God knows, we love a law. So let’s have one. Take bike helmets, please. Situation: kids ride bikes, kids fall off bikes. kids hit head on pavement, get concussion, die or worse. This is Oak Park. It can happen here, but it must not happen here, let’s forbid it. Pass a law. Is that simple enough for you?

Some say it won’t be enforced, this new law condemning parents to community service (watching bike racks in shifts, like outside the old Ridgeland Pool door, lest they be ripped off, for instance):

. . . the revised ordinance eliminates the fine and replaces it with possible community service for the parent if they cannot provide proof they [he or she, including single moms or dads already
working two or more jobs?] have acquired a helmet for their kid.

So what? It won’t be enforced:

The chances of…

The old way, letting the priest do what he has to do while I meditate and commune, privately. It’s the nearest thing to heresy you can come these days. But it’s that or I lose it as far as Catholic practice and belief are concerned.

Too much going on at today’s mass: priest in my face all the time, mumbling or orating, performing, always as if I had no resources and he alone could provide them for me. Ditto the various songsters with hand raised at prescribed moments, as if hailing a taxi, and announcers, directors of all things worshipful or presumably so. I tune it out, reading St. Paul or other New Testament or Psalms or religious verse.

Currently St. Paul in a little volume from the Daughters of Same book store on Mich. Ave., where today I saw he told Timothy that we are citizens of heaven and…

Sunday Dec. 8 at John and Mary Howell’s house, 644 S. Grove (NE corner Jackson), 2-5.

Dan Proft, who was born in Oak Park, visits at the Oak Park Republican holiday party. He’s an entrepreneur, writer, former Republican candidate for Governor, and radio talk show host for WLS in Chicago, where he co-hosts with Bruce Wolf on weekday mornings, 5-9.

He also works as a Senior Fellow at the Illinois Policy Institute, a free market think tank in Chicago, and serves on the boards of two non-profits — the Disabled Patriot Fund, that provides assistance to Illinois military families, and Freedom to Learn-Illinois, that “supports all forms of parental choice in education, with a particular emphasis on scholarships and vouchers that aid low-income and working class families.”

On top of all that, and topping it, he says, he’s “an aspiring basketball coach.”

A Northwestern graduate, he has…

Free-market thinking seems to have got its start not with Adam Smith and his fellow Scots but with Dominicans and Jesuits at the U. of Salamanca in the 15^th century.

Just price? The market decides that, etc. Such stuff does the social justice mantra in, or defines it in ways the world doth not dream of in these post-Marxist days . . .

Jesus Huerta de Soto has good material at Mises.com:

We stand for free trade and sound money; against confiscatory taxation and the oppression of collectivists; and for individual autonomy against dictators, bullies and even the tempers of momentary majorities.

“So does this have anything to do with the Jesuit Luis de Molina?” asked Penny Ziemer Ford in reply to my Facebook posting.

Yes indeed.  Consider this from the Acton Institute

Tom Cross, running hard for treasurer, sends on a link to the Northwest Herald, all about the pension bill just passed, where we read:

If the pension reform bill passed Tuesday by the Illinois General Assembly was a first step in a series of reform measures still to come, wed hail it as a small victory for taxpayers and the state.

Unfortunately, we fear that in the minds of Gov. Pat Quinn, Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton, this weeks reform effort is the only step, which it cannot be if Illinois is to right its fiscal ship….

I catch the drift and like it, but haven’t time to register as a signed and sealed reader, which you can do for more of this. Sorry.