Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Ruthless authoritarianism

As evidenced by the 2010 Health Care Summit, the governing philosophy of the current Administration is one of paternalistic authoritarianism.  After giving the semblance  of listening to different perspectives, progressive policy makers conclude that health care is too important to leave to individual decision making and requires a top-down approach from the central government. As [...]

Barack Obama: Authoritarian

The surprising defeat of the Democrats in the recent Massachusetts elections has unleashed a great number of opinion pieces about the  mistakes of the Obama administration. A common theme in these articles is that the Obama administration fails to recognize that the United States is a right-of-center nation that consistently rejects the far-left / progressive  [...]

The ruling class

In an engaging piece about the lack of ideological diversity in American theater Harry Stein makes the following perceptive observation:
Like liberals everywhere, its creators imagine they’re speaking truth to power—when, in fact, they are the power, and guard it as jealously as any of the right-wing, American-allied dictators of yore they grew up protesting against.
One [...]

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 [...]

Health care as a right?

To understand the background of the recent debates on health care it is instructive to look at how this issue  is being approached in “progressive” states like Oregon. Last year a Constitutional Amendment was discussed  which would declare access to health care in Oregon to be a “fundamental right.” But what is so progressive [...]