Here.
Justin Wolfers (Freakonomics blog) has completed a series of six posts about the economics of happiness (here, here, here, here, here, and here). The bottom line, according to Wolfers:
1) Rich people are happier than poor people.
2) Richer countries are happier than poorer countries.
3) As countries get richer, they tend to get happier.
All of which should come as no surprise to anyone, without the benefit of “happiness research.” Regarding which, I agree with Arnold Kling, who says:
My view is that happiness research implies Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada. I believe that you do not learn about economic behavior by watching what people say in response to a survey.
You learn about economic behavior by watching what people actually do.
And…you consult your “priors.” It is axiomatic that individuals prefer more to less; that is, more income yields more satisfaction because it affords access to goods and services of greater variety and higher quality. Moreover, income and the wealth that flows from it are valued for their own sake by most individuals. (That they might be valued because they enable philanthropic endeavors is a case in point.)
It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, that the “law” of diminishing marginal utility, which may apply to particular goods and services, does not generally apply to income or wealth in the aggregate. But, in any event, given that Wolfers’s first conclusion is self-evidently true, the second and third conclusions follow. And they follow logically, not from “happiness research.”
There’s an excellent exchange on the subject of Burkean conservatism at The Volokh Conspiracy. Dale Carpenter, a Burkean, gets the best of it, in my view (e.g., this post).
P.S. Ilya Somin’s “final thoughts” add nothing to the mix, in that Carpenter’s “clarification” is only that, and not a concession. Moreover, Somin reveals himself as a Left-libertarian who simply wants life to be “fair” to everyone. Well, life just ain’t fair — get over it, Ilya.
Related posts:
“Libertarian Conservative or Conservative Libertarian?” (29 Jul 2004)
“Where Conservatism and (Sensible) Libertarianism Come Together” (14 Apr 2005)
“Common Ground for Conservatives and Libertarians?” (04 Sep 2005)
“Conservatism, Libertarianism, and ‘The Authoritarian Personality’ ” (01 Feb 2006)
“The F Scale, Revisited” (27 Dec 2007)
The ludicrous and (it seems) increasingly popular assertion that plants have rights should not distract us from the more serious issue of fetal rights. (My position on the issue can be found among these links.) Maverick Philosopher explains how abortion may be opposed for non-religious reasons:
It is often assumed that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises. This assumption is plainly false. To show that it is is false, one need merely give an anti-abortion argument that does not invoke any religious tenet, for example:
1. Infanticide is morally wrong.
2. There is no morally relevant difference between abortion and infancticide.
Therefore
3. Abortion is morally wrong.Whether one accepts this argument or not, it clearly invokes no religious premise. It is therefore manifestly incorrect to say or imply that all opposition to abortion must be religiously-based. Theists and atheists alike could make use of the above argument.
MP then quotes from a piece by Nat Hentoff, an atheist and Leftist. Hentoff writes, apropos Barack Obama and abortion, that
I admire much of Obama’s record, including what he wrote in “The Audacity of Hope” about the Founders’ “rejection of all forms of absolute authority, whether the king, the theocrat, the general, the oligarch, the dictator, the majority … George Washington declined the crown because of this impulse.”
But on abortion, Obama is an extremist. He has opposed the Supreme Court decision that finally upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act against that form of infanticide. Most startlingly, for a professed humanist, Obama — in the Illinois Senate — also voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act….
Furthermore, as “National Right to Life News” (April issue) included in its account of Obama’s actual votes on abortion, he “voted to kill a bill that would have required an abortionist to notify at least one parent before performing an abortion on a minor girl from another state.”
These are conspiracies — and that’s the word — by pro-abortion extremists to transport a minor girl across state lines from where she lives, unbeknownst to her parents. This assumes that a minor fully understands the consequences of that irredeemable act. As I was researching this presidential candidate’s views on the unilateral “choice” that takes another’s life, I heard on the radio what Obama said during a Johnstown, Pa., town hall meeting on March 29 as he was discussing the continuing dangers of exposure to HIV/AIDS infections:
“When it comes specifically to HIV/AIDS, the most important prevention is education, which should include — which should include abstinence education and teaching children, you know, that sex is not something casual. But it should also include — it should also include other, you know, information about contraception because, look, I’ve got two daughters, 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals.
