From National Affairs George Will writes The Limits of Majority Rule. It is an excellent summary of the history of the court as it has moved from judicial review to activism. The success of Progressivism has hinged on the court
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From Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (published in 1840): Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its
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From The Transformation of Economics by Richard Vedder in The Wall Street Journal: Economics as ideology in camouflage. Economists who achieve fame for genuine intellectual insights, like Paul Krugman, sometimes then morph into ideologues—predominantly although not exclusively on the left. The leftish domination
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The supremacy of the written law holding all branches of government accountable was as significant as the concept of democracy. While we take this for granted today it was radical at the time.
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from National Review,Liberals Rewrite History, Make a Few Mistakes by Josh Gelernter “The white race of South Africa should be the predominating race,” said Mahatma Gandhi. He also said, of himself and his followers, “We believe as much in the
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from Charles C.W. Cooke in The National Review, Our Presidents Are Beginning to Act Like Kings Most important of all, why are we not up in arms when the president openly abuses his position as the head of the bureaucracy in
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A NYT article, The Debate About America’s Best Days about Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth sounds like another academic pontificating how our best days are behind us. Reminds me of economists from the 1970s and early
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Henry Oliner 2016 01 21 In the campaign leading up to William McKinley’s campaign of 1896 the two hottest topics in political debate was tariffs and currency. Consider them as prominent as health care and immigration are today. Tariffs and
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from Charles C.W. Cooke in The National Review, Our Presidents Are Beginning to Act Like Kings At best, Wilson’s argument is a good-faith but terribly naïve attempt to make government “work.” When the Supreme Court rules, as it did in 1989,
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from Charles C.W. Cooke in The National Review, Our Presidents Are Beginning to Act Like Kings As Thomas Jefferson had it, “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” There are no new
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From National Review, Hamilton and Jefferson: The Deserving and the Deserter, a fascinating comparison and myth busting comparison between Jefferson adn Hamilton by M.D. Aeschliman “The Constitution did more than just tolerate slavery,” Chernow writes, “it actively rewarded it.” The
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from Wall Street Journal, Notable and Quotable: John Quincy Adams But there is one principle which pervades all the institutions of this country, and which must always operate as an obstacle to the granting of favors to new comers. This
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from George Will in The Washington Post, The danger of a government with unlimited power Lack of “a limiting principle” is the essence of progressivism, according to William Voegeli, contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books, in his new
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From The Telegraph, Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism by Daniel Hannan Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting
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A few excerpts from Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, The World from the Twenties to the Nineties: “History shows us the truly amazing extent to which intelligent, well-informed and resolute men, in the pursuit of economy or in altruistic passion for
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The common belief in our history is that President Woodrow Wilson championed the concept of the League of Nations and it failed at the hands of his Republican adversaries who leaned toward isolationism. Historian Paul Johnson in his history of
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“What I have argued in this book, and what the British experience convinces me even more to be true, is that the unforeseen but inevitable consequences of socialist planning create a state of affairs in which, if the policy is
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From the progressive standpoint, the Framers had not so much erred in their efforts as subsequent events had rendered their formulations moot. Madison had been particularly worried about a fractious majority violating the public good or minority rights for selfish
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a bit of American History from Walter Williams at Townhall in Historical Ignorance: The 1783 Treaty of Paris ended the war between the colonies and Great Britain. Its first article declared the 13 colonies “to be free, sovereign and independent
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“Is it too pessimistic to fear that a generation grown up under these conditions is unlikely to throw off the fetters to which it has grown used? Or does this description not rather fully bear out Tocqueville’s prediction of the
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