journal op-ed in the “must read” category. Reviewing a couple hundred years of economic history sheds some surprisingly relevant light on the assumptions under which our state operates.

One such assumption is that our woes are a consequence of the decline of manufacturing here and in general. On the general side, it’s not true that U.S. manufacturing has declined, and a declining global market share needn’t affect a state as small as Rhode Island, if we were at the leading edge. Frias offers a clue as to why we’re not:

In the 19th century, because of the Industrial Revolution, Rhode Island’s economy grew at a rapid rate. The state’s economy was characterized by one historian as “a kind of manufacturer’s dreamland” where taxes were low, regulations were few, and labor was inexpensive.

Rhode Island’s manufacturing problem, then, has a lot to do with deliberate changes that made the state less attractive for it. The same problems — the difficulty of initiating and doing business here — also prevent Rhode Islanders from redefining the state along other industries. Consider:

In April 1946, RIPEC [reported] that Rhode Island had lost its tax advantage over other industrialized states such as Massachusetts. [Previously,] “a generally conservative attitude toward public expenditures, plus a relatively simple state government, produced a moderate state tax cost” … giving it a “rather substantial tax advantage” over most other industrialized states.

It’s possible to pump a lot of fog into economic debates, but Rhode Island does not have to lag the country in recovery. Our size does not dictate high costs for government. We’re not bound by an unhealthy tradition, inflicting hardship on our families, and we shouldn’t be cowed by assertions of “what Rhode Islanders believe” when we, as individuals, don’t actually believe it.

We are allowed to change this.

Cycles of Politics, Inevitable “Progress” or Something Else?

My initial instincts are to agree with the 2nd graf of Peter Kirsanow’s post up today at National Review Online

Obamacare is shaping up as the most visible domestic policy disaster in our lifetimes and Democrats/progressives will suffer a setback as a result, but conservatives would be mistaken to think that public backlash against Obamacare represents a durable realignment in public sentiment against big-government liberalism or that Democrats will suffer more than a temporary, shallow setback from the debacle.

…though not necessarily with every detail that follows (though they are definitely worth reading).

What do others think; too pessimistic or just right?

Timely Thoughts on Veteran’s Day

Even after 150 years, the Gettysburg Address refocuses our attention away from a president and toward those who’ve sacrificed for the cause of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

“Romans were blinded to what was happening to them by the very perfection of the material culture which they had created.”

Eileen Power on the Fall of Rome – Selections from Chapter 1 of Medieval People: The decline of Rome preceded and in some ways prepared the rise of the kingdoms and cultures which composed the medieval system….No observer should have failed to notice that the Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries was no […]

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