Why do governments keep subsidizing houses in hurricane zones?There's moral hazard at work. There might also be regressive transfers.
Sure, some people would live in risky areas no matter what. Some live in these areas already and can't afford to move. But government intervention in the insurance market has helped many more people move to these areas since the 1970s.
Whenever there's a major flood (doesn't matter if it follows a hurricane or a rain storm or it's just the spring thaw somewhere in the north) you'll get people talking about "hundred-year" or "thousand-year" or what have you flood events.Where a policy of making good flood damage looks like an inefficient use of resources, particularly if rising sea levels or stronger hurricanes are in our future, as the doomsday environmentalists would have it, as well as a regressive transfer, with the likes of the Obamas and Newt Gingrich and who knows how many other people you might have heard of qualifying for a rebuild of their beachfront property, perhaps there might be a consensus for no further subsidies to beachfront housing, no matter how appealing the view from the balcony might be.
And yes, there are people who lose that lottery multiple times, and perhaps there will be a moment when our political masters will sit down and rethink the current system of publicly subsidized flood insurance, under which the taxpayers replace the same damaged property, repeatedly. Not surprisingly, the flood insurance program replaces more than a little beach-front property for rent-seekers, and once the emergency passes, I intend to turn to that dimension of the situation.
I said that universities can have many goals (such as fiscal health and successful sports teams) and many values (such as social justice, national service, or Christian humility), but they can have only one telos, because a telos is like a North Star. It is the end, purpose, or goal around which the institution is structured. An institution can rotate on one axis only. If it tries to elevate a second goal or value to the status of a telos, it is like trying to get a spinning top or rotating solar system to simultaneously rotate around two axes. I argued that the sudden wave of protests and changes that were sweeping through universities were attempts to elevate the value of social justice to become a second telos, which would require a massive restructuring of universities and their norms in ways that damaged their ability to find truth.That sounds a lot like "The Costs of Correctness," although it differs in meaningful ways.
I expanded on this argument in a blog post for Heterodox Academy where I predicted that “the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable … Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict.” It’s now six years later, and I think it’s clear that this prediction has come true. It has been six years of near-constant conflict, with rising numbers of attempts to get scholars fired or punished for things they have said, and a never-ending stream of videos showing students (and sometimes professors) saying and doing things that are gifts to critics of universities and of the left. As one university president said to a friend of mine in 2019, “Universities are becoming ungovernable.” Public trust in universities has plummeted since 2015,² first on the right, but later across the board. We are in trouble.Indeed they are. The point of learning to think is to be able to recognize when somebody is talking rot. That requires some basis for understanding what is or is not rot. There are ways to call attention to lacunae in the Western political order or what have you in an intellectually consistent way. That, however, is not the way of the critical studies types, with their fantasies of interrogating things. Back to Mr Haidt.
I believe it is still incumbent on every professor to act properly and professionally in the meantime — in part because professionals abandoning their duties in our political and epistemic institutions is a major cause of the collapse. So how do we act properly and professionally? What is the right thing to do when there are so many competing crises, each with its own moral demands? Should professors engage in political activism — in their teaching and in their research — and push their universities and professional associations to do so as well?I'd like to think it's as simple as recognizing there is a boundary, fuzzy perhaps, but a boundary nonetheless, between positive analysis, or an intellectually consistent way of understanding phenomena, and normative analysis, which might apply the positive analysis in support of a preferred policy outcome. Those distinctions might be harder to see if you're unfamiliar with the discourse practice of a discipline. They exist, all the same.
In the rest of this essay I’d like to introduce the concept of fiduciary duty, which I believe complements the concept of telos and can help explain the moral incoherence that has overtaken the academy since 2015, as well as give us a moral foundation upon which to stand when we resist pressures to violate our duties.