“But if they make a mistake,” Obama continued, “I don’t want them punished with a baby.”
Among my children and grandchildren are two daughters and three granddaughters; and when I hear anyone, including a presidential candidate, equate having a baby as punishment, I realize with particular force the impact that the millions of legal abortions in this country have had on respect for human life.
And that’s the crux of the issue: respect for human life.
Thus I turn to a Peter Lawler’s “A Human Person, Actually,” in which Lawler reviews Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, by Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen:
The embryo, George and Tollefsen argue, is a whole being, possessing the integrated capability to go through all the phases of human development. An embryo has what it takes to be a free, rational, deliberating, and choosing being; it is naturally fitted to develop into a being who can be an “uncaused cause,” a genuinely free agent. Some will object, of course, that the embryo is only potentially human. The more precise version of this objection is that the embryo is human—not a fish or a member of some other species—but not yet a person. A person, in this view, is conscious enough to be a free chooser right now. Rights don’t belong to members of our species but to persons, beings free enough from natural determination to be able to exercise their rights. How could someone have rights if he doesn’t even know that he has them?…
Is the embryo a “who”? It’s true enough that we usually don’t bond with embryos or grieve when they die. Doubtless, that’s partly because of our misperception of who or what an embryo is. But it’s also because we have no personal or loving contact with them. We tend to think of persons as beings with brains and hearts; an embryo has neither. But personal significance can’t be limited to those we happen to know and love ourselves; my powers of knowing and loving other persons are quite limited, and given to the distortions of prejudice. Whether an embryo is by nature a “who” can be determined only by philosophical reflection about what we really know.
The evidence that George and Tollefsen present suggests that there are only two non-arbitrary ways to consider when a “what” naturally becomes a “who.” Either the embryo is incapable of being anything but a “who”; from the moment he or she comes to be, he or she is a unique and particular being capable of exhibiting all the personal attributes associated with knowing, loving, and choosing. Or a human being doesn’t become a “who” until he or she actually acquires the gift of language and starts displaying distinctively personal qualities. Any point in between these two extremes—such as the point at which a fetus starts to look like a human animal or when the baby is removed from the mother’s womb—is perfectly arbitrary. From a purely rational or scientific view, the price of being unable to regard embryos as “whos” is being unable to regard newborn babies as “whos”….
As I say here,
abortion is of a piece with selective breeding and involuntary euthanasia, wherein the state fosters eugenic practices that aren’t far removed from those of the Third Reich. And when those practices become the norm, what and who will be next? Libertarians, of all people, should be alert to such possibilities. Instead of reflexively embracing “choice” they should be asking whether “choice” will end with fetuses.
Most libertarians, alas, mimic “liberals” and “progressives” on the issue of abortion. But there are no valid libertarian arguments for abortion, just wrong-headed ones.
Mark Perry discusses House Resolution 5800, introduced by Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), the “Consumer Reasonable Energy Price Protection Act of 2008,” which would:
- Tax the oil industries’ “windfall profits.”
- Set up a “Reasonable Profits Board” to determine when the oil companies’ profits are in excess, and then tax them on those windfall profits.
- As oil and gas companies’ windfall profits increase, so would the tax rate for those companies.
…Kanjorski said “his legislation will encourage oil companies to lower prices to prevent them from receiving higher tax rates.”
A few Questions/Comments:
1. Oil companies don’t set oil and gas prices, global market forces do. The fact that oil and gas prices change daily demonstrate very clearly that oil companies are at the mercy of market forces of supply and demand.
2. If you tax something (oil), you get less of it. If you get less of something (oil), prices go up, not down.
3. How does Rep. Kanjorski know what “reasonable profits” are?….
Well, Rep. Kanjorski is a typical member of Congress, whose members’ economic views reflect their constituents’ economic illiteracy.
Those constituents, I am sure, would reject slavery out of hand. But they favor measures like Kanjorski’s because they want to buy a given amount of a good or service (gas, health care, etc.) at a lower price. But the only way to get the same amount of anything at a lower price is through greater productivity (which can’t be legislated) or by forcing people to produce more of it, that is, by making slaves of them.
