We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A young woman recently commented to me that she thought one reason she was in love with a certain man was because he "made her feel safe." "Safe from what?" I asked. She thought for a minute and said "Safe from the world, I guess."
It's not an unusual topic of conversation among some of my more conservative lady pals to speculate about why women have some tendency to vote more Leftist than men do.
We have lots of theories, but more questions than anything else.
For some examples, Women are more caring and nurturing, less aggressive or more needy than men (maybe, possibly, I sort of doubt it but, if so, why would women think of government as a vehicle for those feelings?)
Or, Women are fearful of losing a man, and want government to step in as a husband if needed
Or, many women don't have a man, and would rather lean on government than on charity
Or, Women are more prone to parental transferences to powerful government, while masculine pride resists accepting government "help" because it makes them feel diminished
We have other theories too.
Here's a piece on a related topic at Reason: "Women vs. the State. It’s time to liberate ladies from unequal and unjust government policies."
James Q. Wilson had been frequently referred to that way. He knew about everything.
My first reading of him was in his The Moral Sense, back when it had just come out. The book made a lot of sense to me (if you haven't read it, those Amazon comments on it are helpful).
Here's a Wilson quote from the end of the book:
Mankind’s moral sense is not a strong beacon light, radiating outward to illuminate in sharp outline all that it touches. It is, rather, a small candle flame, casting vague and multiple shadows, flickering and sputtering in the strong winds of power and passion, greed and ideology. But brought close to the heart and cupped in one’s hands, it dispels the darkness and warms the soul.
Well, the OWS Movement didn't last through a rather mild winter. They may have some vigor left as the election cycle heats up, but for the most part the press has ceased to be impressed with their value.
It seems the Fed isn't all that impressed, either. While I'm no fan of the Fed as a manager of the economy, they do some fine research.
Income inequality should not be vilified, and public policy should encourage people to move up the income distribution and not penalize them for having already done so.
From Heather MacDonald's review of The City That Become Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control, It's the Cops, Stupid!
A quote:
New York’s safety surge torpedoes all conventional understandings about crime. To be sure, the country as a whole experienced its own record-breaking crime drop in the 1990s, but New York’s crime freefall was twice as steep—80 percent, as opposed to 40 percent—and lasted twice as long. Whereas America’s crime decline stalled in the 2000s, New York’s continued, cementing Gotham’s previously unimaginable status as the safest big city in the country.
You might think that criminologists would have flocked to New York to study how such a paradigm-shattering development happened. Instead, for the last decade and a half, the criminology profession has tried to look the other way. A favorite criminological pursuit in the 1990s was finding cities that equaled New York’s crime decline on a single front—homicide, say—in order to diminish the significance of what was happening in the nation’s largest city. San Diego and Boston were favorites of New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield and his professional sources, no matter how wildly different those localities’ demographics and overall crime rates were from New York’s. When, by the late ’90s, the crime drop in the rival cities had petered out or, as in the case of Boston, reversed itself, the profession lost interest in New York entirely. The city, after all, had two counts against it: it was presided over by a crusading Republican mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, who was targeting New York’s welfare culture as well as its violence and disorder, and all early indications suggested that responsibility for the crime decline lay with the newly focused, assertive tactics coming out of the New York Police Department.
Read the whole thing. I suspect that one reason NYC's success (and it is palpable when you visit these days) is not widely imitated in the big urban areas is because it doesn't fit Blue Social Theory. Blue Social Theory wants to deal with the "root causes of crime," when we already know the cause of crime is people - often bad people or addicts - behaving badly.
Mark Steyn elaborates on that pitiful citizen's sentiments in The Perversion of Rights. A quote:
When it comes to human rights, I go back to 1215 and Magna Carta — or, to give it its full name, Magna Carta Libertatum. My italics: I don’t think they had them back in 1215. But they understood that “libertatum” is the word that matters. Back then, “human rights” were rights of humans, of individuals — and restraints upon the king: They’re the rights that matter: limitations upon kingly power. Eight centuries later, we have entirely inverted the principle: “Rights” are now gifts that a benign king graciously showers upon his subjects — the right to “free” health care, to affordable housing, the “right of access to a free placement service” (to quote the European Constitution’s “rights” for workers).
We all surely agree that lying is immoral and, most of the time, a terrible thing to do. We all surely agree that lying by omission is equally evil, most of the time. As we say here, a lie is the theft of somebody else's reality.
In life, we tend to identify liars and to distrust them, figuring reasonably that if they lie about one thing, they just tend to be liars. It's not always true, of course, but it's a safe rule of thumb.
Claiming military honors offends a lot of people in a way that claiming honors for other subjects doesn’t. Personally, I think that outlawing things merely because they offend people is a bad idea (and unnecessary–you’ll note that the offender in this case got his comeuppance even before the law was applied), but that’s another argument.
