“Starve the beast” has been the go-to strategy of American conservatives to restrain government spending since the 1970s, but in light of the reality of ever-increasing profligacy and ballooning debt and deficits even in the face of repeated tax cuts, “starve the beast” has gotten … Continue readingStarve the Beast: Still the Path to Smaller Government?
By now the “progressive hegemony”, or whatever you want to call it, over the arts, the entertainment industry, and sophisticates and cultural elites more generally is well-known, but almost everyone is missing a crucial piece of the puzzle: the creatives actually don’t like today’s mainstream … Continue readingArtists Exit Stage Left?
“Extremism can come in many forms,” President Biden said at a speech recently. “It can come in the rage of a mob driven to assault the Capitol. It can come in a smile and a fleece vest.” “Extremist” or not, turns out coming in a … Continue readingTriumph of the Fleece Vest
We’ve all heard the mantra “Build Back Better” so beloved by our political leaders, including President Joe Biden, but what does it mean? At last we have an answer on the White House website, as encapsulated in “The Life of Linda”. Here I will go … Continue readingUpgrading the Life of Linda
Kurt Gödel is famous for his “incompleteness theorems”, and ranks among the all-time great mathematicians (he was also a logician and a philosopher). What’s less well known about him is that he claimed to have discovered an “inner contradiction” in the United States Constitution, a … Continue readingGödel’s Loophole: My Pet Theory
What if I had a country to call my own, one that belonged to me, my very own answer to the Principalities of Liechtenstein or Monaco? First and foremost I’d want it to be a refuge of liberty, a free society where the best of … Continue readingIf I Had a Country
We should abolish elections and replace them with sortition, random selection from the citizenry, thus guaranteeing a representative body. I’ve posted about that before. But if we must have elections, what voting system should we use? Pure proportional representation, that’s what; specifically multi-winner ranked choice … Continue readingFor Proportional Representation
“9/11”: a word filled with feeling, the bulk of it bad, for all but those fortunate enough to have neither experienced nor heard of it. In the heat of the moment, when Islamic terrorists rammed two hijacked jet planes into the twin towers of the … Continue readingTwenty Years of Terror
The results of the 2020 United States Presidential election are well known by this point, and much analysis has been offered, including by myself on Twitter. For the first time on this blog I would like to offer some of the thoughts I’ve expressed in … Continue readingChecking in on American Politics: 2020 Edition
In recent years a perennial controversy has returned to the fore: namely, the issue of the state’s power to order the society it governs, of statecraft as soulcraft. “Liberalism” is usually the center of attention in such debates, but it’s recently struck me that the … Continue readingPost-Liberalism: An Echo, Not a Choice