Political Thought
A recent iteration of First Things‘ “While We’re at It” feature mentioned the Wall Street Journal lament of feminist Erica Jong that breeding and raising children is a fad that just won’t die. From the lament: Unless you’ve been living on another planet, you know that we have endured an orgy of motherphilia for at…
Theodore Gatchel notes a perpetual problem facing a public that wishes to be informed: There are so many experts on virtually every subject imaginable that anyone who relies on them for information is faced with the problem of determining which experts to trust. Unfortunately, almost everyone falls in that category. Investors rely on experts for…
It always seems a bit silly, to me, to fight over words. Use of the word “socialism,” for example, tends to be descriptive among conservatives. That is, we use it because we’re trying to describe a system or institution that we’re addressing, not because it polls badly and we want to throw tar on an…
Historian Paul Rahe offers his perspective on the Tea Party. An extended excerpt: Over almost a century, under the influence of the Progressives and their heirs—the proponents of the New Deal, the Great Society, and Barack Obama’s New Foundation we have experienced a gradual consolidation of power in the federal government. Legislative responsibilities have been…
It’s unfortunate that Rich Lowry’s article in the January 24 National Review, “What the Whigs Knew,” is inaccessible except to subscribers, but two portions are worth typing out: [Eva] Moskowitz combines a fiery faith in the ability of all children to learn with a traditional — nay, downright retrograde — means of molding them into…
My Patch column this week laments the trick of picking a particular aspect of “the democratic process” as dominant for the sake of a particular issue: … too often disputes about public policy hinge more on which side can use prettier words than which side better captures the will of the public, let alone adhering…
Maybe it’s a small thing, but such ideological tells as the sentence that I’ve emphasized in the following paragraph from an unsigned Projo editorial have been catching my attention more, lately: It’s no violation of the First Amendment for Mr. Chafee, a liberal, to do what he says he will do: Ban his people from…
Speaking of statism, the Providence Journal editorial page betrayed its inclination in that direction, recently, on the topic of alcohol tax: Congratulations. By beating each other’s alcohol tax down to zero, neither New Hampshire nor Massachusetts is collecting revenues that it could. And where does this new era of tax-free booze to the north leave…
Once again, I find I must recommend an inaccessible article in National Review, this one by Gettysburg College history professor Allen Guelzo: The antidote to slavery, Lincoln insisted, was also economic free labor. In the 19th century, free labor was the shorthand term for a particular way of viewing capitalism: as a labor system, in…
Kevin Williamson churns out the economic heresies when he defines “social value” as “the stuff society actually values” and “profits” as “evidence of the creation of social value.” Much of modern discourse is a debate over semantics, but choose the words as you wish, the underlying economic principles remain the same, and Williamson is entirely…