This weekend’s column at Townhall.com covers the perennial legislative itch to suppress citizen input — this time in Michigan. Go on over, but come back here to check out links to relevant articles:
Category: links
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Townhall: Dale Carnegie, Where Are You?
This weekend on Townhall, a suggestion to Republicans: what not to do! Click over to Townhall and then come back here for references and further reading:
- “Libertarians Squabble with Rep. Nate Bell’s Criticism” at the Arkansas Times Blog
- Maximilien de Robespierre, on Wikipedia
- Gary Johnson post-election interview with TIME
- “The Voters Who Stayed Home,” by Andrew McCarthy of National Review
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Townhall: Over the Cliff?
Sometimes it seems that politicians have set up for us a Looming Financial Doom.
Why would they do that? And how do we avoid it?
Expanding on the subject of Friday’s Common Sense, I try to tackle both questions in this weekend’s Townhall column, “Over the Cliff.”
The column takes a few long quotations from The Washington Post article, and one short quotation from the actual study. Also linked in the column is a Common Sense from some time back, about public employees gaming the public employee pension system. It’s worth noting that the chief problem with the system is that it is badly rigged. But the gaming doesn’t help.
I use the phrase “cordon off” — it is interesting to remember that “cordon” basically means “rope off,” but that “cordon” doesn’t mean “rope.”
For a previous discussion of the metaphor of the “fiscal cliff,” see “Cliff Notes.”
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Townhall: Confused, Concerned, and Canaried
This weekend’s Townhall column by Yours Truly is, truly, an expansion of Thursday’s Common Sense. The story just couldn’t be confined to one brief comment, I guess. Check it out.
Oh, here are links to articles and relevant reading matter:
- Dr. McCaskill’s entire press conference
- Family Research Council video on bullying and Dr. McCaskill
- Facebook message
- Article on the fracas
- Article on the backlash
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Townhall: Racist Anti-Racism
This weekend’s Townhall column is about race. It is long, in part because talking about race is still so tricky that brief discussions can be easily taken out of context.
And there’s so much to say.
I expand on some comments I made on Friday. But I try to spell out the logic at greater length. So it doesn’t get missed. Racism is an affront to justice. Justice tries to mete out what people deserve, individually. It is especially concerned about establishing basic rules of how to behave. It doesn’t answer every problem of society. It answers crime with punishment and restitution, answers torts with redress. But it does so based on individual responsibility.
Racism is wrong because it judges individuals not on their merits, but by their race. It’s stupid as well as ugly and unjust.
Progressives, however, have been trying to overthrow the old idea of justice as personal freedom and individual responsibility since Progressivism first became an Era.
So it’s no wonder they spread a response to racism that is itself racist. They don’t understand what justice is. So they make an unjust response to an injustice.
Anyway, go over to the column and give it a read. Come back here and tell me what you think.
You will probably be brimming with ideas, complaints, responses. Fine. Me too. One idea I couldn’t include in the column was the sources for some of today’s inner-city African-American problems. It sure seems like they’ve been selected, by racists, for some horrible burdens. But I wouldn’t be hasty on this.
It’s certainly true that official policy has played a huge role in destroying a lot of lives in the inner cities (especially but not limited to African-Americans) — the progressive trifecta of minimum wage raises, welfare aid to families without in-home fathers, and the war on drugs, has devastated the culture of many inner city blacks. Some folks call one of more of these policies “racist,” but the intent, usually, has seemed to be color-blind. That these policies have hit African-American communities especially hard may be more of an accident of history than a policy of repression. But I could be wrong.
Writers from my perspective were once called liberal. Self-defined “Progressives” took over that word in the FDR era. But that hasn’t stopped us from continuing to uphold a commonsense view of justice. Important contributions to the study and advocacy of this concept of justice as they relate to racial issues include
- The Economics of the Colour Bar, by W.H. Hutt
- The Other Side of Racism, by Anne Wortham
- Race and Culture, by Thomas Sowell
- Black Rednecks and White Liberals, by Thomas Sowell
- The State Against Blacks, by Walter Williams
These are all books worth looking up. For further reading about the links between laissez-faire individualism and true anti-racism, you couldn’t do better than start your reading here:
- “Selling Laissez Faire Antiracism to the Black Masses: Rose Wilder Lane and the Pittsburgh Courier,” by David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito
- “The Origin of the Term ‘Dismal Science’ to Describe Economics,” by Robert Dixon
- “Racism,” by Ayn Rand
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Townhall: United We Term-Limit
Over at Townhall, a defense of term limits. Read the column (in which I reference a conference I attended yesterday, see image at right), and come back here. If you don’t find the links, below, satisfying, search the archives of This Is Common Sense (this very site) and you’ll find quite a lot about term limits.
- U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton is the Supreme Court case that badly decided federal limits, and limited the term-limits movement, by denying to the states the power to regulate the terms of their own representatives.
- The ballot initiative is explained, also, at Ballotpedia.
- Term limits remain overwhelmingly popular, as shown by a recent poll of Illinois voters.