The word fiduciary comes to us from the Latin fidere, “to trust.” In any large-scale society, people need to rely on others who are not kin, often when they are in a position of vulnerability. Roman, English, and later American law all developed legal designations that enable some people or institutions to hire themselves out as “trustees” who act as “agents” of the person (the “principal”) who invests trust in them. Such agents have fiduciary duties toward their beneficiaries, which means first and foremost absolute loyalty. They must put the needs of the beneficiary first and must never, ever profit at the beneficiary’s expense. They must avoid and eliminate all conflicts of interest, because the lure of such potential benefits can — and often does — corrupt and subvert the fiduciary’s ability to carry out their duty.I wonder if, somewhere in the fever swamps of Inside Higher Ed or the Chronicle of Higher Education or the other house organs for all wokeness, all the time, there aren't creative minds already offering arguments to the effect that developing antiracist consciousness, or placing environmental degradation or nuclear proliferation top of mind, aren't precisely what putting the needs of the beneficiary first entails.
Is it bad and dangerous to peddle stolen-election conspiracy theories, attack the legitimacy of election results, try to get them thrown out in court, object to certifying electors in Congress, and generally treat the winners of elections as if they have no right to exercise the powers of office? If that is your standard, there are a lot of Democrats who are threats to democracy, including Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Stacey Abrams, John Lewis, former DNC chairs Terry McAuliffe, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Howard Dean, January 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson, and — of course — Jonathan Chait himself. I have documented this in depth here, here, here, here, here, and here, as well as several other places linked in those items. Heck, the current president, Joe Biden, has preemptively attempted to delegitimize the upcoming midterm elections, while the current Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, described American elections as a “rigged game.” Chait appears to have no problem with any of this, having participated in some of it himself.That doesn't work. He's on more solid ground, though, noting that it is possible to stand on a principle.
I do not point to the prior and ongoing misconduct of Democrats and their intellectual and pundit class as a justification for the behavior of Trump or the behavior of anyone in the GOP or on the right. But here’s the thing: You can’t have it both ways. You can’t summon up the “danger to democracy” rhetoric on the basis of Trump’s unique behavior, defend and distinguish the behavior of your own side by pointing to that uniqueness, and then just routinely transfer the Trump rhetoric to people who have done nothing like what Trump did.Being unprincipled might be a precondition for being a politician. The column then turns to matters of policy. The conclusion points to what might be the harshest logic lesson.
Instead, the modern welfare/entitlement state spends money on autopilot without asking the people for their continuing consent; you need a majority of the House plus 60 Senators plus the president in order to not continue an ongoing act of the federal government. That absolutely is a problem of democratic legitimacy, but it thwarts the results of elections in ways that Jonathan Chait approves of.It's also the ultimate act of denial. While the likes of Bernie Sanders and Ron Johnson are throwing barbs at each other about "ending" "Social" "Security" nobody is paying any attention to the slow decline in the so-called trust fund, let alone the growing reluctance of bond traders to validate the Jarrett regency's money printing.
In our decentralized system of government, most social services, from education to housing, are provided by localities. And the people who run those local governments, like my school board friend, must write the checks and somehow make the spreadsheets work. One dollar for the autistic person means one fewer dollar for a prestigious AP program or a library program aimed at seniors. Some people fill up the tax coffers in a community, while others are very costly.It doesn't have to be that way. But restrictive zoning practices have contributed to a situation in which many municipalities are not capable of raising sufficient taxes locally to cover the services the voters would like them to offer. That's long been an area of policy interest at Northern Illinois University, although, unfortunately, much of the publicity the university makes available came across as normative: oh, look how unsustainable that sprawl is!
This crazy way of providing services in this country has reduced everyone to a number. What’s your number? Multiply your number of kids by the price of schooling at the local public school, the extra services they need, and then subtract your local taxes. Are you a positive or a negative?
