Monthly Archives: August 2018

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

Keeping the Mob at Bay

“If Wyoming has to do things the same way as New Jersey, then the battle over federal power — and especially the metastatic power of the ever-more-princely presidency — must be understood by partisans and culture warriors as existential. That, and not the endangered state of what remains of American federalism, is what most deeply ails the body politic.”

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The Political Mirror

“The financial crisis revealed a horrific meatloaf of bad policy and bad actors, but it does not excuse an individual for refusing to keep personal financial commitments.”

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Liberalism vs Democracy

“In a liberal democracy, the role of liberalism very often is to prevent democracy from doing what democracy wants to do — liberalism is the grown-up who tells democracy, “No.”

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Imperfect Democracy Reigns Supreme

The frustration of our democracy has many reformers wishing for a benevolent dictator. The problem is that when they cease being benevolent, they remain a dictator.

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A Different Game

We are witnessing a similar shift under Trump. The divide is not Democrat or Republican; they are merely marketing organizations for similar interests. The parties have become addicted to their power not their ideology. As Nancy Pelosi admonishes her candidates, “Just win.”

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Sore Losers .

“It’s true that the Electoral College works against a party whose voters are geographically and demographically clustered. For the Framers, that was a feature, not a bug. They feared domination by a concentrated bloc of voters with no broad support across the country.”

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Natural and Positive Rights

Material rights to products and  service that must be provided and paid for by others is inevitably oppressive and usually counterproductive.  The secret to Hong Kong’s miraculous growth was the priority of economic growth over social spending. The economic growth provided the means for greater social spending. Over time if you give priority to growth over social spending you will end up with more of both, and a healthier and more sustainable economy.

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The Greater Threat to Democracy

“The greatest factor in hastening the end of American-style democracy over the past 125 years (at least) has been increasing government centralization and administrative rule.”

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Who Is Really Hostile to Free Speech?

The left has exhibited far more hostility to free speech than Trump has ever remotely considered.

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The Greater Threat to Free Speech

“Who today indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media? Again, President Trump has said some ill-advised things on this score. But most of our authors acknowledge, quietly, that he hasn’t actually acted on any of it. Meanwhile, the Left openly argues against, and sometimes actively disrupts, their opponents’ right to assemble. “

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Centralized Failure

“Right now, both parties are full of people who think this country can be run by a relative handful of people — or even one person – sitting in Washington. They think they’re smarter than the market or the people closest to the problems on the ground. “

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JG on Character

“…and saying “character matters” undermines Donald Trump even though character doesn’t matter and even if it did, he’s got character out the ying yang.”

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Elizabeth Warren’s Lunacy

Warren shows no understanding of what profit is.  It is the signal that determines the best allocation of resources.  The better ideas attract the most capital through the profit incentive. Profit is a byproduct of innovation and ideas.  Ms. Warren would substitute this with a government bureaucracy who will determine the proper allocation of resources.  The would not only squelch economic growth and innovation, it would increase corruption exponentially as businesses curried political rather than consumer approval.  Startups would head overseas.

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Is Capitalism Natural?

By acknowledging human flaws and addressing them, conservatives permit human potential to flourish.  By seeking a non existent perfection socialists require central control and power that frustrates human potential and growth.

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Marketization

“What do you imagine would happen to the price of a Honda Civic if the federal government gave every young person in the country ten grand and a subsidized loan that could only be used for the purchase of a Honda Civic? “

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Branded Ignorance

“..a Stanford graduate now usually knows less history than his Hillsdale counterpart. A successful self-made businessman can know a lot more about the economy than does a Harvard M.B.A., and a state-college graduate is likely to have better ethical bearings that the Clintons with their Yale Law degrees.”

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Corruption and Tariffs

“The larger the state is, the more capable it is of picking winners and losers, and the more aggressively it will be lobbied to do so in a particular way. And while it is easily misunderstood in this age of the modern regulatory state, the tariff is perhaps the earliest example of big government — the state intervenes in otherwise free markets to bring about a result it finds socially or economically desirable. “

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Democracy and Populism

From the first progressive era the left has preached democracy but delivered a credentialed new aristocracy with increasing contempt for the voters who do not acquiesce. It is called democracy when the mass abides the elite, populism when they do not.

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The One Word Solution

Socialism is the Left’s Version of Libertarianism

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Human Rights

“Who produces, possibly coercively and forcibly, the goods and services that are considered “human rights”?”

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