Benjamin Franklin could have crowdsourced Poor Richard's Almanack, if only he had faster horses to deliver the broadsheets. Meet this week's poster boy.
2. Vince Lombardi and I concur. "The question at hand, though, is whether [behavioral economics] should be taught at the expense of timeless knowledge — i.e., theories of opportunity cost, trade-offs, and supply and demand."
4. Let's play word substitution. "Her absence from Washington angered Democrats who have been frustrated by the enigmatic Arizonan." Cultivating mavericks is all of a sudden a lost art.
5. Perhaps the best thing government can do is go away. "If Democrats cannot govern even with the presidency and majorities in both houses, then it would demonstrate to the American people that democracy may not be workable in our current moment." A bipartisan coalition to trim back the excesses of the true believers of both extremes is a hard thing to find. "Stopping the next authoritarian attempt will require a broad, united opposition." Ross Douthat tells the Dems to stop crying with full mouths. "You have the America you wanted. Make the most of it."
6. Where the irritable mental gestures are. "People with left-wing economic views are more prone to more anxiety disorders." Read on, perhaps there's a reason for all the neurotic cat ladies in higher education.
7. Let's play some more word substitution. "It’s a shame Marx didn’t study the Greeks instead. The Greeks had a word for a class of free people who were disengaged from politics and civic life and had no desire to be part of it: idiots." Give us participants in politics and civic life who would like to be thought of as competent stewards rather than as petty tyrants, and disengagement makes more sense.
8. I remember when educators wanted more parent involvement. Perhaps school board types and principals were competent stewards rather than petty tyrants when that was the case. Families are fed up with a public education system that puts the needs of students last, and they are speaking up about it.
9. The plutocrat vacations in Florida and parks his fortune in South Dakota while his ukases kill the people who elected him to office but rejected his tax increase. "South Dakota's trust industry has attracted dynastically wealthy families to form 'dynasty trusts' including the Chicago Pritzker family (Hyatt hotels), the Minnesota Carlsons (Radisson Hotels), the Wrigley family (heirs of chewing gum magnate William Wrigley), and others."
10. The Bears still suck, no matter where they play. "Chicago really isn’t a very wunnerful place to live, work or throw a screen pass." Nobody should even think about picking the pockets of the taxpayers for a single dollar to build the Chicago Bears a new stadium in Arlington Heights.
11. Heavy-handed interference in market economies tends to produce the same pathologies we see in socialist economies, including shortages and inflation. [I]nterventions can't be massive infusions of force and capital, or we just end up seesawing from overcompensation to overcompensation, from solving one problem to creating three more.
12. Bertholt Brecht, call your office. "There it is, again — the view that people vote Republican because they are too benighted to understand their interests or to translate their values. An obvious alternative explanation — that Democrats have abandoned traditional values and turned their back on the working class — is off the table."
13. Complex adaptive systems tend to do what they d**n well please. “We’ve ascribed far too much human authority over the virus.”
14. New Zealanders should ask the American Question. "The same people who wear masks to ride bikes or walk all alone in the open air should have imagined that viruses find ways to travel round the world, but as we’ve seen, the smartest people in the room aren’t running the show anywhere these days."
15. Pitchforks, tar and feathers, or coal? "Anthony Fauci is a government adviser; he is not the suzerain of the American Calendar."
16. Living at the expense of others. "If the biggest the federal government can go is only funding (over the course of a decade) 12% of our highway maintenance backlog and 22% of our bridge maintenance backlog—rates of repair that will be dwarfed by the rate that more infrastructure falls apart and is added to the backlog—what do you think is going to happen to all that stuff in your community that you have no money to maintain?"
17. Straight talk about asking the credit card company for a higher borrowing limit. "For two and a half months, we have simply warned that since your party wishes to govern alone, it must handle the debt limit alone as well." I repeat, because repeat I must: if all that budget-busting spending is so popular, why not take pride in raising that credit limit?
18. Straight outta Bastiat. "It’s a deliberate policy of subsidized parasitism." Read the full post, there is plenty of parasitism to go around.
19. Exactly. "[W]hat they mean by 'our democracy' is their oligarchy."
20. The role of the university. The university campus is supposed to serve as a colosseum in the battle of ideas, not a place where students are conditioned to bite their tongues. Sometimes telling the truth is awkward. But it’s the civil thing to do.
25. Jane Jacobs "didn't trust masterminds." If that wisdom is percolating through to academic administrators, perhaps there will be generalizations to "creating the background conditions against which people could be their fullest selves."
26. Fourth Turning Alert. "An authoritarian oligarchy: jealously reserving power to those inside the structure is almost guaranteed to eventually become rigid, unstable and fragile, liable to fall apart once it begins to shut out rivals for power." Lively bull session.
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