Strong Towns frequently feature communities that were once vibrant manifestations of car culture and suburban affluence. Many of them, including Colerain, Ohio, a Cincinnati suburb, have turned into swamps of public squalor amid private destitution (to tweak an old J. K. Galbraith phrase.) It goes beyond the downscale people attempting to cross the butt-ugly stroads, which is the focus of the post. "What are the options for the folks who find themselves standing on the side of Colerain Avenue? They can work part time at one of the fast food outlets. They can scrape by month to month with payday loans and pawn shop transactions. Or they can join the military which is by far the best career option, although it comes with certain risks." The author's thesis, consistent with Strong Towns writers' emphasis on the suburban growth ponzi scheme, is that these once-promising bedroom suburbs have become obsolete and the strip malls and tract houses have trickled down to people less capable of taking care of what they have.That might be too harsh. The McKenna household could be in a municipality facing a different sort of problem. "The school districts, police, and fire protection, might rely on people who have to live at a distance from the Upgraded Executive Boxes and McMansions that change hands among the transferees. As long as the test scores are high, and the athletic teams competitive, Curriculum Wars are probably infrequent, and silly zero-tolerance policies unchallenged." Yes, that post is over ten years old, and the Curriculum Wars ought to be top of mind among parents in the upcoming election.
Major portions of many of our large, Democrat-run cities have become unlivable. Crime, lawlessness, and a general breakdown of the norms of civilization are rampant. Many young people in these cities are untrained, ignorant, and, one suspects, unemployable. But they don’t seem to mind, and our society apparently doesn’t expect more from them. Maybe liberals like the prospect of a generation with no prospects, who will forever be dependent on government.Earlier this year, a candidate for Milwaukee County's board of supervisors came close to calling for such measures. "I don't want this neighborhood to turn into an African shantytown." He subsequently apologized and deleted his campaign.
These trends come together in spectacular displays of anarchy like the ransacking and looting of a Wawa store in Philadelphia, one of many misgoverned Democrat cities, on Saturday night. Reportedly something like 100 young people, described as teenagers although some appear older, participated.
The criminal element among the black community – estimated to be about 4% of the population – is also estimated to be responsible for about half the violent crime in the United States. That is poisonous enough, but in a lot of ways, it’s a self-limiting phenomenon. Black offenders with a penchant for violence will eventually encounter a final come-uppance: other offenders in open gang war, law-enforcement once they have pushed too far and too openly, even eventually vigilante action, should the black criminal element venture too far away from their protected turf. Vicious predators in the back country eventually run into a terminal 3-S solution.That's my Chicago Boyz colleague Sgt. Mom, who continues,
Tolerations and patience among ordinary citizens already appear to be running out when it comes to the black criminal class; might it be running out for the antics of the black activists and the lunatic intellectual racists as well? Not that I think there will be any overt demonstrations, such as there would have been early in the last century; any actions taken will be more along the lines of quiet shunning and physical avoidance.That sort of shunning and self-sorting will go on, even if the real estate business wants to make it harder for people to figure out where the dangerous quarters are.
So who are the real racists here? The people searching for a home, or the real estate honchos who want to pretend they’re “better serving” consumers and being more “equitable” to black/brown/Asian communities by excluding important data that all people look to – white, black, Hispanic, etc – when trying to rent/buy a home?We can close the windows, and pretend there's no thunderstorm outside, and it's raining all the same.
My prediction on this is that it’s going to backfire big time on Redfin and Realtor.com, much the same as “Defund the Police” backfired on House Democrats. Because as it turns out, no matter what a person’s race is, they want police around to protect them and they want to know the crime data for cities and neighborhoods because their first priority is to keep their family safe.
As a society, we never, ever talk about this stuff in public. Our newspapers and TV stations don’t report on it. Nobody runs op-eds about it, because this discourse is not permissible, any more than it is possible in our media to discuss anything to do with LGBT people or Muslims in a negative light. The taboos are very strong, especially in the age of cancel culture.That might be so, and yet, if the previous creation of sundown towns, based on flimsy evidence, contributes to contemporary inequalities, what will be the effect of a new era of sundown towns, perhaps based on income characteristics, rather than racial characteristics, on inequalities yet to come?
