During President Obama’s two campaigns, Republican critics suggested his signature health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) was socialism, since the government was trying to centrally plan 1/7 of the economy.  Naturally Democrats reject that characterization, and accuse the Republicans of demonizing the president.  Rather than focus on the question […]

From today’s Wall Street Journal: Poll Finds Republicans Gain Favor on Key Issues.

I am in the middle of reading a couple of really interesting and controversial books on capitalism.  One is Deidre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for An Age of Commerce.  University of Chicago Press, 2006.  This is a big book on big subject, a grand sweep type of book with high ambition.  McCloskey is currently a […]

The French government finally “gets it”. Or they have been forced to get it. In response to the euro-zone debt crisis France has been increasing taxes to cut its deficit. But the French economy has hit the wall. In France Says It Will Miss Budget Deficit Targets published in The Wall Street Journal, William Horobin […]

It’s hot here in DC, really hot–96 degrees and humid.  How did people function here before air conditioning?  Wait, they didn’t. Government was much smaller and those who could left town for the summer.  Jefferson had two homes in Virginia.  Congress had a longer vacation.  Those were the good old days. But here we are […]

No comment appears necessary.

I came across an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. More on Fracking and the Poor reminds us that it is private initiative and activity that is the source of economic growth in the US economy. The concluding paragraph reads in part: “It’s a classic American story of innovation, human ingenuity, risk-taking and […]

I had the privilege of attending the inauguration in Washington, DC of Russell D. Moore as the new president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.  The service (and it was a worship service more than merely an inauguration) at the historic Capitol Hill Baptist Church.  Speakers included a former […]

Courtesy of Todd Adams via Twitter, here is the inherent problem the progressive left has with President Obama’s Syria policy: h/t Jim Geraghty at NRO.  

Actually I have two topics, one more important and the other just an illustration of how bureaucractic organizations can become pathological or dysfunctional.  So let’s begin with Syria.  My colleague Mark Smith enumerated well the various issues and positions on the question of whether we should use force against Assad’s ruling regime.  It is indeed […]