A Few Random Things
I like to email articles to myself to post at a later date, but occasionally I notice that my mailbox is full of this stuff and I haven't done anything with it so I dump it on you like this:
1) Jonah Goldberg makes an eloquent argument in favor of the "Don't just do something, stand there!" school of conservative thought:
I've written many times in favor of doing nothing on all sorts of policy issues. In any debate, the law of unintended consequences is the conservative's greatest ally. Pick a "reform" - from campaign finance to welfare - and you'll find the law at work and see the wisdom of Chesterton's observation that "progress is the mother of problems." Child-safety caps have led to more deaths, because the "protection" they offer has lulled parents into greater laziness about leaving dangerous medications around children. Mandatory bicycle helmets for children seem to have contributed to a similar increase in bike accidents. Rent control makes housing more expensive for poor people and gives unfair subsidies to the middle and upper classes.
Calvin Coolidge noted long ago, "When you see ten problems rolling down the road, if you don't do anything, nine of them will roll into a ditch before they get to you." If Congress had taken this advice a decade ago, maybe the financial scandals of today wouldn't be so bad.
Another Coolidge quote: "Four-fifths of all our troubles would disappear, if we would only sit down and keep still."
Also, New Hampshire's first governor (and a personal hero of mine), Josiah Bartlett belonged to this school: According to a recent news article: "Bartlett took his ideas of limited government seriously. In 1792 he told members of the legislature that they had carried out their duties so well that he could not think of anything for them to do. They packed their bags and went home." The same article noted that, "Bartlett was a reluctant politician, and in any case he was more public servant than politician."
(West Wing's Josiah Bartlett has *nothing* on the original!)
Of course, this doesn't mean that obvious wrongs should be addressed. It only means that we should be more judicious in dealing with social and economic problems and not do anything just for the sake of doing something.
2) The Weekly Standard recently posted a great article about Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. My favorite part was the penultimate paragraph:
Therein lies the heart of the difference between O'Connor and Roberts. O'Connor's endorsement test ultimately relies on how people perceive themselves, whether they sense themselves as outsiders or full members of the political community. Her overwhelming concern is how people feel, rather than how they are actually treated. Unfortunately, subjective feelings are a notoriously unreliable legal criterion, and one that inevitably leads--as O'Connor herself learned in the Pledge case--to a tyranny of the easily offended. Roberts, in marked contrast, proceeds on the basis of tradition and of common sense, both of which suggest that religious establishments trespass the Constitution only when they preferentially receive public funds, or rely on the force of the state.
3) The Left is eying your home! (Hat tip to babzen.)
4) Greg Gutfeld (editor of Maxim in Britain) wrote a satirical piece for the Huffington Post criticizing the New Age guru Deepak Chopra's recent statements expressing moral relativism regarding World War II and the War on Terror. Gutfeld is hilarious.
5) Veterans returning from the war in Iraq are finding that college campuses are quite hostile (so much for "support the soldiers, oppose the war"!):
As college students hit campuses across the nation this week, a new generation of young veterans will step off the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan and onto the ideological battlefield of our university campuses. For those on the frontline in the war on terror, the antiwar hostility of liberal professors and campus activists will assuredly prove unsettling.
Just ask Marine sergeant Marco Martinez, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a full-time psychology major at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, Calif.
"A woman on campus had apparently learned I might be a Marine. When I told her I was, she said, "You're a disgusting human being, and I hope you rot in hell!'"
Indeed, Martinez, who will be the first male in his family to receive a college diploma, says he is receiving more of an education than he bargained for: "There are a lot of people who don’t appreciate military service in college," Martinez said. "If someone asks me about it, and I think that they’re not too liberal, I might tell them I was in Iraq. But I don't tell them the full extent of it or anything about the Navy Cross."
1) Jonah Goldberg makes an eloquent argument in favor of the "Don't just do something, stand there!" school of conservative thought:
I've written many times in favor of doing nothing on all sorts of policy issues. In any debate, the law of unintended consequences is the conservative's greatest ally. Pick a "reform" - from campaign finance to welfare - and you'll find the law at work and see the wisdom of Chesterton's observation that "progress is the mother of problems." Child-safety caps have led to more deaths, because the "protection" they offer has lulled parents into greater laziness about leaving dangerous medications around children. Mandatory bicycle helmets for children seem to have contributed to a similar increase in bike accidents. Rent control makes housing more expensive for poor people and gives unfair subsidies to the middle and upper classes.
Calvin Coolidge noted long ago, "When you see ten problems rolling down the road, if you don't do anything, nine of them will roll into a ditch before they get to you." If Congress had taken this advice a decade ago, maybe the financial scandals of today wouldn't be so bad.
Another Coolidge quote: "Four-fifths of all our troubles would disappear, if we would only sit down and keep still."
Also, New Hampshire's first governor (and a personal hero of mine), Josiah Bartlett belonged to this school: According to a recent news article: "Bartlett took his ideas of limited government seriously. In 1792 he told members of the legislature that they had carried out their duties so well that he could not think of anything for them to do. They packed their bags and went home." The same article noted that, "Bartlett was a reluctant politician, and in any case he was more public servant than politician."
(West Wing's Josiah Bartlett has *nothing* on the original!)
Of course, this doesn't mean that obvious wrongs should be addressed. It only means that we should be more judicious in dealing with social and economic problems and not do anything just for the sake of doing something.
2) The Weekly Standard recently posted a great article about Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. My favorite part was the penultimate paragraph:
Therein lies the heart of the difference between O'Connor and Roberts. O'Connor's endorsement test ultimately relies on how people perceive themselves, whether they sense themselves as outsiders or full members of the political community. Her overwhelming concern is how people feel, rather than how they are actually treated. Unfortunately, subjective feelings are a notoriously unreliable legal criterion, and one that inevitably leads--as O'Connor herself learned in the Pledge case--to a tyranny of the easily offended. Roberts, in marked contrast, proceeds on the basis of tradition and of common sense, both of which suggest that religious establishments trespass the Constitution only when they preferentially receive public funds, or rely on the force of the state.
3) The Left is eying your home! (Hat tip to babzen.)
4) Greg Gutfeld (editor of Maxim in Britain) wrote a satirical piece for the Huffington Post criticizing the New Age guru Deepak Chopra's recent statements expressing moral relativism regarding World War II and the War on Terror. Gutfeld is hilarious.
5) Veterans returning from the war in Iraq are finding that college campuses are quite hostile (so much for "support the soldiers, oppose the war"!):
As college students hit campuses across the nation this week, a new generation of young veterans will step off the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan and onto the ideological battlefield of our university campuses. For those on the frontline in the war on terror, the antiwar hostility of liberal professors and campus activists will assuredly prove unsettling.
Just ask Marine sergeant Marco Martinez, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a full-time psychology major at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, Calif.
"A woman on campus had apparently learned I might be a Marine. When I told her I was, she said, "You're a disgusting human being, and I hope you rot in hell!'"
Indeed, Martinez, who will be the first male in his family to receive a college diploma, says he is receiving more of an education than he bargained for: "There are a lot of people who don’t appreciate military service in college," Martinez said. "If someone asks me about it, and I think that they’re not too liberal, I might tell them I was in Iraq. But I don't tell them the full extent of it or anything about the Navy Cross."