Category Archives

Archive of posts published in the category: Uncategorized

The Coolidge Tax Cuts

“Thus, total individual tax receipts ballooned by 70% from 1924 to 1928; and, throughout the 1920s, the share of income taxes paid by earners of over $100,000 a year doubled. Meanwhile, Coolidge held spending constant, allowing him to eliminate nearly a quarter of the national debt and leave it fully 29% smaller than it was when Harding took office.”

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The Gilded Myth

While the period of industrial expansion did create both economic and political dislocations, the benefits were often overlooked in our history.  The restraint on concentrations of political power in our constitution applied largely to economic power in an agrarian economy but this diverged in the industrial era.  The great dilemma of the progressives was how to address the concentrations of economic power without losing the restraints on the concentration of political power.

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You Have a Choice Until You Don’t

If we do not do something about our national finances, then we will reach a point at which the debt ceiling is no longer a matter of congressional action but a matter of what the credit markets are willing to bear.”

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Stability is Boring

“The free world isn’t free because it is rich — it is rich because it is free. Freedom is not only a moral good but also a practical one: Because we have a system that enables us to fail quickly and fail cheaply, we can try many different approaches to social and material problems, throwing everything we have at them and seeing what works. Authoritarian societies, in contrast, have trouble adapting to fluid conditions, often discomfited by problems that cannot be solved with bayonets.”

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Preventing Putins

“What liberal societies have is not better men — it is independent courts, a free press, the rule of law, checks and balances, democratic accountability, competitive elections, powerful private institutions, and vibrant civic life. There have been some men of remarkably low character elected to the American presidency, but the American system has limited the damage they could do.”

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Perpetuating Racism

We are all the same because we are all different. Condoleeza Rice summarized it brilliantly, “Black people are not perpetual victims and White people are not perpetually guilty”.

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The Limits of Federalism

“The kind of federalism the founders espoused was not a freewheeling endorsement of state sovereignty — they had seen how dreadful the results of that might be — but a federalism that restrained power where they had seen its worst abuses: in the states. As Hamilton would write in Federalist 15, “[w]hy has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.” It is such constraint that requires not solely federalism, but a nation.”

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Addiction to Entitlements

The lesson- entitlement programs are essentially irreversible and very difficult to contain.  We should be very cautious about starting any new program no matter how small, fighting the urge as Daniel Henninger framed it “that any tear in the social fabric should be mended with permanent entitlements or subsidies”

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The Twentieth Century Challenge to Enlightenment Individualism

Man’s collective identity was expressed politically in socialist ideologies and economically in corporate structures.  Technical advances empowered the collective, rendering the morality and individual prudence ill prepared to contain.

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Woke Illiterates

“There is no shortage of books about slavery or America’s founding, and none of them have been written by Ms. Hannah-Jones. To what, other than her race and politics, does she owe all this deference?”

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Trust Evidence, Not People

“You consider their motivations, their ideological biases and their conflicts of interest. You interrogate their advice, and weigh it against that of their critics. You exercise diligence. You ask questions. You trust in evidence, not in people. You think for yourself.”

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Social Media Bypasses Important Mediating Institutions

“We need mediating institutions, because human beings are capable of extraordinarily evil things and very much prone to banal evil and petty corruption — and easily seduced by the crude stimulation of mere novelty.”

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Political Thoughts 2021 03 24

Big ideas have big consequences: when you eat like an elephant, you shit like an elephant. This is true in the corporate world where the price of failure is very high.  It is far more dangerous in politics when these ideas are enacted by people with no skin in the game and very little accountability.

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Woke is a Cult

“Woe betide the working-class kid who arrives in college and uses Latino instead of “Latinx,” or who stumbles conjugating verbs because a classmate prefers to use the pronouns they/them. Fluency in woke is an effective class marker and key for these princelings to retain status in university and beyond. “

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The Electoral College Saves the Day

The left that so opposed the Electoral College in 2016 should appreciate its genius today. They should also appreciate the nature of federalism with state and local governments that are not beholden to the president.  The framers had a realistic view of human nature that they should not be trusted with concentrated power. It was as if they understood the possibility that just occurred.

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The Books of 2020

As a rule of thumb I lean towards volumes that are at least 20 years old- if they are still in demand today they must have some staying power. I always find a few volumes that I have read before.  There is usually much to be gained from the second reading.

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Trump Clickbait

Trump will not go away because 1) despite his flaws he reaches a demographic no one else reaches and 2) the left will not want to give up the lucre of Trump click-bait.

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Conservative Principles and the French Revolution

The monumental failures of the French Revolution illuminated the importance of  essential conservative principles.

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Temperamental vs Classical Conservatism

“One of the paradoxes of American conservatism is that one of the things American conservatives seek to conserve is American liberalism, which is rooted in the Anglo–Protestant liberalism of Locke, Smith, et al. “

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If Trump Wins

The illiberal politically correct, identity politics, cancel culture was behind his first success and these forces only seem to have become worse. You do not persuade just because you have silenced someone, and the voting booth is the ultimate safe space. Political power requires the building of coalitions; identity politics is the opposite.

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