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For a moment of cross-ideological sympathy, I was ecstatic to see progressive journalist Steve Ahlquist publish an essay with the title, “How does the public hold unelected boards, councils, commissions and departments accountable?,” a couple months ago on Uprise RI: From a political point of view, these unelected boards are a great insulator from the…
The common wisdom, of course, is that fake news is a byproduct of freedom, but it doesn’t work out that way, according to a Heritage study by Anthony Kim. Our findings reiterate the importance of economic freedom as the fundamental need for enhancing public trust. Pre-existing economic freedom perceptions are the building blocks for stability…
Not only are pension bonds a bad idea in principle, but Rhode Island has a sharp recent case study for reference. Yet, Dan McGowan reports for the Boston Globe that Providence “Mayor Jorge Elorza’s administration is planning to ask state lawmakers to allow the city to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars through a pension obligation bond,” avoiding…
If journalism were really about holding the powerful accountable and approaching them with a skeptical eye, we’d see a lot more stories like this one, in which the GoLocal Prov News Team reported the difficulty that the minority women who make up the pro-charter-school group Stop the Wait RI have been having getting any response from…
Although Jonathan Swan appears to have positioned a recent essay on Axios with a view toward explaining away President Trump’s electoral gains among Latino voters as a “counterintuitive” political benefit-to-him of the coronavirus, I think the real lesson is quite different. Swan argues that by “shifting Trump’s rhetoric from immigration to fears around the economic impact…
Ethan Yang, in a post for the American Institute for Economic Research, asks, “Why Have the Courts Been Deferential to Lockdowns?” Yang addresses legal principles and tests, such as “rational basis” and “the narrowly tailored standard” and writes: Hollow phrases such as “the common good,” “the public interest,” and “reasonable” give enormous discretion to judges…
Why do advocates downplay the true face of child poverty in Rhode Island and its most-obvious cause?
As we watch the cycle of moral panics churning over one another — each being replaced for a season or two and then resuming for another turn — it’s important to keep in mind how easy it is to construct narratives. On a continent of hundreds of millions in a world of billions, a well-networked,…
Each instance is a small thing, and especially in a small state, one wants to limit one’s time spent lurking around social media like a sort of contrarian anthropologist. (Of course, most insiders aren’t on there purely for fun and distraction, but are working angles, too.) Still this subtle dynamic may be one of the…
When you get one of the regular giant mailers from a cabal of government labor unions advocating for higher taxes, it’s pretty obvious what’s going on. They want government to collect more money so they can arrange with elected officials to transfer more of it to them, with the promise that the unions will feed…