Single payer’s magic has historically worked via just a few channels:There's a great deal of elaboration in the comment, go over to the post and read it.
1. Some amount of monopsony allows the government to bid down medical services below market rates.
2. Political imperatives lead to lower training burdens, lower staffing ratios, and lower certainty in diagnosis and treatment.
3. Obfuscation of possible alternatives diminishes demand for costlier care.
There is a natural tendency on the internet to think that all universal coverage systems are single payer, but they are not. There is also a natural tendency to contrast single payer systems with freer market alternatives, but that is also an option not a necessity. You also can contrast single payer systems with mixed systems where both the government and the private sector have a major role, such as in Switzerland.It's not possible, however, for Our Intelllectual Betters to develop humility.
I’ll say it again: single payer systems just don’t have the resources or the capitalization to do well in the future, or for that matter the present. Populations are aging, Covid-related costs (including burdens on labor supply) have been a problem, income inequality pulls away medical personnel from government jobs, and health care costs have been rising around the world. Citizens will tolerate only so much taxation, plus mobility issues may bite. So the single payer systems just don’t have enough money to get the job done. That stance is conceptually distinct from thinking health care should be put on a much bigger market footing. But at the very least it will require a larger private sector role for the financing.
There is, however, ample evidence that court intellectuals for Democrats design policies from a mind-set of Omniscient Expertise, whether For Your Own Good (voters are ignorant) or as Efficient Division of Labor (voters are boundedly rational and experts have objectively better information sets), that court intellectuals for Democrats often come across as snobbish and condescending (I watch MSNBC so you don't have to), and that Democrats enact policies that oft run afoul of the Law of Unintended Consequences.Fortunately, the court intellectuals are mostly on defense these days.
Is it possible this could happen in America? That all these "small steps" would one day lead to a dictatorial form of government that has so cowed the people, the politicians, and even the business community and media that it can't be challenged?Let the record show that social media companies, the legacy press, and many major corporations were on board with the corona tyranny and a weak form of critical theory as operating principles, long before that hysterical speech in Philadelphia.
Doesn't the nation rise up and protest the destruction of its own democracy? Don't the people pour into the streets?
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.Perhaps it started with "fifteen days to slow the spread." Or perhaps with making the schools a little more inclusive, or bail conditions a little less onerous. Don't carry on, don't be unsociable.
"You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty."
"But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.These days, that little boy might say "racist" or start tossing pronouns around. But in Mr Hartmann's Wolkenkuckucksheim, it's the Democrats going to jail. Please.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying 'Jew swine,' collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose."
Because at the stroke of 12.15pm as silence falls across London, it is precisely at that moment when Army precision kicks in with flawless accuracy - practised to perfection – so the procession can begin against the chimes of the world’s most famous clock.The watches must be synchronised, as well as the chime and the gun, as the Horse Artillery are somewhere near Buckingham Palace, which is to say, a few seconds' distant from earshot at Westminster Abbey, as well as out of sight of the lead units of the cortege, which otherwise could, in yacht racing fashion, step off at the sight of gunsmoke.
For one team of soldiers however, silence will not be an option – it is their job to ensure the guns of The King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery (KTRHA) fire at precisely the same time that Big Ben chimes, because it is the guns that mark the start and the finish of the funeral procession, not the bell.
While the Westminster crowds stand still, soldiers from 10 Signal Regiment will be at the top of the iconic Elizabeth Tower to communicate the exact timings with Army personnel on the ground.
For Operation London Bridge they provide the timings to synchronise both the chimes of Big Ben, with the Minute Gun salutes of KTRHA via secure telecommunications and flag signals, during the movement of the coffin from Westminster Abbey to Wellington Arch.
