Michael Ramirez cartoon retrieved from his Substack.
The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.
1. It is that simple. "Higher education has lost the support and trust of the American public."
2. Buy popcorn and munitions. "The new political leadership in Chicago is poised to offer a radically different alternative—one that rejects market exaltation and instead reverses long standing inequities, ensures economic security, and provides for the elements of a dignified life."
3. Here we are. "Nancy Pelosi and others kept going on about Our Democracy™ when what they meant was 'our oligarchy.'" And Our Power. "The Democrats’ Definition Of Democracy Is Like The Marxist Definition Of Peace." And Our Gerontocracy Forever.
4. Blackboard economics? "The concept of government failure has been trapped in the cocoon of the theory of perfect markets. Narrowly defined deviations from market perfection have been designated market failures, for which government corrections may or may not really be a solution." Markets fail. Use markets.
5. Blame relative price shifts, not wage stagnation. Labor force participation has its consequences. "Men have stayed even in earning power over the decades but the standard of living is increasingly based on dual earners."
6. The lion shall lie down with the lamb. "Now as always, the physicians of the American soul must resist the temptation to put what is popular over what is wise."
7. Who trusts higher education anymore? It's not even higher. "Well, then the children are having to stay one extra year in college based on loans that they have taken for work that they should have completed when they were in high school." We could send the bad debt to the high schools.
8. Cheer up, it could get worse. So I cheered up. "Anybody with any sense of history will remember that the history of Russia is that everything can always get worse."
9. I saw the future, and it failed. "Most social movements associated with what many now think of as 'the heroic Sixties' turned out to be complete disasters, which is now thought a bit rude to discuss honestly. A short, offhand list of these failures might include: the embrace of drug culture, the extremes of the sexual revolution and the latter waves of feminism, pay-per-child welfare, mental-patient deinstitutionalization, community policing, and pleasure-based sex education." What comes next? "It’s really Pride Part Two." That's what Lakeview voted for.
10. Share the misery! "Equity is at the center of Biden's economic policy, and will not stop until average Americans are equally poor!" The communists in his coalition notice! "Does Bidenomics Include Deadly Poverty?" Inevitably: "Bidenomics is the embrace of Big Government, Big Labor and Big Spending." Seasoned with the usual spin. "Use rhetoric as a substitute for performance." That is, for demented-coot values of rhetoric.
11. It never stood a chance. "We embarked on nation-building when the task confronting us was really that of changing a civilization." Civilizational change is emergent. "Americans may be forgiven, after the last quarter-century, for thinking [the arc of history] just wobbles around, not always predictably, and that getting things right requires not just wisdom and energy but also a dollop of good luck."
12. A suggestion? "Maybe the DEI Task Force could investigate how South Africa’s Apartheid government discriminated among various races."
13. So it always is with court intellectuals. "The confirmation of the lab leak theory would also mean that all the mainstream journalists, establishment scientists, and social media moderators who derided its adherents as conspiracy theorists were stunningly wrong."
15. I am a man. "I am not a ‘cisgender man’." Please refer to me as Normal. "Why not just call people who don’t pretend to change their gender exactly what they are instead of making up a silly term that sounds 'woke' or whatever?" We could stop overworking the term gender. Sex is binary. Personality is a continuum. "Sex is a biological reality; race is largely a cultural phenomenon."
16. The fundamental contradiction of socialization. "Schools exist to stifle freedom, and also to inculcate it, a dialectic that is the essence of true education."
17. Hilarious. "Lefties are attacking and smearing women who are literally fighting the patriarchy." Faction fighting worthy of pro wrestling! "Feminists, who pioneered the concepts of 'gender' and 'sex' as social constructs with no grounding in biology, birthed this transgender monster that has now taken over their political movement. They opened — through their pseudo-philosophy propagated first through the university system in the West, which then seeped into popular culture and lower levels of education — the gender ideology pandora’s box."
18. When others deny coherent beliefs, it becomes obligatory to restate the obvious. "Sex is substantially different from race, and treating sex the same as race would be a profound injustice for women in sports."
20. Freedom Weekend is upon us, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Let the Republic have a new birth of freedom. "Let it be one that holds its sense of crusading zeal in check and gives full measure to the virtue of self-restraint." Plus: "True patriotism involves preventing and stopping wars instead of starting and continuing them." In a quarter-millennium, we got a few things right. "The Constitution has an uncanny power. When you follow it, things go well. When you don’t things go wrong."
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