I used to believe that social justice required that a region be overbuilt [or at least over-entitled at law] in high-density housing and other locally undesirable land uses. Now, thanks to Joel Kotkin’s influence, I believe that social justice requires […]
Howard Ahmanson
No Place Like Home Conference – June 3, 2013
This conference is being hosted by me and others to discuss the current state of subsidized home ownership in America, something that has been happening since the end of World War II but since the 1970s has been less successful […]
Last Call in California
Huh? It would make a lot more sense, automobile-dependent as California still is, to keep the alcohol closing hour at 2 a.m. and insist that Starbucks and other coffee houses stay open till 4 a.m. If I went pub-crawling in […]
Thoughts on St. Patrick’s Day
In a few days comes one of the strangest holidays in our American calendar, in which we honor a saint who actually deserves honoring or remembering, and at the same time the first major non-Protestant ethnic group to come to […]
Is Hawai’i the Bellwether for California?
California used to consider itself the leading state and the bellwether for the entire country. Now that the entrepreneurial initiative has mostly switched to Texas and other such places, and Texas’s infrastructure has pulled ahead of California’s in its quality […]
A New Federal Department of Cities?
Oh good grief. Don’t we already have a Department of Housing and Urban Development, Mr. Florida? As C. Northcote Parkinson pointed out more than 50 years ago in Parkinson’s Law, only dictatorships have a cabinet larger than approximately 20. It […]
Allergy to Antithesis, Again
Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal, declares that Obama is trying to destroy the Republican party using a Marcusean strategy of ‘liberating intolerance’. But in the previous term, Obama was trying a policy of including the Republicans and everyone […]
Why ‘entitlement’ programs aren’t really entitlements
I fully agree with Jim Huffman of Lewis and Clark Law school that the ‘entitlements’ of Social Security and Medicare are not, in any moral sense, entitlements. That does not mean that I favor eliminating them. The problem with Social […]
Respect For Women, Respect for Property, Social Compassion: The Real Proof of the Pudding
There has been a lot of international notoriety about some gang rapes in India. I don’t know how many they have had in the past, but many of the women have had it. The attached in the Wall Street Journal, […]
Evangelicals: From ‘Mind their own Business’ to Activism
I don’t think opposition to abortion rights is ‘hating women’, but it is very true that the Evangelical Right, unlike the Catholics, came to its anti-abortion position rather late. It was Francis Schaeffer, his son Frank, and the man who […]