FRIDAY short TAKES.

Likewise.  "We're done trying to make sense of this nonsense. We'd prefer just to mock it."

That illustration might be a derivation of the workings of the Welfare Economics Paradigm.  You have to look hard for the errors that are designed in.  "Governance in the hands of self-appointed experts tends to spark backlash.  Without democratic accountability, the further technocratic governance reaches, the greater resistance it arouses."  Particularly when the experts keep getting it wrong.  They need to show their work.

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

1.  Governments Can't Improve on Good Economic Principles.  Thus I never lack for work.

2.  Want some postmodernism to go with it?  "The most prolific source of error today is the confusion of moral judgments with irrefutable truth."

3.  Vote as if your freedom depended on it.  "If you vote for the lesser of two evils, you are endorsing evil."

4.  Free markets are good for individuals and for families.

5.  Is anybody surprised that Democrats "don't really believe in democracy?"

6.  Sic semper tyrannis.  "The Biden administration’s Bureau of Indian Affairs treats us worse than white people do."

7.  That new birth of freedom.  "the words in those carefully crafted documents—written by great men who were themselves flawed human beings—ultimately lit the way toward a more perfect union. In some sense, the history of the United States is a story of striving to make their soaring words—We the People—real to every American."

8.  Vanguardism, without commissars?  "Britain's political system allows the leadership of its major parties to ignore the wishes of grassroots voters."

9.  Know your false pundits.  "Such a claim would hardly be surprising among the superficial polemicists — Naomi Klein, Zephyr Teachout, or Thomas Friedman, for example — who make no pretense of being intellectually serious. When otherwise competent and able scholars ignore the tradition of emergent order, however, it is harder to explain."

10.  For all of this century, actually.  "With very few exceptions, America has had incredibly poor quality in Washington, D.C., for the past few decades."

11.  Voters voting themselves benefits?  The Democratic Party views much of the federal budget as a giant slush fund with which to pay off and empower its supporters so as to perpetuate its political power."

12.  Take your range safety course first.  "Part of your training is to understand the legal aspects of deadly force."

13.  Free love, no baby, baby.  "My convenience as a sex partner was my primary appeal to him."