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 […]
Howard Ahmanson
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 […]
Driver’s Licenses for the Undocumented
I actually favor the issuance of driver’s licenses to the undocumented. They, however, should be of a distinctive marking. But it gives us some control. If an illegal immigrant drives without insurance, or if he attempts to apply the Fifth […]
Where Did The Adoptable Children Go?
USA Today less than two weeks ago wrote about the “critical adoption shortage” now that Russia is cracking down in international adoptions. In addition to that, we are told that “as single parenthood becomes more acceptable,`there are just not as […]
Minimum Wages: A Modest Proposal
Ron Unz, generally considered a conservative but quirky, came out for a radical increase in the minimum wage here last year, not something you generally expect of conservatives, but then Ron Unz and his magazine, The American Conservative, generally take […]
Declining Birth and Marriage Rates Threaten Whom?
Jonathan Last says declining birth and marriage rates are “a threat to the right’s political survival”[?] More likely the left’s political survival; the right is making such babies as are being made, and all they have to do is educate […]