(For more about economic illiteracy, follow these links. Relatedly, some links about irrational voters are here.)
I somewhat cavalierly dismiss departmentalism in “No Way Out?” (05 Dec 2004), where I address alternative ways to stop “The Erosion of the Constitutional Contract” (23 Mar 2004). William J. Watkins Jr. explains departmentalism by way of example:
Departmentalist theory is perhaps best examined in the context of President Jefferson’s approach to the Sedition Act. Upon entering office, Jefferson ordered the cessation of all federal sedition prosecutions and he pardoned those who had been convicted. In 1804, Jefferson received a letter from Abigail Adams criticizing his handling of the Sedition Act controversy. Mrs. Adams argued that because the judges had upheld the Sedition Act, President Jefferson had overstepped his constitutional bounds when terminating prosecutions and pardoning offenders.
In a polite response, Jefferson reminded Mrs. Adams that “nothing in the constitution has given [the judges] the right to decide for the executive, more than the Executive to decide for them.” Both branches, continued Jefferson, “are equally independent in the sphere assigned to them.” Jefferson recognized that the judges, “believing the law constitutional, had a right to pass a sentence of fine and imprisonment, because that power was placed in their hands by the constitution.” However, this did not bind him when performing his duties as chief executive. Because he believed the Sedition Act was unconstitutional, he “was bound to remit the execution of it.”
Departmentalism may be alive and well, at least with respect to John McCain’s status as a “natural born Citizen” under Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution of the United States. As Matthew J. Franck argues, it is not up to the Supreme Court to decide McCain’s citizenship status (as some would have it), it is up to the Electoral College and Congress. And that will be that.
Eugene Volokh, a known grammatical relativist, scoffs at “to increase dramatically,” as if “to dramatically increase” would be better. But better in what way: clearer or less stuffy? The meaning of “to increase dramatically” is clear. The only reason to write “to dramatically increase” would be to avoid the appearance of stuffiness.
Seeming unstuffy (i.e., without standards) is neither a necessary nor sufficient reason to split an infinitive. The rule about unsplit infinitives, like most other grammatical rules, serves the valid and useful purpose of preventing English from sliding yet further down the slippery slope of incomprehensibility than it has slid already. If an unsplit infinitive makes a clause or sentence seem awkward, the clause or sentence should be rewritten to avoid the awkwardness. Better that than make an exception that leads to further exceptions — and thence to babel.
Related posts:
“Missing the Point” (28 Mar 2008)
“More Grammatical Anarchy” (31 Mar 2008)
TomDispatch.com reproduces Chalmers Johnson’s review of Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire, by Alex Abella. Although Johnson is wrong about American “imperialism,” the causes of the Cold War, and the role of RAND (the prototypical defense think-tank) in fostering and prolonging the Cold War. But Johnson is right in his characterization of defense think-tanks and their denizens. For example:
[RAND’s] ideological bent was disguised in statistics and equations, which allegedly made its analyses “rational” and “scientific.” Abella writes:
“If a subject could not be measured, ranged, or classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all — the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical.”
In my opinion, Abella here confuses numerical with empirical. Most RAND analyses were formal, deductive, and mathematical but rarely based on concrete research into actually functioning societies. RAND never devoted itself to the ethnographic and linguistic knowledge necessary to do truly empirical research on societies that its administrators and researchers, in any case, thought they already understood….
It is also important to note that RAND’s analytical errors were not just those of commission — excessive mathematical reductionism — but also of omission. As Abella notes, “In spite of the collective brilliance of RAND there would be one area of science that would forever elude it, one whose absence would time and again expose the organization to peril: the knowledge of the human psyche.”
Following the axioms of mathematical economics, RAND researchers tended to lump all human motives under what the Canadian political scientist C. B. Macpherson called “possessive individualism” and not to analyze them further. Therefore, they often misunderstood mass political movements, failing to appreciate the strength of organizations like the Vietcong and its resistance to the RAND-conceived Vietnam War strategy of “escalated” bombing of military and civilian targets.