Westminster Abbey Observer, Major (Maj) Harrison, and Operator Lance Corporal (LCpl) Butler wait for the coffin of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to appear in the doorway of Westminster Abbey. This starts the flag waving signals seen at the KTRHA gun line in Hyde Park.How very British, the horologists have the requisite hard hats for an industrial setting, plus the ceremonial uniforms for the occasion. The weather was fine for the processions last Monday, and the backup plan in case of fog did not have to be used. "While the responsibility for ensuring the signal is communicated at the right time falls to the Army experts, the job of keeping the world-famous timepiece in working order falls to the Palace of Westminster’s clock mechanics." It's convenient, as well, to have the Greenwich Observatory bang on the Prime Meridian to get a a good fix on noon, in order that the 12:15 formalities would be on the advertised.
When Garrison Sergeant Major Stokes orders ‘Funeral procession by the centre, Slow March’, Maj Harrison and LCpl Butler initiate the firing sequence by issuing the words of command ‘Fire Fire Fire!’, the flag drops at Hyde Park and KTRHA fire the first gun salute.
Perfection is the only option. Reacting to Big Ben’s famous toll would mean being a stroke too late. At the top of the 334 steps inside the tower, the soldiers of 251 Signal Squadron thrive on providing military precision. Captain (Capt) Cooper, the Timing Control Officer supported by Lieutenant Richards and Staff Sergeant Yeoman of Signals (YofS) Fowler sit behind the hands of the Elizabeth Clock Tower face with the horologists wearing full ceremonial uniform and hard hats.
Capt Cooper explained: “It’s my job to ensure everything goes like clockwork. Every minute during the procession, commands are issued to both the gun line and the horologists, to ensure the guns fire and Big Ben tolls every 60 seconds.”
Our work outfit had a 2-6-6-2 Mallet and we were called to push a steam rotary over the pass. A snow slide at Falcon had blocked the tracks and tore down the overhead trolley wires. Our rotary crew had cleared the passing track at Falcon, then we went to work on our other assignments for the day.That's got the tension necessary to a work of railroad fiction. Now bring in the human interactions.
When we got to East Portal, we plowed out the sidings and had a meet with a westbound freight train.
Good railroad fiction has in common with good sea stories the opening line, "No s***, this really happened." The stories in the anthologies I've read tend to fall into a few broad categories: the rigid manager who has a humbling experience, the dispatcher or telegrapher that keeps 'em rolling despite natural or man-made problems, the maintainer that comes up with an inventive if not quite by the book fix.Only we are in a no s*** this really happened situation.
Since the wire at Falcon was now buried in a pile of snow, the train would have to go through there with the pantographs down. With the trolley overhead gone, there were no working air compressors on the train as there was no source of electricity to run them.That's a safety feature. You wouldn't want leakage in the brake line, thanks to entropy and amplified by cold weather, to have the brakes releasing. But you have to put enough pressure back into the brake line to be able to reapply the brakes, once you have a pusher on and the train ready to move.
This meant there would be no regenerative braking and the crew would have to handle train braking using only the compressed air in the system. Additionally, there was no way to release the train brakes once they were set.
As the train rolled through the gap in the trolley overhead, the brakes crept on more and more, threatening to stop the moving train. With no compressors the crew had no way to kick off the air brakes to keep the train moving through the gap. Eventually the train stalled with both electric engines sitting in the section that had no electricity.
The air in the braking system on the freight had leaked off after two to three hours on a cold night in the mountains. We backed onto the it and coupled up the air from our 2-6-6-2. Then the old-time hoghead on the Mallet released the brakes and started pumping air into the train, but the air from the steam engine was too little and too late.Will this story end with a broken train and dead and injured people? Will the substation flash over when the electric locomotives go into regeneration from too high a speed? Will the steam locomotive engineer come to blows with the engineer on the helper electric locomotive? Click over for the rest of the story.
As soon as the brakes released, away went the train, and us with it.