Making lying illegal seems crazy to me. For starters, every politician would be convicted.
What kind of club is that, where half the members pay no dues? (chart via Foundry)
To mix metaphors, we believe that every citizen should have some skin in the game. It's only "fair."
Of course, from a political standpoint the Left wants all the free-loaders and dependents they can get. We all get that. (Look at what has been happening to Disability. After some time on Disability, no matter how functional, few will ever work again. It has become the new Welfare. Everybody has some disability, don't they? Nobody's perfect.) Here's a question from Bernie: Can Obama Win Re-Election by Promising Free Stuff?
Mr. Obama says he is not waging class warfare against the wealthy in America. He is, of course. His campaign slogan might as well be: ” Vote for Me … I’ll Give You Free Stuff.” This is enticing. Imagine if you pay no federal income taxes and one of the candidates says, “I’ll take money from rich people and give it to you to pay your mortgage – even if you were irresponsible and bought a house you couldn’t afford. Vote for me, I’ll make sure you get unemployment benefits for almost two full years. And, oh yeah, vote for me and I’ll make sure you get birth control pills — free of charge.
Half of our culture no longer puts death and taxes next to each other, no longer understands that Uncle Sam taking your money is a bad thing, no longer understands what angered Robin Hood and what prompted the Boston Tea Party. This half of our culture has actually reached a point that they view taxes as a noble form of patriotism and charity.
We need to start showing them how it’s affecting their lives on a daily basis. We must get people to hate taxes again and look at it as the absolutely minimal necessary evil that it’s intended to be. We don’t get there by scolding them. We get there by teaching them.
I'm sure Isaac Asimov was not a fan of capitalism, let alone the Republican Party (or even Libertarians). The movie I, Robotwas based on his series, primarily his work on the Three Laws of Robotics and some outcomes that may occur with their implementation. In some ways, the movie was a criticism of corporate culture and government becoming too interlaced. US Robotics becomes an overly powerful organization with deep ties to government, ultimately making the robot takeover very difficult to slow or stop. On the other hand, it's a criticism of Progressive overreach. Perhaps unknowingly.
There is one scene which reminded me of our current government's goals. The idea that we have politicians or bureaucrats who 'know better', and can guide us to a better place. All we have to do is agree to let them, and while many will be harmed, it will be for a 'better good'.
Public housing today, even in the post-welfare-reform era, continues to give priority to those of lowest income, which, as a practical matter, means female-headed, single-parent families, who still dominate the projects and the Section 8 housing-voucher program. Census data from the 1950s makes it possible to compare marriage rates in white and black St. Louis neighborhoods. The numbers show that black marriage rates have long lagged behind white rates. In nine predominantly black census tracts, married persons (husbands and wives, not including children) constituted 16.4 percent of the population. In predominantly white census tracts, the number was 24.5 percent—half again higher, before the advent of public housing. Without question, the perverse incentives of public housing and public assistance worsened this situation. In contrast, the incentives created by the private housing market—to maintain two-parent households so as to pool incomes in order to get ahead—would have worked in just the opposite direction.
It's really all about help that wasn't helpful - or even wanted - and perverse incentives.
Related: The Left Is Still Ignoring the Costs of Family Breakdown. In my opinion, the Left ignores it because it creates more household poverty, and thus more government dependency. When has the Left ever championed family values?
Was the Bill of Rights an error? It is debatable. If you recall, the NY delegation insisted on it.
Every time I find myself slipping into the modern statist mindset, the assumptions of which dominate so much political discourse, I try to step back and remind myself that the American experiment was not so much about instituting specific rights for individuals as it was about limiting the power and rights of the Federal state, leaving all the rest of the power to individual people (or the individual states and localities).
The problem with the Bill of Rights is that it makes it appear that those are the peoples' delimited rights. They even decided to stick in the #10, redundantly I think:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
America is not about rights. America is about the locus of power and self-determination. In other words, the government has (or had) strictly limited rights and powers. That sort of freedom from government was the whole point. Rights are for peasants and serfs, grasping for crumbs of freedom and autonomy or, in the "positive rights" lingo, grasping for freebies. American government was meant to be in handcuffs while we, the people, led our lives freely, and as we thought best.
Over time, political freedom has expanded in some ways: emancipation of slaves, women's suffrage. In other ways, the growth of the would-be leviathan state has usurped much individual freedom - albeit with the consent of the people who seek benefit from its growing power and wealth.
The Libertarian side of me would love to see "a new birth of freedom." Who is the greatest enemy of freedom from state power? Us - the voters, who have consistently for 100 years been willing to trade a birthright for a bowl of lentils.
The left believes strongly in social solutions. It believes that all our ills are social in nature and that social justice can only be practiced by a healthy society. Their idea of a healthy society is totalitarian but they have that in common with most ideologues who want a perfect state, rather than a free state.
