Tag Archives

Archive of posts published in the tag: The Wall Street Journal

The Great Lie of American Politics

“But that’s the great lie of American politics (and of democracy at large): that the people cannot fail but can only be failed.”

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Marxian Anti-Semitism

“Democratic political leaders, who have credibility on elite campuses their Republican colleagues lack, have a duty to denounce these spineless university presidents and fomenters of anti-Israel bigotry. Jew-hatred among the cognoscenti has a history of spreading faster than anybody expected.”

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Gray Swans

Small firewalls that contained corrections were being dismantled, leading to larger, far more damaging crashes.  Part of this was the result of greater connections from travel and communications, but a great part is the result of central powers believing they can control macro markets when they cannot. There is just too much dispersed and unarticulated knowledge for anyone or any administrative bureaucracy to accomplish this.

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The Durham Report

“Likewise, we now know a lot of the Democrat congressmen on television were lying about information. They were fed falsehoods from the deep state and regurgitated them without basis on television. The entirety of the bureaucracy not just picked a partisan side but then weaponized their powers to undermine a President.”

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The Fourth Branch of Government

“During my 12 years in government I often saw career bureaucrats push their preferred policy passions irrespective of agencies’ rules, federal regulations or the law.”

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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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Seduced by Numbers

“Science cannot tell us how to value things,” Ms. Thompson says. “The idea of ‘following the science’ is meaningless.”

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Guns and Shooters

we must decide if we prefer criminal justice over social justice.  It is time to place concern for the victims, which are also disproportionately minorities, over concern for the perpetrators.

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Poetic Disinformation

Even the most educated and credentialed are subject to cognitive biases, and commitment to a preferred narrative over objective facts.

This is especially true for a government run Ministry of Truth, no matter what you decide to call it.

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Coverage of Anti-Semitism

“After a white-nationalist attack, the media devote considerable resources to tracing the attacker’s ideas and search history along the ideological continuum and tarring the Republican Party with “complicity” in his crimes. After an Islamist attack, the imperative is not to establish politicians’ complicity with the criminal, but to avoid any inquiry that might amount to “Islamophobia.””

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The Contempt Speech

“A president shouting that 52 senators and millions of Americans are racist unless he gets whatever he wants is proving exactly why the Framers built the Senate to check his power”

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Permanent Crisis

We need to realize that crisis are inevitable.  Ideologues will debate causes long after they pass, but it does not matter if the cause is excessive individualism, unfettered free markets, limited government, excessive government, globalism, the administrative state, or utopian socialism. Any theory of human action in a complex interrelated world will fail occasionally; but we fail a critical test when we equate the ‘failings’ of an ideology with the ‘failure’ of an ideology.  To understand our beliefs we need to know their limits.

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Vichy Capitalism

The regulatory burden rarely get the coverage of tax policy because it is complicated, hard to measure and reporters are lazy- yet the combination is the total friction cost on business.  Increasing the regulatory burden while stimulating the money supply may be the simplest and best definition of stagflation.

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The Mutated Rationale of the Administrative State

“Neither the inflation of the 1970s nor the transformation of America’s industrial heartland into its Rust Belt was inevitable, she argues. Both were direct, foreseeable consequences of short-sighted choices: demanding that monetary policy accommodate irresponsible fiscal policy, and labor and management agreeing to enrich one another by fleecing customers and shareholders ever more brazenly.”

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The Cost of Politicizing Science

“So those who believe in science as philosophy are increasingly estranged from science as an institution.”

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CRT as Racial Calvinism

“So critical race theory, protesting the old injustice, embraces its lie. This is not progress but revenge. The motive is not justice but payback, lex talionis—an understandable, if Balkan, impulse. Beware a hedgehog claiming the immunities of an innocent victim. Beware when victimhood is his One Big Thing.”

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Why CRT Is Doomed

“Hiring practices and workplaces should be fair and welcoming to all, employees say, but mandatory diversity training premised on the ubiquity of “unconscious racism” and “white fragility” is coercive and insulting.”

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The Sins of Others

Modern Critical Race Theory is sin with no redemption. Redemption of any sort would excise the political power from the movement. As it is practiced the movement depends more on appeasing white liberal elites than empowering Black individuals and communities.

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The Trouble With Narratives

As Mr. Scott put it, “It’s wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.” But this is precisely what narratives do—and in fact are meant to do.

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The Progressive Horsemen of Inequality

“We know public schools have failed because more than half of new students at community colleges require remedial courses in math, English or both. “

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