Monthly Archives: September 2014

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

The Authoritarian Defense

Kevin Williamson writes The Unmanageable Man in The National Review. Excerpt: The responsibility of conservatives is to draw ever nearer to reality. And one unpleasant aspect of our current reality is that the pain the Left is feeling as its planning ambitions

Read More

Authoritarian Posers of Capitalism

Joel Kotkin writes Choosing Fortune Over Freedom Excerpts: This is not surprising, given the rapid progress that country has made in recent years. China has expanded its share of global gross domestic product from 2 percent in 1995 to 12 percent in

Read More

Lessons Unwanted

Bret Stephens writes in The Wall Street Journal, Obama Needs to Call Bush Excerpts: Maybe President Obama also calls Mr. Bush every now and then, just to talk, and one day we’ll find out about it. But I suspect not.

Read More

Cherry-picking CEO Data

Economist Mark Perry writes in Carpe Diem When we consider all US CEOs and all US workers, the ‘CEO-to-worker pay ratio’ falls from 331:1 to below 4:1 Excerpts: The AFL-CIO is comparing: a) the average salary of a small sample (350)

Read More

Squandered Opportunities

Bret Stephens writes The Meltdown in the September Commentary. Excerpts: If anything, the international situation Obama faced when he assumed the presidency was, in many respects, relatively auspicious. Despite the financial crisis and the recession that followed, never since John F. Kennedy

Read More

The Planner’s Pretense

Kevin Williamson writes The Unmanageable Man in The National Review. Excerpt: The scientific study of complex adaptive systems such as markets has taken Ludwig von Mises’s philosophical critique of central planning and developed a formidable body of knowledge that suggests

Read More

Piketty’s Absence of Historical Context

Jonah Goldberg writes Mr. Piketty’s Big Book of Marxiness in the July issue of Commentary. Excerpt: Of course, America has poor people, though it has relatively few who go hungry because capitalism has failed them. The average poor person in America, in

Read More

Nasty Little Tyrants

From National Review, Robert Kennedy Jr., Aspiring Tyrant by Charles Cooke Excerpts: Those who contend that global warming “does not exist,” Kennedy claimed, are guilty of “a criminal offense — and they ought to be serving time for it.” Kennedy’s

Read More

Raising the Price of Exit

from Scott Grannis from Calafia Beach Pundit, Obama’s attempt to block tax inversion is a mistake; As the WSJ article notes, it’s still questionable whether the administration has the authority to block inversions via executive order. But in the meantime,

Read More

Raising Incomes vs Reducing Inequality

Kevin Williamson writes What to Do About Wages in The National Review. Excerpts: Inequality as such should be a complete non-issue. It is utterly meaningless as a measure of anybody’s real-world standard of living or of national prosperity. If real wages for

Read More

Irrational Foundations

From The Weekly Standard, The Party of Reason, by Jeff Bergner Excerpt: We will see a pattern. In each case, Democratic thinking will unfold in three stages: (1) Policy is predicated on reality as one wishes it to be, not

Read More

A Matter of Judgment

from The Unwisdom of Barak Obama from the Wall Street Journal by Peggy Noonan: Mr. Obama can see the trees, name their genus and species, judge their age and describe their color. He absorbs data. But he consistently misses the

Read More

Beyond Containment

“But there was also a big difference here. Reagan’s arms buildup, together with his refusal to accept the Brezhnev Doctrine of “what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is up for grabs,” signified a return to containment and deterrence. Bush,

Read More

Ambitious Failure

from National Review, Theodore Dalrymple writes Islam’s Nightclub Brawl to explain why such violent jihadists (interesting that spell check for jihadists comes up ‘sadists’) come from Britain. Excerpts: Are there more British jihadis, for example, because the condition of Muslims in Britain

Read More

Inexperienced Foreign Policy Advisors

Bret Stephens writes The Meltdown in the September Commentary. Excerpts: None of these fiascos— for brevity’s sake, I’m deliberately setting to one side the illusory pivot to Asia, the misbegotten Russian Reset, the mishandled Palestinian–Israeli talks, the stillborn Geneva conferences on Syria,

Read More

Is Inequality a Cause or an Effect?

Kevin Williamson writes What to Do About Wages in The National Review. Excerpts: The Left sees inequality as a cause of economic facts, not an effect of them. As EPI sees things, inequality is an independent actor, a motive force

Read More

Ideological Pathology

From Daniel Greenfield in Sultan Knish, The Headchopper Next Door: It’s easy to dismiss a small enough religion as a cult because its leader sleeps with young girls and its members are willing to kill for him. But when the

Read More

A More Dangerous Foe

A common question from my conservative friends is why Jews vote so overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party. Jews voted for Obama with nearly 80% of the vote and his less than warm reception to Israel baffles many observers. One reason

Read More

Why Tax Cuts are Disproportionate

Kevin Williamson writes Blue Voodoo in National Review. Excerpts:  The cartoon version of conservative economic thinking — that we should subsidize gazillionaires in order to create work opportunities for yacht painters, monocle polishers, and truffle graters — is fundamentally at

Read More