“So the intellectuals were no longer allies or friends of businessmen and became enemies. This happens with Rousseau. The whole idea of keeping together these two social currents of liberalism—namely, private property and toleration—gets lost. What we have today are mostly progressive intellectuals.”
Read MoreProgressives think the Constitution is organic and the economy is mechanical; in reality it is the reverse. Thinking you can tax an isolated segment without affecting others ignores the dispersed nature of knowledge that no central authority can emulate.
Read MoreThe Constitution has two important functions: to protect the republic/ democracy that represents the people and to protect the people’s individual liberty from the abuses of democracy. Democracy is not the end, it is the means and must be limited.
Read MoreBehind the brilliant design of our Constitution is an accurate understanding about human nature and its permanence. This is the reason it has endured in spite of the difficult and contentious compromises that birthed it.
Read MoreIdentify politics was doomed from the start and we are about to watch it unwind. We will discover that people are more than their race or sexual identity. Zogby noted years ago the car in your driveway and that balance in your 401k was a more accurate predictor of your vote than your race or sex. The left’s obsession with race and identity does not affect the conditions most voters face.
Read MoreWe 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read More“You don’t get to be “against the rich” if the richest people in the country fund your party in order to preserve their government-sponsored monopolies. You are not “a supporter of free speech” if you oppose free speech for people who disagree with you. “
Read Morea just, democratic society requires equal opportunity, equal justice, and equal responsibility; it does not require equal outcomes.
Read MoreThe term ‘Progressive’ has come to mean something Theodore or Franklin Roosevelt would never recognize. A pejorative for dysfunctional policies detached from any accountability or reason. While I have come to appreciate the aims of Progressivism at its inception, I still recognize the inevitable flaws of permanent government solutions to every conceivable social problem. Perhaps this ‘woke’ bastardization of the term ‘progressive’ was the inevitable outcome from a movement that was incapable of articulating any limits on government power.
Read MoreThere was more than just the lack of power that the central government needed to function properly that the current alliance circumvented. There was also an abuse of democracy that mere modification of the Articles could not address.
Read MoreThreats to intimidate and undermine our legal institutions is no different from undermining our electoral institutions. Systemic racism and CRT and all of their iterations seek to undermine these critical institutions. Social justice is a poor substitute for real justice, and can easily become its opposite.
Read MoreThe critical point is not that we are simply a republic and not a democracy, but that we are a very carefully constructed republic, reflecting an understanding of human nature, with numerous firewalls that are designed to prevent the democracy from degenerating into anarchy and tyranny.
Read More“The technocratic future is already upon us. And it has little need for the labor of the lower classes—or the messiness of democracy. These same people have amassed the power to control and disseminate information far more subtly and efficiently than Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin.”
Read More“Hyphenated capitalism is no capitalism at all. The better name for it is socialism lite.” Nikki Haley
Read More“Recovery had proceeded far enough to end despair, but not far enough to restore satisfaction. People still felt that many things were wrong, but no longer felt, as they had in the terrible days of 1933, that their single duty was to trust Franklin Roosevelt and hold their peace. By transforming the national mood from apathy to action, the New Deal was invigorating its enemies as well as its friends.”
Read MoreWhether 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read More“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.”
Read More“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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