Category: Politics & Economics

Politics & Economics

They were not like the penniless rabble of antiquity who traded their votes to unscrupulous demagogues

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Quote of the Day for Tuesday, June 7th, 2011: Walter Russell Mead on The Death of the American Dream: A nation of family farms is a nation of family firms; suburban America was a land of employees.  America’s shift from a nation of entrepreneurs to a nation working for corporations and government was a profound change in national life that even today is not well or fully understood. The ideal of the independent small farmer was at the heart of early American democratic ideology.  Critics of democracy had always asserted in the past that a mass ...

Politics & Economics

Where OBL wins their empathy, American jocks receive only their bile

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Quote of the day for Saturday, May 7th, 2011: Brendan O’Neill, editor of spiked, providing an interesting critique from across the pond on the reaction of European elites to the killing this week of Osama bin Laden: It is extraordinary, and revealing, how quickly the expression of concern about the use of American force in Pakistan became an expression of values superiority over the American people. The modern chattering classes are so utterly removed from the mass of the population, so profoundly disconnected from ‘ordinary people’ and their ‘ordinary t...

Politics & Economics

Government serves best when it protects and safeguards—rather than crowds out—the poverty-fighting institutions of civil society

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Quote of the Day for Thursday, May 5th, 2011: Ryan Messmore, writing at the Heritage Foundation website, on the ruse that a social and political order disciplined by a commitment to limited government is to be equated with an antipathy for the poor: The goal of overcoming poverty is not simply to eliminate need, but to enable people to thrive—that is, to empower them to live meaningful lives and contribute to society. Thriving is much more than a full stomach and a place to sleep. People tend to flourish in the context of healthy relationships with their...

Politics & Economics

And besides, who would we rob the next year?

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Pajama TV’s (and Declaration Entertainment’s) Bill Whittle, working with material from the always readable Iowahawk, doing a little ‘splainin’ about why the schemes of Michael Moore (and others on the left) to confiscate the wealth of the wealthy to solve the nation’s funding problems are simply useless, irrational – and dangerous – harangues. Note that this presentation doesn’t even touch on the debt problem, but solely on annual spending – nor does it really address the moral issues around the confiscatory “solutions,” but one thing at a time, I suppos...

Politics & Economics

No Child Left Unbooted in Natick

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Natick, MA Superintendent of Schools Dr. Peter Sanchioni, putting a whole lot of clever lipstick earlier this month on a “looky what I found!” decision to raid a high school construction project’s (borrowed) contingency fund to underwrite – with tax dollars – a newly discovered necessity for educating teenagers: personal laptops for everyone: "What we feel, and the case we’re going to make to the MSBA, is that they’ve totally underestimated what a technology budget should be in a 21st century school," Sanchioni said. "We don...

Politics & Economics

In each case the body count was in the millions

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Quote of the day for Sunday, March 6th, 2011: Newsweek is one of the last places I’d expect to find sober political commentary (maybe being sold for $1 has stunned the company out of its indulgent stupor!), but this on-line article last week from Niall Ferguson, entitled Un-American Revolutions, is one of the sanest opinions I’ve read on the tumult shaking the Muslim world: Time and again, Americans have hailed revolutions, only to fall strangely silent as those same revolutions proceeded to devour not only their own children but many other people’s too....

Politics & Economics

“Libyans don’t want anyone but Gadhafi. He gave us loans.”

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Quote of the Day for Saturday, February 26th, 2011: From an AP story by Maggie Michael and Ben Hubbard, as posted on boston.com this afternoon: Supporters in about 50 cars covered with Gadhafi posters drove slowly around the square, waving green flags from the windows and honking horns. A camera crew filmed the procession. A taxi driver, Nasser Mohammed, 25, was among those who had put a picture of Gadhafi and a green flag on his car. "Have you heard the speech last night?" he asked. "It was great. Libyans don’t want anyone but Gadha...

Politics & Economics

We can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house

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Quote of the Day for Tuesday, February 1st, 2011: I’m not sure quite how to attribute this… I’m quoting Joe Carter over at the First Thoughts blog today, who is quoting Judge Roger Vinson’s ruling published Monday striking down the ObamaCare law on account of the individual mandate, which is quoting then-candidate Barack Obama from 2008, who is essentially mocking the notion of a mandate… You can figure it out: Priceless. But if there remained any doubts, we surely know now why Senator Obama was so well-known for voting “present” during his l...

Politics & Economics

An attack on the poor, who have been most helped by capitalism

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Quote of the Day for Thursday, January 27th, 2011: Robert T. Miller, in February’s First Things, criticizing the continuing latent Marxism in the political economy of Alasdair MacIntyre’s thought, in an article entitled Waiting for St. Vladimir: Capitalism efficiently delivers goods and services, but it is not a perfect system—far from it. To be sure, capitalism has costs of various kinds. It is a key insight of modern economics, however, that all solutions to a given problem have costs, and we delude ourselves if we think we can find a perfect (in the s...

Politics & Economics

Of the increasingly common bad habit of local politicians to resort to cosmic sermonizing…

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Quote of the Day for Friday, January 21st, 2011: Victor David Hanson, writing yesterday for National Review Online, on when sermonizing on real or imagined global issues trumps the exercise of competence for local officials – or camouflages its absence: Dupnik is a good example of the increasingly common bad habit of local politicians to resort to cosmic sermonizing when more mundane challenges go unaddressed. In Dupnik’s case, it is hard to monitor all the nuts like Loughner in the sheriff’s department files to ensure they don’t get guns and bullets and...