Political Thought
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…
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…