I was in the rotary and the air gauge said 15 pounds in the train line. I knew that once the train started moving, we wouldn’t have enough brakes to stop it.
Most engaged conservatives in red states will reject schemes like this outright, while most liberal democrats in red states will support them outright. The battle for the country’s future falls in the middle, largely with the moderate and uninvested voters. This is why schemes are concocted to appeal to this demographic. The challenge then consists of educating conservatives on why these schemes will be our undoing before we are undone.No, the challenge is in selling a winning message, which, given the Democrats' record on corona tyranny, crime, failing schools, inflation, and the Biden bear market ought be straightforward. Where there's ranked choice, loyalists to Libertarians or to Free Soilers or what have you might rank the Republicans ahead of the Democrats in the construction of that instant runoff majority. That didn't happen in Alaska. "[A] significant number of Begich voters preferred the Democrat to Palin."
I sincerely hope that we’ve turned the tide and we’re about to see a backlash against extremists, nutjobs, charlatans, and others unfit to govern. There’s a least some evidence for that in the broader polling trends. Maybe Palin’s defeat here is a harbinger of that. But it’s simply too soon to tell and one contest—let alone a low-turnout special election using voting rules that the citizenry and parties aren’t used to—just doesn’t provide much information.The same three candidates will compete for a full House term in November. Will Team Palin work on building turnout, or will Team Begich attempt to flip enough Palin voters so as to be first past the post without any instant runoff?
Isn't the real problem the enormous numbers of people crossing into the U.S.? And how to reduce that number? And how to deal with those who do manage to sneak across to make sure that only the relatively small number who have legitimate asylum claims are allowed to stay? Isn't that the real problem?I submit that the border state governors shipping out illegal crossers is a last resort, when the national government will neither enforce the borders nor provide the resources to the border states. That Damon Linker is being played is a bonus.
Instead of dealing with the real problem, everything the Biden administration has done since Day One has been to increase the incentive for would-be immigrants to cross illegally into the U.S. Arguing over how best to accommodate illegal crossers, rather than arguing over how best to return the vast majority of them back across the border, increases the incentive for those considering unlawful entry into the U.S. They know their arrival might set off a debate over whether they should be allowed to stay in El Paso or be sent to Martha's Vineyard, but either way, they stay in the U.S. — their ultimate goal.
I’m sorry, my center-right friends, but you’re being played. It’s true that immigration policy in this country is a complete mess. It’s true that the southern border has frequently been overwhelmed in recent years and that this is unsustainable. It’s true that the Biden administration has been paralyzed in responding to the problem because of deep division within the Democratic Party over immigration—just as Congress as a whole has been paralyzed since at least the early 2010s by similar deep divisions in the electorate as a whole.Right, the usual common room rhetoric about "mean spirited" and "anti-immigrant faction" is a good way to lower the temperature. Rich Lowry writes, Sorry, no.
All of it is bad. The way forward is far from clear. But what’s abundantly clear is that a couple of ambitious and mean-spirited Republican governors using migrants to give Democrats the finger and inspire high fives among the most anti-immigrant faction of the GOP base is only going to make things worse. That’s the way it will always be when politics gets reduced to the performance of practical jokes on political enemies. It’s guaranteed to result in more anger, greater polarization, and less commitment to finding a way forward on the policies that divide us, very much including on immigration.
The crux of the matter is that the Biden administration dismantled or downgraded every policy that had established control over the southern border under his predecessor and is directly responsible for the record number of illegal immigrants flooding into the country. If the influx weren't so large, there'd be fewer migrants to sign up for the bus trips sponsored by Texas and Arizona to send them north and east to blue cities.That won't happen. "In other words, the Biden administration may not want migrants showing up in Martha's Vineyard, but there will be plenty of newcomers settling all over the United States, in a never-ending flow."