What Johnson says of RAND is typical of defense think-tanks. They tend to recruit academically minded Ph.D.s, whose understanding of the real world is off-center to begin with, and which remains almost completely innocent of the actual practice of statecraft and warfare. (See this post for a small sample.)
In my experience (30 years’ worth), the output of a defense think tank is seven parts theoretical, mathematical, and speculative (i.e., bull—-) and one part empirical.
The Presidency – Method 1
Intrade posts State-by-State odds odds on the outcome of the presidential election in November. I assign all of a State’s electoral votes to the party whose nominee that is expected to win that State. Where the odds are 50-50, I split the State’s electoral votes between the two parties.
As of today, the odds point to this result:
Democrat — 309 electoral votes (EVs)
Republican — 229 EVs
The Presidency – Method 2 (UPDATED, 05/09/08)
I have devised a “secret formula” for estimating the share of electoral votes cast for the winner of the presidential election. (The formula’s historical accuracy is described in my second forecast.) The formula currently yields these estimates of the outcome of this year’s presidential election:
Democrat —
241 to 288 EVs241 to 357 EVsRepublican —
250 to 297 EVs181 to 297 EVs
I have revised my “secret formula.” One result of the revision is that the margin of error is greater than before, thus the broad span of estimates. But the estimate produced by method 1 is almost exactly same as the mean estimate by method 2 (239 EVs), which gives me more confidence in method 2.
U.S. Senate
Democrats will gain five Senate seats: picking up one each in Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Virginia. The balance in the Senate will change from 51 Democrats (including Lieberman and Sanders, both nominally independent) and 49 Republicans to 56 Democrats and 44 Republicans.
Even if John McCain wins the election, he will face a Senate that could filibuster his nominations, given the several RINOs among the 44 GOP members.
Hillary Clinton seems to be the “conservative” contender for the Democrat nomination. Who’d have thunk it fifteen years ago, when HillaryCare went down in flames?
But, fifteen years ago, who’d have thunk that the GOP would become Democrat-Lite?
From SCOTUSblog:
Lawyers for Virginia death-row inmate Christopher Scott Emmett told the Supreme Court on Monday that the state follows a “unique and uniquely dangerous” method of execution by lethal injection.
A synonym of “dangerous” is “life-threatening.” An execution is meant to be life-threatening. In fact, a successful execution is life-taking.
Thats the real issue, isn’t it? Mustn’t threaten a condemned convict with execution. (Tsk, tsk.) It might kill him.
Related posts:
“Does Capital Punishment Deter Homicide?” (04 Oct 2004)
“Libertarian Twaddle about the Death Penalty” (13 Oct 2004)
“Crime and Punishment” (23 Mar 2005)
“Abortion and Crime” (15 May 2005)
“Saving the Innocent?” (23 Jul 2005)
“Saving the Innocent?: Part II” (27 Jul 2005)
“More on Abortion and Crime” (28 Nov 2005)
“More Punishment Means Less Crime” (03 Jan 2006)
“More about Crime and Punishment” (06 Jan 2006)
“More Punishment Means Less Crime: A Footnote” (17 Jan 2006)
“Clear Thinking about the Death Penalty” (23 Jan 2006)
“Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (14 Apr 2006)
“Another Argument for the Death Penalty” (07 Jun 2006)
“Less Punishment Means More Crime” (25 Aug 2007)
“Crime, Explained” (09 Nov 2007)
I have lived among Northerners all of my life. I grew up and went to college in Michigan. I spent the worse part of four decades in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., a bastion of Northern “charm.” A village in a rural, western part of New York State claimed another three years of my life. I have now lived in Austin — another bastion of Northern “charm” (i.e., rudeness, crudeness, and lewdness) — for almost five years.
I am here to tell you that Michael Hirsh is wringing wet when he writes in Newsweek that
a substantial portion of the new nation [the South and much of the West and Southern Midwest] developed, over many generations, a rather savage, unsophisticated set of mores. Traditionally, it has been balanced by a more diplomatic, communitarian Yankee sensibility from the Northeast and upper Midwest. But that latter sensibility has been losing ground in population numbers — and cultural weight. The coarsened sensibility that this now-dominant Southernism and frontierism has brought to our national dialogue is unmistakable. (Quotation via Eugene Volokh)
The manners and mores of Northerners, as a “race,” are inferior to those of true Southerners. (True Southerners are persons who can claim the South as the home of their ancestors, going back to at least the early 1800s. True Southerners are not to be confused with the merely geographic Southerners — carpetbaggers — who dominate the D.C. and Austin areas, among other so-called Southern locales.) The denizens of the village in New York (some of them) came close to exhibiting the manners and mores of true Southerners. As for the other Northerners in my life’s experience: “fuggedaboutit.”
I know whereof I speak, having been blessed in the course of my years with the love, friendship, and collegiality of many true Southerners. Their charm, hospitality, and kindness shine as a beacon in the darkness of Northern crudity, which (on the evidence of popular “entertainment”) has engulfed most of the land. Whereas a Southerner says “please” and “thank you” and keeps his word, a typical Yankee’s approach to social and business transactions can be summed up in “gimme that, shut up, and get outta my way, you creep.” (There are glaring exceptions, of course. My father was one of them. He was an Anglo-Canadian-American with the soul of a true Southerner, even though he never ventured south of northern Ohio.)
“Sophisticated … Yankee sensibility,” indeed. “Communitarian”? Only in the sense that the coarsened sensibility of (most) Northerners finds expression through the coercive power of the state (i.e., socialism).
P.S. Whereas I am a Northerner who sees Northerners for what they (mostly) are, Hirsh (Tufts, Columbia) seems to be a Northerner who is blind to the foibles of his ilk. To change the metaphor, he is a fish in water.
Barack Obama and his Obama-maniacs like to complain about “gotcha” politics and “distractions,” as if Obama’s relationships with whitey-hating Rev. Jeremiah Wright and unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers have nothing to do with Obama’s fitness for the presidency. What Obama and his idolizers fear, of course, is the revelation of Obama’s political agenda, which he has succeeded in masking behind his “nice guy” persona, — in spite of his wife’s over-explained, anti-American slur, and his having (in 2007) the Left-most voting record among U.S. Senators.
Wolf Howling does an excellent job of piercing Obama’s defenses. WH also points to a similar analysis by the estimable Charles Krauthammer. I will not try to redo what WH and Krauthammer have done so well. My aim here is to address a charge that lurks in the background, if it hasn’t yet been raised by Obama, his camp, and his camp followers.
That charge? Raising the issue of Obama’s associations with Wright and Ayers is the kind of gutter politics that is sometimes called the politics of personal destruction, if it isn’t plain old racism. (My rule of thumb: The charge of racism in twenty-first century America is a first and last refuge of any politician or public figure who wants to shift the focus of debate from his own views, accomplishments, or agenda.)
It ain’t “personal destruction” if (a) it’s true and (b) it’s relevant to a person’s fitness to hold office (whether elected or appointed). Bill Clinton wasn’t a “victim” of the politics of personal destruction when he was impeached by the House of Representatives; he was a “victim” of his own perjury and deliberate failure to honor his oath of office.
As Wolf Howling and Charles Krauthammer explain so well, Barack Obama’s associations with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers are a legitimate focus of attention. And those associations will remain a legitimate focus of attention for as long as Obama feeds at the public trough or seeks to do so.
Cross-temporal comparisons of incomes by percentile are meaningless, as Arnold Kling and Russell Roberts explain. The bottom line: the persons included in a particular income range (e.g., bottom decile or quintile) in one year are not the same persons who were included in that income range five, ten, twenty, or thirty years earlier. Moreover, real (inflation-adjusted) income has grown steadily across the board: at the bottom and all the way to the top.
Those persons who are (temporarily) at the top do not take away anything from those who are at the bottom or in between. Those at the top earn because more they produce things of commensurate value. (I exclude politicians, lobbyists, and the beneficiaries of economically restrictive regulation.) Those in the middle and at the bottom earn what they earn because they produce things of less value. (Teachers, for example, earn less than baseball players because there are so many more persons who are able to be teachers than there are persons who are able to be major league ballplayers. It’s that fact — not “social injustice” — which accounts for the fact that teachers, firemen, policemen, etc., don’t make as much as ballplayers.) There’s no other way for an economic system to generate more for all than to allow it to reward producers according to the market value of what they produce.
