Monthly Archives: March 2017

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

Tax Psychotherapy

Another gem  from Kevin Williamson at National Review, Bad Medicine on ‘Carried Interest’ Nobody in Washington wants to face that particular angry mob of IRA investors with torches and pitchforks. What we are talking about is singling out a particular

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Lessons from the Health Plan Collapse

The depth of the loss is probably exaggerated.  It is still very early in the term of this administration and the humiliation will subside. Still, there are some harsh lessons that should be learned . President Trump may have found

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The Capitalist Paradox

from Kevin Williamson in National Review, The Social Machine: The people who have an explicit legal obligation to work not on our behalf but on behalf of their shareholders do a pretty good job of giving us what we want; the

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Unacceptable Decency

A gem from Kevin Williamson at National Review, Fake Hate Crimes: The Left desperately wants Americans to be indecent people who go around attacking Muslims and foreigners with funny names, but, by and large, we aren’t. Campus feminists desperately want

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The Bias of the Unthinkable

Pollster Nate Silver wrote a series of analysis on the polling and data pertaining the recent election.  The most recent is There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble: I recently reread James Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdom of Crowds” which, despite

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Origin of ‘Neoconservative’

from Word Games by Kevin Williamson in National Review “Neoconservative” was first brought to popular usage in the American context by left-wing intellectuals (the socialist Michael Harrington most prominent among them) to describe the thinking of a few critics of

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Health Care in Concrete

From Megan McArdle at Bloomberg, Republicans Should Kill Obamacare or Let it Die: Some forms of government policy are built of political concrete. Once done, they cannot be renovated, added to or even destroyed without immense cost; for that reason,

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No Train to Utopia

from Kevin Williamson in National Review, Plans, Trains, and Automobiles Trains are the preferred mode of transit if your ideal is central planning. Automobiles are the preferred mode of transit if your ideal is spontaneous order. It is in the nature

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True Health Care Reform

From Jeff Jacoby, Ditch Obamacare, and don’t stop there: “Republicans want medicine to be inexpensive and effective,” commentator Mark Humphrey writes, “but they do not want to repeal the morass of regulations that make it expensive and ineffective. Just so. But they

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The Mythical Will of the People

From Kevin Williamson at National Review, The Anglo-Americans: Populism takes a different view: At the center of its concerns is the people — or, increasingly, the People. If populism meant only being good at the real-world application of democratic politics, that

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The Intellectual Ghetto

Over the years, I discovered the difficulty of conversation with some people.  Interruptions can be annoying and often rude, but it often seems justified by a long-winded response or statement. We should avoid interruptions, but we should also avoid monopolizing

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Mock Liberalism

From Shelby Steele in the WSJ, The Exhaustion of American Liberalism White guilt is not actual guilt. Surely most whites are not assailed in the night by feelings of responsibility for America’s historical mistreatment of minorities. Moreover, all the actual

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The Trump Spread

It seems that politically the bar for Trump is set very low.  Democrats feel he is inexperienced, incompetent, and of such poor character that success is unimaginable. They remain unable to imagine his victory without nefarious influences. This makes them

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Ad Hominem Politics

A gem from Kevin Williamson at National Review, Fake Hate Crimes: The Left, particularly in the English-speaking world, has been in intellectual crisis since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Left’s last really big idea was Communism. (Bernie Sanders would

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The Theft of Moral Authority

From Shelby Steele in the WSJ, The Exhaustion of American Liberalism This was the circumstance in which innocence of America’s bigotries and dissociation from the American past became a currency of hardcore political power. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, good liberals both, pursued power by

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Passion and Conviction

The refusal of most of the liberal political and intellectual class to balance the frustrating against the optimistic was as much deference to the loudest voice in the room as anything else.

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Blaming the Victim

from The Jerusalem Post, HOW A PRO-PALESTINIAN AMERICAN REPORTER CHANGED HIS VIEWS ON ISRAEL AND THE CONFLICT by Hunter Stuart.: Writing about the attack with the detached analytical eye of a journalist, I was able to take the perspective that (I was

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Fake Hate

Another gem from Kevin Williamson at National Review, Fake Hate Crimes: Fake hate crimes committed by progressives are by this point so familiar that they are practically a cliché. When a Muslim woman at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette

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Groupthink and the Wisdom of Crowds

Pollster Nate Silver wrote a series of analysis on the polling and data pertaining the recent election.  The most recent is There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble: The share of total exposure8 for the top five news sources9 climbed from roughly 25

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Fragile Miracles

In National Review George Will reviews the new dystopian novel, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047, by Lionel Shriver Florence learns to appreciate “the miracle of civilization.” It is miraculous because “failure and decay were the world’s natural state. What was astonishing was

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