Our idea of perfection is good old messy individual freedom and responsibility.
Barone today quoted the stunningly perspicacious de Toqueville:
"Thus, taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrial animals of which the government is the shepherd."
That is what House Republicans are fighting to reverse.
Penicillin, and its deadly poisonous antibiotic cousins, kill billions of life forms yearly. Some near-extinct critters hardly exist, these days, outside the zoos of biologists' labs. The little Anthrax critter, for example, and variola.
These little bugs are just as much a part of the ecosystem as any other living thing.
Photo is of the Pneumococcus, a species which humans attack and kill by the billions every year. Even good old treponema pallidum and yersinia pestis are near extinction.
Where is PETA? This is a serious biodiversity issue. The vast majority of earthly life forms require microscopes to see, but is that any reason to excuse man-made extinction of these critters?
Is it just because they don't look cuddly? Dr. William Osler famously termed pneumoccal pneumonia "the old man's friend" because it provided a peaceful ending.
ObamaCare is designed to become a government-controlled Welfare program for all, with insurance companies as back offices, check-paying services for a one-size-fits-all government program. Leviathan is always hungry. Freedom and free choice is the cost.
Are there really tons of folks out there who want the federal government in charge of their own medical care? Who really wanted this, except for government? And government employees are exempt from it, which just goes to show...
The politicization of medical help has only just begun. It's a feature, not a bug.
As an aside, recall that the Church supported Obamacare. Compassion, of course. Compassion without discernment is just vanity and foolishness.
What would this cost your kid in college? Or would they even offer it? This is an example of the New Education. How many Americans really know this stuff? Not many, I suspect.
If you can get through an American high school, much less an American college, without understanding our Constitution and its history, you cannot know enough to vote. Just my opinion, of course.
The American financial crisis was no more a failure of free markets than the European crisis was. Just as investors tried to signal that something was wrong with the euro, they tried for decades to show that something was rotten in American finance. The rot remains, but Washington has spent the past two years demonstrating that it would rather distort or block market signals than rely on them. This strategy thwarts economic recovery.
The financial system crashed in 2008 because vital checks on the financial industry had eroded long before. One of these checks was that the bondholders who lent money to banks had known that they would lose money if those banks failed and didn’t leave behind sufficient assets to pay their debt; only small depositors enjoyed government protection. But in 1984, the U.S. government saved a failing bank, Continental Illinois, from the normal bankruptcy process because its failure would have posed a threat to the global financial system. Thus was born the phenomenon popularly called “too big to fail.” Bondholders and other lenders to banks began to realize that in a crisis, they could count on intervention from the U.S. government, and they started lending to banks more and more carelessly—so banks grew still bigger and still more threatening to worldwide finance. Immunized by the government against losses, investors could no longer provide important market discipline for big banks.
Why is the US exceptional? Because it focuses on freedom from the state. That remains a revolutionary notion in an era in which so many want the State to be a beneficent God.
The revolution of the left is the stratified revolution of Barack Obamas and Elizabeth Warrens, greedy political activists feeding at the watering hole of government and crying out for more. More power. More laws. More chains. Parse the rhetoric and all you get is the powerful demanding that we give them more power. This revolution of the greedy and corrupt would already be dead if it had not used the momentum of its ideological fervor to embed itself into every institution and seize control of the educational system and the cultural dialogue to program succeeding generations to give it even more power.
The time is ripe for a true cultural and political revolution of the right, but that revolution has been hijacked over and over again by the gatekeepers who warn us that it's time to play nice, that we must think of the long game, that some issues have already been lost and we need to fight only for the core issues that matter to them lest we alienate people. The long march never ends in a last stand, only another tactical withdrawal on issue after issue.
Both cities' rent control laws began as emergencies to meet temporary housing crunches (you always need a "crisis" to create an opportunity for government control). Then your "emergency" action becomes permanent due to its newly-created constituency. That is how Leviathan grows.
If rent control were eliminated in NYC today, in short time there would be tons of new middle class rental housing built; supply up, prices down. The moral issue, though, is that these controls do constitute a form of government theft from the owners.
Did the Founding Fathers make an error? As much as anything else, this Robinson interview with Paul Rahe (that's #5 of 5)captured most of the key political issues with which we Maggie's Farmers are concerned today.
Some people desire to run other peoples' lives for their own good. I wish those Rahe interviews were on YouTube. They deserve to be.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, many are asking questions about how much freedom most people really want. How much freedom will the average person trade for a bowl of lentils? In other words, for security or for free money?
When I was in 6th Grade, our school had a speech contest, the title being "What Freedom means to me." Mine came in second. If I were doing that speech today, I'd probably come in last. Freedom from involuntary servitude - slavery - is of course basic, but freedom from government power is the beseiged freedom of today, just as it has always been.