Income inequality is a bogus issue. It is exploited by economic illiterates, do-gooders, and politicians to advance various forms of welfare, which necessarily involves income redistribution. The result, of course, is to make almost everyone worse off. The only beneficiaries of income redistribution are the welfare bureaucracy, vote-grabbing politicians, and perennial parasites. The rest of us pay via higher taxes and slower economic growth.
Related posts:
“Why Class Warfare Is Bad for Everyone” (21 Sep 2004)
“Fighting Myths with Facts” (27 Sep 2004)
“Debunking More Myths of Income Inequality” (13 Oct 2004)
“The Destruction of Wealth and Income by the State” (01 Jan 2005)
“Ten Commandments of Economics” (02 Dec 2005)
“More Commandments of Economics” (06 Dec 2005)
“Zero-Sum Thinking” (29 Dec 2005)
“On Income Inequality” (09 Mar 2006)
“The Causes of Economic Growth” (08 Apr 2006)
“The Last(?) Word about Income Inequality” (21 Jul 2006)
“Your Labor Day Reading” (04 Sep 2006)
“Status, Spite, Envy, and Income Redistribution” (04 Sep 2006)
“Things to Come” (27 Jun 2007)
“The Poor Get Richer” (06 Feb 2008)
Orin Kerr tries to identify the “good old days” of the Fourth Amendment, which reads:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
According to Kerr:
If you had to identify a “high point” of Fourth Amendment protection, I suppose you might pick the window from December 1967 to May 1968, or maybe the six years from December 1967 until some of the pro-law enforcement decisions of the Court in 1973. But if that’s right, it seems to me that the “good old days” of the Fourth Amendment were actually a pretty narrow window of time: anywhere from a few months to five or six years, around forty years ago, out of a 217-year history of the Fourth Amendment.
Kerr’s high point should be called a low point. The six years from 1967 to 1973 were “good old days” when law enforcement was hamstrung in its efforts to protect us from predators. One result was to reinforce the upward trend in the rate of violent and property crimes.
In any event, the Fourth Amendment has been distorted out of all recognition, as I explained in writing about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Hudson v. Michigan:
[T]he majority … believed that the case did not involve a “knock-and-announce” violation. But the majority could not change the fact of Michigan’s concession that there was such a violation. So the majority did the next best thing; it prevented Hudson from getting off scot-free, in spite of the supposed violation. How? The majority found the “exclusionary rule” inapplicable and allowed the evidence found in Booker Hudson’s home to be used against him.
By its action the majority also forestalled claims similar to Hudson’s. The second-guessing by prosecutors and judges of reasonable judgments made by the police in the execution of their duties — especially in the execution of lawful warrants — is not a defense of liberty. Rather, it undermines liberty by making it easier for predators like Booker Hudson to elude justice, on the questionable theory that “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”
I contend, further, that a proper reading of the Constitution would require either “knock-and-announce” or a warrant, not both. At the time of the framing, when “knock-and-announce” was accepted law, warrants were not accepted law. As William J. Stuntz writes in The Heritage Guide to the Constitution (pp. 326-9):
. . . When the Fourth Amendment was written, the sole remedy for an illegal search or seizure was a lawsuit for money damages. Government officials used warrants as a defense against such lawsuits. Today a warrant seems the police officer’s foe — one more hoop to jump through — but at the time of the Founding it was the constable’s friend, a legal defense against any subsequent claim. Thus it was perfectly reasonable to specify limits on warrants (probable cause, particular description of the places to be search and the things to be seized) but never to require their use.
Hudson served justice, while remaining true to the original meaning of the Constitution.
Hudson may not have been the high point of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, but it was among the higher points.
