Political Thought
The article, by Neil Downing, takes the tack of describing people who find their Social Security checks indispensable, but the recipient numbers are the important part, to my mind: Now, 200,202 Rhode Islanders are collecting Social Security benefits, according to newly issued figures from the Social Security Administration’s Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics. ……
Thomas Sowell, writing about a planned vs. free-market economy, remarks on the contrast between wicked smart planners and the small decisions made by the average Joes and Jills: How was it even possible that transferring decisions from elites with more education, intellect, data and power to ordinary people could lead consistently to demonstrably better results?…
It’s always notably plausible that there’s a larger truth in the mix when I agree with Bob Kerr, but while his column lamenting the possibly fatal restrictions that the Tiverton Town Council has placed on an annual charity event, this year, counts in that regard, I’d suggest that he should think on the larger lessons…
The city of Central Falls is surely better off without Mayor Charles Moreau in office, and many of us likely share the opinion (from afar) that he’d best serve the state by taking this opportunity to quietly exit public service (which phrase I type with some difficulty, in this context). But let’s take a moment…
In the latest Claremont Review of Books (sub req’d), Wilfred M. McClay discusses President Obama’s resume, Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, the Tea Party and Turner’s Frontier thesis as a preamble for his proposition that the path to national renewal lay in a less organized America. There is a danger of overorganization in American life, of…
It’s fortuitous that I’m a bit behind my blogging schedule today, because Marc’s closing point happens to relate to my thoughts upon reading Red Jahncke’s criticism of the Dodd-Frank Act regulating the finance industry. Jahncke gives a little history: Under Glass-Steagall, banks were local and regional champions. In New England, for example, Connecticut had Connecticut…
It feels a bit like giving in to provocation to respond to a July 6 column by the Newport Daily News’s Joe Baker, but the piece seems so indicative of a certain error in political philosophy that I’ve talked myself into thinking a response worthwhile. (A link, however, is not worthwhile, because the paper offers…
… in his Vally Breeze column a couple of weeks ago for the Fourth of July. Do we want to be left alone for “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence, or do we prefer the soft tyranny that comes with the security of a welfare…
Jeffrey Friedman’s analysis of the origins of our current economic crisis and assessments thereof is worth reading, but he wraps it in the pose that everybody else is wrong: To their credit, liberal analysts realized from the start that the cause of the recession was a banking crisis, not a housing crisis. In explaining the…
On the question of American exceptionalism (subscription required), James Bennett puts aside conservatives’ emphasis on abstractions like “freedom, prosperity, and innovativeness” as well as liberals’ emphasis on “America’s unique evil or guilt.” Rather, he looks to culture and history to explain how the United States differs from other countries in a substantive way. His analysis…
