Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

The decline of free speech

HT The Brussels Journal

Variants of interventionism

At Secular Right Heather Mac Donald makes the following observation:

We are not moving from pure capitalism to pure socialism, we are moving from an already highly regulated, corporate- and individual-welfare-saturated economy to an even more regulated and redistributed economy.  (And we didn’t get to our welfare-saturated state without popular support for trying to minimize risk, [...]

John Derbyshire’s hard-headed realism

Paul Gottfried reviews John Derbyshire’s latest book We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, which appears to make a secular, empirical case for “hard-headed realism.”

Although We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism would appear to be a light read, brimful of anecdotal asides, first impressions can and, at least in this case, do deceive. Derbyshire’s work is [...]

Politicized health insurance

Heather Mac Donald draws attention to the gradual transformation of private  health insurers to highly regulated providers of entitlements:

Democrats (and some Republicans) regularly bash health insurance companies for not covering preexisting conditions.  But isn’t that like expecting a home insurance company to write a policy for fire after your house has already burned down?  Health [...]

Parasite-In-Chief

Theodore Dalrymple on the culture of inflation

In the Summer 2009 issue of City Journal Theodore Dalrymple  discusses the cultural effects of inflation:

asset inflation—ultimately, the debasement of the currency—as the principal source of wealth corrodes the character of people. It not only undermines the traditional bourgeois virtues but makes them ridiculous and even reverses them. Prudence becomes imprudence, thrift becomes improvidence, sobriety [...]

The Whole Foods boycott and modern liberalism

Commenting on the call for a boycott of Whole Foods by liberal activists, Donald J. Boudreaux draws attention to the double standard of modern liberals when it concerns voting with one’s dollars:
How hypocritical. Persons who seek greater government control over health care proudly exercise their ability to vote with their dollars to avoid patronizing a [...]