No matter how much money is spent to combat poverty, crime, sloth, slovenliness, rudeness, obesity, poor grades, and all other “social ills,” those “ills” cannot and will not be cured unless three things change:
1. The state quits discouraging innovation, entrepreneurship, and capital investment through taxation and regulation.
2. The state quits subsidizing the less capable at the expense of the more capable, which subsidization (a) helps to ensure the reproduction of the less capable at a faster rate that of the more capable, and (b) traps the less capable in a cycle of dependency which prevents them from taking ownership of their lives and striving to escape the ills of poverty, crime, sloth, etc.
3. The state quits discouraging heterosexual marriage, family formation, and the inculcation of traditional values. The state discourages those things through its bureaucracies, public schools, and public universities, which (altogether) celebrate “diversity” and “alternative lifestyles,” belittle religion, denigrate traditional marriage, foster teen sex through contraception, elevate abortion to a secular sacrament, underwrite single motherhood, encourage mothers to work outside the household, and enable couples to divorce at the drop of a hat rather than work out their differences.
I have written so many related posts that I cannot begin to list all of them. I refer you to “The Best of Liberty Corner.”
Regarding the HBO mini-series, John Adams, I have two comments:
1. I never got used to the idea of Paul Giamatti as John Adams. Giamatti simply doesn’t look the part, and he never seemed to be comfortable with the hybrid English-Yankee accent chosen for his character.
2. The mini-series was geared to viewers who are largely ignorant of American history. Why else would the script writers have kept injecting trite dialog to “establish” well-known facts? The final episode, for example, included cumbersome reminders that John Quincy Adams (John’s eldest son) also served as president (1825-9), and that both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the Fourth of July 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Doug Mataconis accuses an Arizona legislator of “trying to turn schools into propaganda mills.” In fact, according the quotation furnished by Mataconis, the legislator is trying to do just the opposite:
[Arizona Senate Bill] 1108 states, “A primary purpose of public education is to inculcate values of American citizenship. Public tax dollars used in public schools should not be used to denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization.”
Given that public schools already are government-sponsored propaganda mills — usually for anti-American, anti-market crap — the proposed measure seems reasonable to me. As long as government is in the business of running schools, it ought to run them in ways that don’t spread discord and preach the “social gospel” according to Al Gore, Michael Moore, and their ilk.
I’m a product of public schools whose teachers (probably) were old-time Republicans, and who extolled the virtues of “dead, white males” like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. We need more of that, not less.
I agree with everything Tom Smith says about his Weber Grill — I have one just like it. (Though mine isn’t hooked to a 1,000 gallon propane tank.) It does run hot, but when you become accustomed to that, you can reliably produce a steakhouse-quality steak, succulent grilled chicken, and crusty-juicy pork tenderloin. I’ve never had a grill — gas or charcoal — that came close to matching the Weber Spirit for consistently flavorful results.
I once wrote something along these lines:
[T]he very idea that one’s personal opinion has anything to do with the existence or non-existence of God is fundamentally irrational.
The writer, in this instance, is one “Vox Day,” author of The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. For my dissections of that trinity, and of irrational atheism, see:
“Same Old Story, Same Old Song and Dance” (26 Nov 2004)
“Atheism, Religion, and Science ” (03 Jan 2005)
“The Limits of Science ” (05 Jan 2005)
“Beware of Irrational Atheism” (22 Jan 2005)
“Science, Logic, and God” (08 Nov 2005)
“Debunking “Scientific Objectivity”” (16 Jan 2006)
“The Big Bang and Atheism” (04 Nov 2006)
“The Universe . . . Four Possibilities” (07 Jan 2007)
“Einstein, Science, and God” (06 Apr 2007)
“Atheism, Religion, and Science Redux” (01 Jul 2007)
“A Reminder” (15 Aug 2007)
“Collegiate Crap-ola” (28 Sep 2007)
“A Non-Believer Defends Religion” (31 Oct 2007)
“Evolution as God?” (02 Nov 2007)
“The Greatest Mystery” (24 Dec 2007)
“A Sensible Atheist Speaks” (16 Jan 2008)
“In Search of Consistency” (12 Mar 2008)
“Religion in Public Schools: The Wrong and Right of It” (03 Apr 2008)
Politics and Prosperity 