There is the unplanned and unintended benefit of making luxuries into ordinary items. Such spending primes the pump on some items, but it is not an essential element for progress. When wealth is generated to provide consumers with products and services they want we all benefit; when wealth is generated by rent seeking behavior most of us lose.
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 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 More“If you are not used to the intellectual compartmentalization required of an American politician, it can be jarring to hear, e.g., Senator Sanders demanding “revolution” at 10 a.m. and denouncing “insurrection” at 10:15 a.m”
Read More“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.”
Read More“Progressives have long struggled with the tension between their desire, often genuine, to be democratizers and their desire to give experts (however unreliably identified) a larger role in the administration of public affairs. “
Read MoreBecause socialism always begins with a man in a workshirt and ends with a guy dressed up as Cap’n Crunch,
Read More“We need mediating institutions, because human beings are capable of extraordinarily evil things and very much prone to banal evil and petty corruption — and easily seduced by the crude stimulation of mere novelty.”
Read More“”What we do at the personal level, we also do at the political level. That is why we are so fixated on statues put up a century ago and on the average daily temperatures a century hence — anything to avoid looking soberly at our real troubles in the here and now.”
Read More“Federalism and localism aren’t aesthetic preferences or ideological leanings that come out of nowhere — they are peace-keeping mechanisms necessary to the stable functioning of a diverse society.”
Read More“Conservatives have long understood that our choice is not between a bundle of prejudices and enlightened scientific management but between a bundle of prejudices and a different bundle of prejudices.”
Read More“The first is that all personal problems and all moral or intellectual matters have become political; that there is no human misfortune not amenable to political solution. The second is that, since everything can be known and changed, there is a perfect fit between action, knowledge, and morality.”
Read More“For the politician, jobs are not a means to some end — Cadillacs, bales of cotton, iPhones — but an end in and of themselves.”
Read More“One of the paradoxes of American conservatism is that one of the things American conservatives seek to conserve is American liberalism, which is rooted in the Anglo–Protestant liberalism of Locke, Smith, et al. “
Read MoreHealthcare does more to illuminate the divide in political ideology than any other issue. It merges the ideological and pragmatic limits of central power; the dispersal of interests (and thus the difficulty of consensus) and the dispersal of knowledge, the ‘fatal conceit’ that any central power can know how to manage complex markets for a vast and diversified nation. Health care challenges the authority and the competence of central power.
Read MoreJust as a slight difference in the angle at it origin can dramatically change the direction and distance of a trajectory, a seemingly slight change in a definition can dramatically change the the outcome from from the use of a commonly used term or idea.
Read MoreVirtue Signaling is an effortless act of contrition that empowers a mob to act more like a mob. Real solutions require thinking, listening and effort; not threats, intimidation and scapegoating. Systemic racism and white guilt is just a way to avoid accountability, using a narrative as a scapegoat.
Read More“the diminished credibility of the major news media, the courts, the political professionals, and the academics is not the result of histrionic right-wing criticism. It is the result of shoddy work by the people entrusted with the care and development of those institutions, of corruption and intellectual dishonesty at the highest levels filtering down to high-school history classrooms.”
Read More“The destructive nature of socialism comes not from its tendency to trample on democracy (though socialism often does trample on democracy) but from its total disregard for rights — rights that are, in the context of the United States and other liberal-democratic systems, beyond the reach of mere majorities.”
Read More“The rising authoritarianism of our time is not an aberration but the ordinary natural fulfillment of mass democracy when it has overflowed its constitutional restraints”
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