A wonderful synopsis of Roger Williams' life and influences:God, Government and Roger Williams' Big Idea - Banished from Massachusetts, the Puritan minister originated a principle that remains contentious to this day—separation of church and state.
I had not known that he had been a pretty big deal in English government before coming to Boston.
When you read about the Puritans in the 1600s - or about the C of E at the time, it is reminiscent of today's Middle Eastern Moslems. No "tolerance," and religious beheadings.
A quote on the founding of The Providence Plantations (Rhode Island):
On March 14, 1644, Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Plantations granted Williams his charter.
The committee could have imposed a governor or defined the government. Instead, it authorized a democracy, giving the colonists “full Powre & Authority to Governe & rule themselves...by such a form of Civil Government, as by voluntary consent of all, or the greater Part of them shall find most suteable” so long as its laws “be conformable to the Laws of England, so far as the Nature and Constitution of the place will admit.”
Even more extraordinary, the committee left all decisions about religion to the “greater Part”—the majority—knowing the majority would keep the state out of matters of worship. Soul liberty now had official sanction.
Williams had created the freest society in the Western world. But he had only begun...
"But, by an inference as false as it is unjust, do you know what the economists are now accused of? When we oppose subsidies, we are charged with opposing the very thing that it was proposed to subsidize and of being the enemies of all kinds of activity, because we want these activities to be voluntary and to seek their proper reward in themselves. Thus, if we ask that the state not intervene, by taxation, in religious matters, we are atheists. If we ask that the state not intervene, by taxation, in education, then we hate enlightenment. If we say that the state should not give, by taxation, an artificial value to land or to some branch of industry, then we are the enemies of property and of labor. If we think that the state should not subsidize artists, we are barbarians who judge the arts useless."
Modern-Day Prohibition - The eternal temptation to ban things that give people pleasure. Stier begins:
The new Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary Prohibition is a five-and-a-half-hour missed opportunity to demonstrate why bans on substances are doomed from the start. Fortunately, for those who want to understand the irresistible lure of all types of prohibitions, there is Christopher Snowdon’sThe Art of Suppression: Pleasure, Panic and Prohibition Since 1800. Although Snowdon’s comprehensive history will never reach as many people as the PBS series, The Art of Suppression makes the case that Burns seems to go out of his way to avoid: that prohibition of products that people desire, whether alcohol a century ago or Ecstasy today, is bound to fail miserably.
The world is full of cranks and zealots who want to make you do whatever they think they should do. From my standpoint, I tend to want people to make up their own minds, and if they want to spend their lives half-stoned on heroin or pot, or fat from ice-cream and pastries, so be it. It's their life and their body.
The list of things of which I disapprove is long, but the list of things I would chose to apply power to prohibit is very short. Murder and theft, for starters.
"Pat Moynihan once encountered Nixon in the hall of the White House and said ‘Mr. President, James Q. Wilson is the smartest man in the United States. The president of the United States should pay attention to what he has to say.’"
... if you do good research on how the world really works, if you have the right data and the right assumptions, and you make the right arguments, and (even) if you do this in a nonpartisan and objective way, it will lead in the great majority of cases to conservative conclusions, because good research amplifies that the world operates, when it operates successfully, on principles that conservatives embrace. It reinforces our commitment to free enterprise, personal freedom, and military strength.
At Minding The Campus, Brooklyn College history professor KC Johnson presents the devastating critiques, from venues venerated by the left, of leftist Brooklyn College Political Science professor Corey Robin's book about conservatives.
As KC Johnson concludes:
Fifty years ago, academics frequently migrated in and out political life. Now, with the exceptions of a handful of fields (data-dependent economics; faculty from schools of law, business, or medicine, whose curricula are set in part by forces outside the academy), it's all but inconceivable to imagine professors whose views reflect the basic assumptions of their respective disciplines serving in responsible government positions. Indeed, with occasional exceptions (such as political scientists Brendan Nyhan or Jonathan Bernstein), it's hard to imagine academics outside of economics, the law, and medicine having much interesting to say about politics.
I suspect that most members of the majority viewpoint on today's campuses are willing to make the trade, firming up their power within the academy in exchange for losing virtually all influence in the public square. Whether society benefits from this exchange is another matter.
I nominated Corey Robin for leftist quote of the day. In short, Robin is a bird too commonly found in the professorate of US colleges.
James Q. Wilson had been frequently referred to that way. He knew about everything.
Was the Bill of Rights an error? It is debatable. If you recall, the NY delegation insisted on it. 
Penicillin, and its deadly poisonous antibiotic cousins, kill billions of life forms yearly. Some near-extinct critters hardly exist, these days, outside the zoos of biologists' labs. The little Anthrax critter, for example, and variola. 
A wonderful synopsis of Roger Williams' life and influences: