Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
That is the title of my latest Bloomberg column, the inspiration for which came from an Alex T. tweet. Here is one passage: Economists themselves have been of no great help. My Twitter feed includes plenty of the world’s greatest (or at least best-known) economists. They love to debate Elizabeth Warren’s plan for a wealth … Read more
Victor Davis Hanson | Nationalism Good and Bad: Lessons from History Take all the signature brand names that the Baby Boomers inherited from prior generations—Harvard, Yale, the New York Times, NPR, CNN, the Oscars, the NFL, the NBA, the FBI, the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, and a host of others. And … Read more
Why progressivism can never stop . . . Warren is emblematic (not alone but in the forefront) of the left wing of the Democratic party’s revelatory shift in self-description: Onetime liberals are now progressives. Liberals believe in the capacity of government to do good. Progressives believe that government’s job is to push society forward toward … Read more
Presidential aspirant Beto O’Rourke, thrashing about in an attempt to be noticed, says tax exemptions should be denied to churches and other institutions that oppose same-sex marriage. O’Rourke’s suggestion, and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren’s plan to tax the “excessive” exercise of a First Amendment right, and the NBA’s painful lesson about the perils of moral … Read more
Why do those so concerned with economic justice sneer at the country’s poorest region? In polite company among the technocratic elite, it’s acceptable to ridicule the South, Southern culture, and Southern politics. The Left has especially skewered Southern states for seeking to restrict abortion “rights.” Before that, North Carolina suffered ridicule—and punishment at the hands … Read more
Imagine one vast airport that you cannot leave. With apologies to Margaret Atwood and a thousand other dystopian novelists, we do not have to theorize about what an American police state would look like, because we know what it looks like: the airport, that familiar totalitarian environment where Americans are disarmed, stripped of their privacy, … Read more
Speed and red-light cameras are the bane of many motorists. A modern idea made possible by technology, they have been installed in at least 24 states. Although these cameras are a revenue boon for governments across the nation, their intrusion into daily life is disturbing, and their constitutionality is dubious. Specifically, use of these cameras … Read more