FRIDAY short TAKES.

Even the brightest among you could benefit by a modicum of repetition.  "[N]egative unintended consequences are the hallmark of progressive ideology."  That's something Ronald Reagan grasped, long ago.  "Want to know why working-class voters of all races are abandoning the Democrats? It’s because the Democrats have abandoned working-class voters."

The weekly round-up of pithy reinforcements of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

1.  The way to demonstrate the folly of a rule is to comply with it.  "Instead, the offended Republican student filed a harassment complaint."

2.  Harry Truman might understand.  "It’s not hateful to show the truth."

3.  The value of the social sciences.  "[I]f you can’t find something interesting among money, sex and power, I really don’t know what to tell you."  See also sex, death, and why the lines are longest at the roller coaster.

4.  The self-sabotage is deliberate.  "Academia is a rotting tower of scholars’ dogmatic resentment and sinking fast under the weight of administrators’ glut."

5.  Reject the Cult.  "Congressional Democrats want the president to act like a king, but only when that president is a Democrat."

6.  Margaret Thatcher, meet Richard Musgrave?  "In theory, this method can only work for so long, until you run out of efficient and productive ways to raise taxes on the affluent. In practice, the American tax system is nowhere near that point."

7.  Are public universities censorship per se?  "When public universities take sides on controversial political issues—and expect their faculty to do the same—one consequence is trampled constitutional rights."

8.  Build that wall?  "[Washington, D.C. mayor Muriel] Bowser sounded like Governors [Greg] Abbott and [Doug] Ducey [of Texas and Arizona] when she said that local taxpayers should not have to pick up the tab for illegal migrants bused into town."

9.  The absence of bourgeois norms?  "Put simply, it is the culture, not the guns."

10.  Their incompetence is their diversity, civilian edition.  "[T]he people concludes two things: [Jarrett regency officials] are either crazy, incompetent, or ignorant of ancient human nature, and they were appointed to their positions for reasons that have nothing to do with either experience or competence.

11.  Individuals ought be sovereign.  "Those who, in the future, continue to insist that we disarm ourselves and venerate government enforcers who are tasked to protect us should be unceremoniously kicked to the curb."

12.  Geh' auf, Giftzwerg!  "He is long past his sell-by date and has inflicted incalculable damage on the United States."

13.  Rent-seekers gotta seek rents!  "Government doesn’t work and it particularly doesn’t work for ordinary people trying to make better lives for themselves."

14.  The reality of child labor.  "Why are people so desperate to earn money that they would risk their lives and the lives of their children and families?"  We are, all of us, underemployed compared with our ancestors.

15.  Mock boutique multiculturalists!  "It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose."

16.  Weimar America, or the TQIA++ nutters.  "A conservative seeking some swing of the cultural pendulum back to the center is not a fascist."

17.  I want better choices, or perhaps younger ones.  "Everything that has gone wrong in the Biden era was predictable, and in fact was predicted, by those not blinded by Trump-hatred."

18.  It's Crazy Bernie's platform.  "Sanders does not care about Biden’s agenda; he’s irked because Manchin is undermining his totalitarian goals."

19.  Their incompetence is their diversity, military version.  "It’s another to enlist in a service with a corrupt and incompetent civilian leadership and a senior military leadership that’s no better."