Everyone should agree it'd be much better if President Joe Biden reversed field and sought to control the border. Texas and Arizona would no longer be getting inundated and therefore would have less incentive to send migrants further inland. If that were the case, places like Washington, DC, and New York City wouldn't be receiving thousands of new migrants and wouldn't have to declare emergencies and request the National Guard to help cope.
If the border states are treating migrants as "pawns," give them fewer pieces on the board. If they are engaged in unworthy "stunts," remove the incentive to make theatrical gestures in the first place. Reduce the temperature by controlling the problem at the source.
The truth of the matter is that prior to Texas and Arizona undertaking their programs — and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis adding his attention-grabbing flights to Martha's Vineyard — illegal immigrants were already getting moved around the country, with the assent of the Department of Homeland Security. The federal government gives migrants permission to travel within the country, and private organizations get them on buses to go to their preferred destinations.
[H]e asked British royal commentator Hillary Fordwich whether the British royal family should pay reparations, claiming that some in the United Kingdom “want to be paid back.”Wonderful! Too often, people will either get defensive, or equivocate, or otherwise grant the point in a squishy way. Apparently Mr Lemon never watched the opening of Battle of Britain, in which the King's Ambassador in Switzerland declines the German Ambassador's offer of surrender terms with "You can't threaten us or dictate to us until you're marching up Whitehall. And even then we wouldn't listen." (That was a dramatization. There was, in real life, a radio response that had something like "we hurl it back in your foul-smelling teeth" in it.)
“England is facing rising costs of living, a living crisis, austerity budget cuts, and so on. And then you have those who are asking for reparations for colonialism, and they’re wondering, you know, $100 billion, $24 billion here and there, $500 million there,” Lemon explained. “Some people want to be paid back, and members of the public are wondering, ‘Why are we suffering when you are, you know, you have all of this vast wealth?’ Those are legitimate concerns.”
Her response was epic. After initially giving the impression that she agreed with Lemon, she schooled him royally.
“Well, I think you’re right about reparations in terms of if people want it, though, what they need to do is you always need to go back to the beginning of a supply chain,” Fordwich replied. “Where was the beginning of the supply chain? That was in Africa, and when it crossed the entire world, when slavery was taking place, which was the first nation in the world that abolished slavery? The first nation world to abolish it, it was started by William Wilberforce, was the British. In Great Britain, they abolished slavery.”
She continued, “Two thousand naval men died on the high seas trying to stop slavery. Why? Because the African kings were rounding up their own people, they had them on cages waiting in the beaches. No one was running into Africa to get them. And I think you’re totally right.”
The look on Lemon’s face was priceless. Fordwich succeeded in agreeing with him, although for different reasons than he was obviously suggesting. And she wasn’t done with the lesson.
“If reparations need to be paid, we need to go right back to the beginning of that supply chain and say, ‘Who was rounding up their own people and having them handcuffed in cages?’ Absolutely. That’s where they should start. And maybe, I don’t know, the descendants of those families where they died at the, in the high seas trying to stop the slavery, that those families should receive something too, I think, at the same time.”
But in most cases, after the passage of time, it becomes impossible to calculate the debt, morally or financially. It becomes not really a matter of seeking justice for the past, but of jockeying for power and position in the present. How can we possibly calculate the cost to families of white Union soldiers who died or were maimed fighting to end slavery? Or, following the line of discussion introduced by Fordwich above, the British sailors who lost their lives fighting to end the transatlantic slave trade?Perhaps Mr Lemon, now that he's a less active personality on CNN, might pay the Minnesota State Capitol a visit.
[T]he cladding of the Capitol was originally to be Georgia marble. The Grand Army of the Republic, still active in Minnesota politics at the turn of the twentieth century, would not hear of it. Minnesota was the last state into the Union before South Carolina voted to leave, and Minnesotans took a great interest in restoring the Union, oversubscribing the first call-up from Abraham Lincoln.There's instructive art inside, if he knows where to look. "Elsewhere, there are ... paintings of Minnesota regiments liberating Corinth and Nashville and Vicksburg and Little Rock and Missionary Ridge and holding the line at Gettysburg." That "holding the line at Gettysburg" was not trivial. "Power Line's Scott Johnson invokes Colonel Chamberlain along with the 20th Maine he commanded, and the First Minnesota as instrumental in stopping the Rebels on July 2 at Gettysburg, a development that along with Vicksburg's surrender on July 4 persuaded United States leadership (at levels subordinate to President Lincoln) to begin thinking about victory."
