Monthly Archives: January 2017

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

The First Duty of Intelligent Men

The 24-hour news cycle and its ubiquitous media brings every detail of every issue and policy to us.  Debates limit responses to critical issues to two minutes. Congressional hearings for cabinet nominees are similarly limited.  This precious time is wasted

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Illiberal Democracy Preceded Trump

From my article today in American Thinker, Has America Become an Illiberal Democracy? Trump may exhibit authoritarian characteristics and Zakaria is correct is articulating the weakening of some of our restraints on majoritarian democracy, but he is late to the scene

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Hillary’s Loss Continued a Trend

from The City Journal, Trump and the American Divide by Victor Davis Hanson: Trump’s election underscored two other liberal miscalculations. First, Obama’s progressive agenda and cultural elitism prevailed not because of their ideological merits, as liberals believed, but because of his great

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Three Laws of Politics

from newly discovered blog Isegoria, Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics: Everyone is conservative about what he knows best. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. The simplest way to explain the

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The Most Destructive Form of Political Corruption

from The Worst Perversion, by Kevin Williamson at National Review: A liberal society with decent government requires that the pursuit of political power be insulated from the exercise of political power. That is why we have a Hatch Act and why

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Wait for the Second Act

Nor during the Age of Innovation have the poor gotten poorer, as people are always saying. On the contrary, the poor have been the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism. It is an irrefutable historical finding, obscured by the logical truth

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No Influence Left To Peddle

from The National Review, The Clinton Global Initiative’s Ignominious End by Jim Geraghty: Why would foreign governments suddenly lose interest in the charitable work the Clinton Foundation purported to do? They wouldn’t, unless the Clinton Foundation and CGI had existed

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The Trump Shift

From The Wall Street Journal, Trump May Herald a New Political Order by John Steele Gordon: So does Donald Trump’s stunning election herald something permanent—a shift akin to those brought by Jackson, Lincoln, McKinley and FDR? That’s a fair bet, considering

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Zakaria on Illiberal Democracy

An excellent summary of the difference between constitutional liberalism and democracy.

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The Great Progressive Fallacy

from Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek (highly recommended) , a quote from Robert Higgs: Nothing has done more to render modern economic theory a sterile and irrelevant exercise in autoeroticism than its practitioners’ obsession with mathematical, general-equilibrium models.  Not only

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Classical and Progressive Liberals

From a book review of Conserving America? by Patrick Deneen- review by Micah Medowcroft-  Trump Didn’t Kill Conservatism in The Wall Street Journal: The two dominant alternatives to this fixation on the present are progressivism’s focus on the future and what

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The Treason of the Clerisy

Yet in the late nineteenth century the artists and the intellectuals-the “clerisy,” as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and I call it-turned against liberal innovation. The treason of the clerisy led in the twentieth century to the pathologies of nationalism and socialism

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Palestinian Preference

from The Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens writes On Palestinian Statehood What about the interests of Palestinians? Aren’t they entitled to a state? Maybe. But are they more entitled to one than the Assamese, Basques, Baloch, Corsicans, Druze, Flemish, Kashmiris, Kurds,

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Clueless Victims

from Katherine Timpf at National Review, The Golden Globes Are Why Donald Trump Is Not Going Anywhere Streep actually had the nerve and naiveté to begin her speech by whining about how Hollywood is one of “the most vilified segments in

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The Difficulty of Measuring Inequality

from The Inequality Hype by Neil Gilbert in The American Interest: However as Richard Burkhauser pointed out in his presidential address to the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, the market income of a tax unit is a poor

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Identity Headwinds

Historians refer to the period between 1890 and 1920 and the Progressive Era, but the Democrats frequently and currently use ‘progressive’ as a prefix to ‘Democrat’.  Interviewed by Chis Matthews, candidate Hillary Clinton referred to herself as a Progressive Democrat

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Untying the Health Care Knot

Kevin Williamson puts some reality on the Health Care Issue: The Health-Care Double Bind in National Review The way to cut this Gordian knot is to treat insurance like insurance. Insurance is not a way to pre-pay for health care, though

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Mixed Feelings on Russian Hacking

We do not want Russian interference in our elections.  While the intention may be the same, there is a difference between screwing with the voting process itself and selectively hacking, and releasing private information.  The investigation seems focused on the

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When Debate is Worthless

from Declination: Do You Want to be Right, or True? Something changed over time. Call it maturity, or wisdom, or understanding of self. Or call it, as I do, a certain intellectual exhaustion. Whatever it is, I just stopped caring about

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Hollowed Out Parties

from John Hawkins, 20 Best Quotes of 2016 my favorite of the list:  “Disagreement often turns into dehumanization. Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples and judge ourselves by our best intentions.”– George W. Bush “If you don’t

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