Not only is the growth of central government power antithetical to the founding principles, it has proven as short of necessary competence as it is short of legitimacy. As economics has rivaled politics for our attention new scholarship has observed the dispersed nature of knowledge that separates knowledge from power at the federal level.
Read MoreThe media, regardless of their descent, should not be our scapegoat. We are too willing to accept wild haired conspiracies rather than our own shortcomings and faults, and we are more eager and willing to demonize an opposing view than even pretend to understand it. Each side denies their complicity; and both are guilty, but that does not make it acceptable. The media is selling outrage, but we are willing buyers.
Read MoreIn our new revolutionary atmosphere, we face a Jacobin moment where our political and social institutions are called into question by woke vigilantes who follow in the footsteps of Calhoun’s racism, historicists, pragmatists, and the early progressives in challenging the philosophy and principles of the founding. Reform is always seductive; comparing visible faults and errors with untested intentions or in the case today nothing constructive. Like the French Jacobins the woke wish to deconstruct (destroy) the existing order in the name of systemic racism, critical race theory, vague concepts of equality, intersectionality or whatever concept oozes out of our citadels of credentialed ignorance.
Read MoreThis clarity and distinction on the proper limits of government action defined the objectives of the conservative progressives like William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover. When the government crosses from protecting property and individual rights to managing and granting these rights, it crosses the line from progressivism to socialism.
Read MoreSocialism and its cousin, Progressivism, are not the forward-thinking ideologies they pretend, but regressions to the natural tendencies of man.
Read MoreThe government of the Founders’ Constitution is more than merely a “night watchman state,” but not very much more. It creates the rules of the garden and the gardeners and little more. This does not mean the government cannot intervene in the society or the economy. It means that, when it does so, it should be to protect liberty, which Madison defined in Federalist No. 10 as “the first object of government.” Jonah Goldberg
Read More“As Adams explained it, the French philosophes had invented the word, which became a central part of their utopian style of thinking and a major tenet in their “school of folly.” It referred to a set of ideals and hopes, like human perfection or social equality, that philosophers mistakenly believed could be implemented in the world because it existed in their heads. Jefferson himself thought in this French fashion, Adams claimed, confusing the seductive prospects envisioned in his imagination with the more limited possibilities history permitted. “
Read Moreby Henry Oliner Many Americans have become familiar with basic economic concepts because it affects them so regularly, but our understanding usually stops at our shore. The Brexit vote has us scratching our head to comprehend something we hardly knew…
Read MoreDaniel Greenfield writes And This is Revolution in his excellent blog, Sultan Knish, 1/14/13. Excerpt: It’s the aspiring middle class that begins revolutions, but when they turn bloody enough, then they usually aren’t the ones who inherit them. An ascending…
Read MoreDaniel Greenfield write a bit of profound analysis of Democracy in With a Pocketful of Democracy in his blog Sultan Knish Excerpt: In an amoral society, democracy is one of the few things left to us by dead white men…
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