When Diversity Isn’t the Right Kind of DiversityPerhaps Power Line's Steven Hayward is right to call attention, "The trouble is that for many of the same people, ethnic and racial diversity count only when combined with a particular point of view," to the symbolism over substance that arises, as is often the case in higher education, when that most inclusive faculty, or most inclusive administrative staff, is stocked with people who share the same perspective: and that only becomes a problem when the shared perspective is not a left perspective.Liz Truss, the new Conservative prime minister, announced her cabinet, and for the first time ever, not a single member of the inner circle — what’s referred to as the Great Offices of State — is a white man. . .
Did the left break into applause? Were there hosannas throughout progressive Twitter heralding this racial, ethnic and gender diversity as a step forward for society?
Not exactly.
Instead, the change was dutifully relayed, often with caveats. “Liz Truss’s cabinet: diverse but dogmatic,” noted The Guardian. The new team was criticized as elite, the product of schools like Eton, Cambridge and the Sorbonne. These people aren’t working class, others pointed out. They don’t sufficiently support the rights of those seeking asylum in Britain or policies that address climate change.
Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a think tank that focuses on issues of immigration, integration and national identity, told CNN, “It’s not an advance on social class terms.”
The Welfare Economics Paradigm is so easy to diagram on a blackboard, and its conclusions make presumptive social engineers comfortable with their prejudices. Peter Boettke notes, though, that for blackboard economics to work, the people who implement policies must behave in exactly the fully-informed, public-spirited way the model dictates.Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux reminds us they don't.
Interventionists typically describe lovely outcomes and then posit a handful of measures for government officials to impose – measures for ham-fistedly prohibiting this large class of actions, penalizing that other large class of actions, and subsidizing yet some other other large class of actions. Selling their schemes to the public in terms of excellent promised outcomes, the means that interventionists propose for government to use to achieve these outcomes – and to do so without giving rise to worse unintended consequences – are never formulated and calibrated to account for the great, unseen complexity of the economic and social phenomena that must be successfully rearranged if the interventionists’ schemes are to have any hope of successfully achieving the interventionists’ stated goals.Humility, though, has not been a personality trait of technocrats.
A child would step into a world bathed in crimson light. She’d hear the hiss and toot of a steam whistle organ.Let us be grateful that those funhouse mirrors, which are illustrations of optical principles that can also be used to peer into the universe, didn't get cancelled for fostering fat-shaming.
The tease of the circus announcer: “You’ll see Jolly Marge, the heaviest human being alive! … And Tiny Timothy, the smallest man on Earth!”
And then she’d spy, at her own eye level, the golden lights in the big top and tiny, rickety figures dangling far above the safety net. Perhaps she’d dream of one day becoming a trapeze artist.
For the better part of five decades, thousands of children — and grownups, too — experienced the thrill of the circus while strolling through an exhibit on the art form at the Museum of Science and Industry.
For many it was magical, for others, like a nightmare scene from a bad horror flick. But for all, it is now just a memory. The remaining two dozen or so items — including 10 hand-made dioramas with mechanical moving figures — were removed earlier this month to make way for a new exhibit.
Traditional circuses, like rotary phones and drive-in movies, don’t have the same appeal they once did.
“We want to always be relevant to our audience,” said Kathleen McCarthy, the museum’s director of collections and head curator. “Science and technology is a field that really advances quickly. So this content is nostalgic. While really enjoyable and entertaining, we just thought we needed the space to introduce new content.”
