Monthly Archives: September 2021

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

Political Observations 2021 09 29

Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican you cannot incite a mob and expect to control it for long. The French learned this long ago. 

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A Reasonable Use of Liberty

The government or the politicians who seek the power of government tend to promise benefits without paying for them.  When there is an eviction moratorium what happens to the landlord? When we forgive college debt or any other debt who makes up the shortfall?  When the minimum wage is raised where does this increase come from?  We pretend either the shortfall magically appears or worse, it comes out of the pockets of evil greedy people who deserve to be shorted.

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The Forgottten Man and Civil Liberty

“Now if I have set this idea before you with any distinctness and success, you see that civil liberty consists of a set of civil institutions and laws which are arranged to act as impersonally as possible. It does not consist in majority rule or in universal suffrage or in elective systems at all. These are devices which are good or better just in the degree in which they secure liberty.”

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An Alliance of Victims and Experts

“That is, the experts are not always disinterested, and they sometimes use their powerful positions to find ways to avoid the consequences of their own innovations. Court-ordered busing to achieve school integration, for example, involved many children, but few whose parents were the judges, lawyers, and activists who promoted this remedy.”

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The Risk of Historical Determinism

The evolution of philosophy document so well in The Tyranny of Reason by Yuval Levin brought the dream of scientific reason to the social realm, expressed by Hegel that influenced Marx, the communists, and the fascists and to a much lesser extent, the progressives. It is expressed innocently as the arc of history or the right side of history.  Darwin provided the link from science to society, though he should not be held accountable for those who so bastardized his work. The ‘inevitability’ of history provided cover for the most brutal regimes of the last century.

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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 Dignity of the Destitute

“Hopkins much preferred giving straight cash, even if the reliefer used it for tobacco or liquor; on the whole, he felt, more damage was done to the human spirit by loss of choice than by loss of vitamins.”

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The Forgotten Men

For FDR the ‘Forgotten Man’ was the victim of an unfair society left behind in the capitalist economy. Only a robust central government had the power to right this wrong. For William Sumner the ‘Forgotten Man’ was one who would be required to ultimately pay for it.

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The Liberal Q-Anon

“A note to our progressive friends: This is your version of Q-Anon — falling for obvious, ridiculous lies because you want to believe the worst about people you hate.”

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