Monthly Archives: September 2017

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

Democrat’s Self Sabotage

Mark Lilla is a committed  Democrat who admonishes his party for its descent into Identity Politics in The Once and Future Liberal- After Identity Politics   The only adversary left is ourselves. And we have mastered the art of self-sabotage. At a

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The New Coke Policy

From National Review Kevin Williamson writes McHealthcare Deluxe- The Affordable Care Act is a failed political product. But whatever else you can say about the politics of health insurance, it remains the fact that the ACA does not work. Even if it

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Failing Better

One of the greatest advantages of market solutions is not that it always picks better solutions, but that it recognizes failures quicker and better. The opposite happens in government. Self serving bureaucracies institutionalize failures. Instead of admitting failure and redeploying assets into better and different solutions we institutionalize failures and increase their funding.

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Global Greening

from National Review, Matt Ridley: Climate Change’s Rational Optimist “This is a huge global phenomenon, which is bringing enormous financial benefits to agriculture,” Ridley told me. “That means we have a genuine benefit to carbon dioxide that surely must be taken

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Rocket Man and the NFL

I feel like I am channeling my dad when I say that the more I read and think I know, the less I understand what is going on, especially in politics. I have not bought into the defenders of Trump

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True Tax Reform

from An Anti-Growth Tax Cut by Kevin Williamson in The National Review In economic terms, there are two things going on with those revenue and deficit numbers. One is the structural issue, i.e., tax policy, spending, etc. The other is

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Doubling Down on A Losing Strategy

From Kimberly Strassel at The Wall Street Journal,   Here’s What Really Happened to Hillary Hillary’s take on “What Happened” has unsurprisingly unleashed another round of analysis about her mistakes—Wisconsin, deplorables, email. These sorts of detailed postmortems of failed campaigns are

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Taboo vs Argument

Mark Lilla is a committed  Democrat who admonishes his party for the its descent into Identity Politics in The Once and Future Liberal- After Identity Politics  What replaces argument, then, is taboo. At times our more privileged campuses can seem stuck

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Cherry Picking Tax Policies

from Kevin Williamson at National Review, The U.S. Is Not the Highest-Taxed Nation in the World The problem for the Left is that Democrats cannot, under most circumstances, tell the truth about U.S. taxes, either, because the American middle class does

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Creating Your New Master

Why Medicare for All Would Damage our Republic by Jay Cost at National Review This is a very diverse array of policies, but they all exhibit a similar flaw. When the government wishes to accomplish some public purpose that it does

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The Quiet Resistence

from Victor Davis Hanson at National Review, Two Resistances Yet in contrast to the media-driven “Resistance,” there is a more authentic ongoing resistance that Trump himself capitalized on, but hardly originated. It is a pushback against the corporate and government conglomerate

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Politics and Profits

From Thomas Donlan At Barron’s, Trump’s CEOs: In the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time (I like the title in the print edition better, There’s No Profit in Politics) Business executives as a group rarely show the kind of sophistication that the

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Policy Matters

From Kimberly Strassel at The Wall Street Journal,   Here’s What Really Happened to Hillary Mr. Sanders was an unexpected force in the primary, though mostly because he wasn’t Hillary. Sanders supporters resent this argument, and claim the only reason his

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Antifa Schmucks

from Jonah Goldberg at National Review The Idiot Boys of Antifa and the Alt-Right I don’t want to start cannibalizing my forthcoming book, but the simple fact is that most of these ideological rationalizations for why Antifa is so very different

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The Racial Hammer

From The Wall Street Journal, Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism by Shelby Steele Such people—and the American left generally—have a hunger for racism that is almost craven. The writer Walker Percy once wrote of the “sweetness at the

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Statutory vs Actual Tax Rates

from Kevin Williamson at National Review, The U.S. Is Not the Highest-Taxed Nation in the World We do have an extraordinarily high top corporate-tax rate — on paper, anyway. Our statutory top corporate rate is among the highest in the world,

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Limits of Government Power

Mark Lilla is a committed  Democrat who admonishes his party for the its descent into Identity Politics in The Once and Future Liberal- After Identity Politics  But every catechism tends over time to become rigid and formulaic, until it eventually becomes

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Sanctimonious Abuse of Power

from Kimberly Strassel at the WSJ, Comey’s Secret Power: Mr. Comey’s meddling has never seemed to stem from some hidden partisan impulse, but rather from an overweening self-righteousness. But power can be misused as much in the hands of the

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Over Emphasis on Ideas

from Jonah Goldberg at National Review The Idiot Boys of Antifa and the Alt-Right Intellectuals and ideologues of various stripes tend not to like these kinds of explanations, for the largely laudable reason that they make a living working with ideas

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Liberty and Unemployment

From Deirdre McCloskey in Reason Magazine, The Myth of Technological Unemployment Helping the poverty-stricken is laudable. But we can’t subsidize 1.7 million people a month. Nor is job retraining a good idea when directed from above: The wise heads in Washington

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