Political Thought
I’ve written, periodically, about my belief that debt is the new method of indentured servitude. If we can get young adults to enter the working world with hundreds of thousands of dollars in education loans, some additional thousands in credit card debt (incurred on the expectation of profitable labor after graduation), with car loans a…
This short article about job prospects for young adults in Greece catches many of the various nuances, but it still seems as if there’s a disconnect of cause and effect. Consider: From their settled perches, the elders criticize and cluck. The young, they say, have either no initiative, a dearth of opportunities, or some combination…
It seems humanity is fated to always reconvincing itself that it’s got the problems all figured out and can henceforth hand broad control to government entities. Ed Achorn makes a contrary suggestion: Britain confronts what has historically been the great threat to representative republics. A majority of voters, whipped on by self-interested politicians, eventually figure…
Boston’s Mayor Menino made one of his typical gaffes the other day when he was describing such “ionic” Boston sports moments like that time Varitek split the uprights for the Patriots. The Assistant Village Idiot (an “iconic” title 😉 explained that the sports-knowledge and vocabulary deficiency that Menino displayed is an indicator about politicians’ knowledge…
A recent column by Mark Patinkin profiling a Rhode Island fisherman contains this unsurprising gem: After each haul, [Niles Pearsall] has to painstakingly throw back restricted fish — sometimes half or more of what the nets haul up. The irony is that many are dead anyway. He said it’s like throwing $20 bills into the…
At last, a comment from Stuart worth further exploration: …the point is that governments were created to use our – yours and mine – pooled resources to create BETTER things than we could have created by our lonesome selves. In fact, good systems of government like that of the USA are the biggest friend of…
The following passage, from an autobiographical essay by Fr. Richard Neuhaus, from 2002, caught my eye, because it strikes me as a generally applicable principle for organizational growth, as opposed to continual redefinition: The Church’s teaching lives forward; it is not reconstructed backward—whether from the fifth century or the sixteenth or the nineteenth or the…
In these times, the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville seem as apt as ever: [Government] takes upon itself alone to secure [the people’s] gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was…
Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru had an excellent cover piece in the National Review before last on the domestic battle over American exceptionalism, which divides pretty conveniently along the current line of left and right. President Obama is obviously a key figure in the dispute. Not surprisingly, what strikes me is the gargantuan task facing…
Right now, public education is such an expensive catastrophe that top-down imposition of standards and reasonable organizational principles is an attractive option. But there’s a very dark side to the impulse, hints of which can be found here: Governors and education leaders on Wednesday proposed sweeping new school standards that could lead to students across…
