This is a must read, an absolutely excellent piece. For you
NY Times lovers, pay attention. For you NY Times haters, it says what you
have been preaching for years.
If you think we need the government to make industries
competitive, you have the wrong view of what true competition is. Watch
the video.
This article was written in 1998 and pertained to Bill
Clinton. But the effects predicted in this
article came true. Bush and Obama (and almost assuredly Trump) have and
will continue to extend the power of the executive branch and we have failed to
reign in this power. We must work towards this goal now.
"ONE
OF THE MOST DISTURBING aspects of the whole presidential impeachment crisis is
the number of people who seem to think that this is about Bill Clinton and
Monica Lewinsky. What they did in the past and how they will deal with it in
the future are things that can be left to them ---- and to the tabloids.
What
matters is not their past but this country's future. All the talk about whether
Clinton has been genuinely contrite, or contrite enough, is completely beside
the point. No one needs to see someone grovel. We certainly do not need to see
the President of the United States grovelling to keep his job, especially since
he must continue to represent us to other countries and to the world, so long
as he is in office.
Repeated
perjuries and an orchestrated campaign of obstruction of justice have happened.
Nothing can change that. You cannot unring the bell.
All
that can be done now is to choose whether perjury and obstruction of justice
will be condoned or punished. There is no third way, however much some
politicians and journalists might like to have one. When
all is said and done, either the president gets away with perjury and
obstruction of justice or he doesn't.
Either way, it won't change the
past. But it can make a huge difference to the future of this country. And that
is the real issue, not Clinton or Lewinsky or Starr or anybody else.
We in
the twentieth century have no excuse for forgetting the enormous dangers that
go with letting leaders be lawless because they are popular. Many of the
horrors of this century resulted from leaders whose popularity allowed them to
ignore laws.
Lenin,
Hitler and Mao were all popular -- and millions paid with their lives for the
power that popularity gave them. This is not to compare Clinton with them. On
the contrary, Clinton's past and future deeds are as nothing compared to what
others who hold the power of the presidency can do in the future if he gets
away with his violations of laws and his corruption of our institutions.
At this point, Clinton doesn't matter and
his contrition doesn't matter, whether real or fake. In the context of history
-- and what is happening in Congress now is historic, regardless of how it
turns out -- Clinton just happens to be the man who confronted us with this
challenge to the rule of law."
Is income derived from 1) getting there
first, 2) winning the lottery from some grand dealer in life, or 3) our own
capacity to please our fellow man? What
do you believe?
“We just might ask ourselves: Where is a
society headed that holds its most productive members up to ridicule and makes
mascots out of its least productive and parasitic members?”
Williams articulates what I believe to be the most basic
argument against government intervention: we don’t even know what we don’t
know!
"… mankind’s total
knowledge of all that can be known is trivial. Another is some people act as if
they know it all and, in their roles as politicians and bureaucrats, they
forcibly impose what they see as their “superior wisdom” on others. These
barbarians have forgotten Richard Whatley’s warning, “He who is not aware of
his ignorance will be only misled by his knowledge.” Not only will these people
mislead themselves, if they have power they’ll mislead a nation."
The author presents the libertarian case for
open immigration borders.
"In the early stages of
interventionism, the emphasis is on keeping immigrants out. When state interventionism
gets more intense, the emphasis switches to preventing citizens from leaving —
as was the case in the USSR and all the Eastern European socialist countries.
It is true that socialist policies cannot
survive free migration. Welfare states are inherently unsustainable — the
problem is not the immigration; the problem is the socialist economic policies
of the state. Do you advocate dismantling socialist controls? Or do you
advocate propping up an unsustainable welfare state with the protectionism of
immigration controls?
If you are against welfare, make the argument
against the welfare system, not against immigrants on the basis that they might
someday take welfare. If you are worried that immigrants might vote for
politicians you dislike, be consistent and argue against the legitimacy of
anyone’s voting to take your money, not just someone who recently moved.
We
have a common enemy — the interventionist state. People moving from one home to
another across an artificial line are not initiating aggression. They are not
the enemy. Nineteenth-century classical liberals knew that. It’s a shame that
so many modern libertarians have forgotten it."
Are
we as Americans really as racist as we are made out to be? The author contends the term “racism” doesn’t
mean racism as such anymore. Instead, he
suggests the term is levied by progressives when others don’t agree with them.
"I wonder if the average American thinks
about his country in that way anymore. I wonder if the average American
understands how rare bias-motivated crimes are in his country. Since 9/11 we’ve
been warned about an impending violent backlash against Muslims. Yet even with
a number of horrific terrorist acts perpetrated by home-grown Islamists, it
still hasn’t happened. Of all hate crimes, 19.7 percent were reported as
religious bias. Among that group, 51.3 percent were reported as anti-Semitic
and 22.2 percent were anti-Muslim. (Also, 17.7 percent were committed against
one of the Christian faiths, which the FBI divides into multiple
categories.)"
"In truth, the reason racism is treated
as a grievous social sin is because it is so rare and intolerable in everyday
discourse. The Left compensates for this by constantly expanding the
description of bigotry to include anyone opposing their policy preferences. When everyone is a racist, no
one is."
The forgotten side of terrible public schools are the kids who are
bored in class going over the remedial material.
While I am not necessarily endorsing these suggestions, one point
is challenging to refute: There is a difference between health insurance and
health care. When we force coverage on everyone we take resources away
from figuring out how to best provide health care in
the most efficient manner instead of just health insurance.
READ THIS ONE. I 100%
agree.
1. Diversity of thought is the most important form of diversity.
Yet, this is the kind of diversity the supposedly “pro-diversity left”
tries to squash.
Exit the echo chamber
ß
2. The empirical benefits of other kinds of diversity are
lacking at very best.
3. The diversity of Trump voters is greater than the diversity of
Clinton voters by far - and this is not necessarily a good thing, but certainly
ironic.
4. The left has a less diverse view of what diversity itself is.
A meta irony.
Stop the madness while there is still time!
"Otherwise put, bureaucracy must not be
allowed to swell, it must be nipped in the bud, as reducing it will only become
increasingly difficult. In fact, the costs of reducing bureaucracy will often
act—though they should not—as a disincentive to demand such a process."
No need to click the link.
The quote is pasted below.
"But the same lack of knowledge on the part of any
single person or organization which makes it impossible for comprehensive planning
to replace the market also makes it irrational for a non-comprehensive planning
agency to try merely to ‘guide’ the market. If the guiding agency is less
knowledgeable than the system it is trying to guide – and even worse, if its
actions necessarily result in further undesired consequences in the working of
that system – then what is going
on is not planning at all but, rather, blind interference by some agents with
the plans of others."
"If the rising generation of
young progressives allow themselves to believe Donald Trump is just a bump in
the road to inevitable Democratic success, that nothing needs to change in
their message or their agenda, it could be that they are in for even more rude
awakenings in the future. The sooner they wake up to this political reality –
that the Obama coalition is harder to reassemble than just checking the right
boxes and rolling out the right celebrity endorsements, and that the moment
requires introspection and reevaluation of their prior assumptions – the sooner
they will grow to understand the nation as it is, not as they imagined it to
be."
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