One of the classic books on the history of suburbia is Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier. It came out in 1985, two years before my personal favorite, Bourgeois Utopias, by Robert Fishman. This book notice discusses Crabgrass Frontier in view of […]
We do not often think that Jesus Christ and the New Testament justifies capitalism. To the extent that capitalism means greed and self-indulgence, I should think not! Greed and self-indulgence are root human sins and will be manifested in any […]
In the Appendixes to The Lord of the Rings, we learn that the Rohanians came from the north at a critical point to assist Gondor in one of its wars. Out of gratitude, Gondor gave them a stretch of its territory […]
It occurred to me that during the first period in my life that I was a conservative, which was in my youth, I was motivated mainly by deficit hawkery. I was ten in the year that Nixon ran against Kennedy, […]
One of the explanations of the rise of Donald Trump is the concern by his working class followers about free trade, as well as immigration. After thinking of just how and where their standard of living is declining, I wonder […]
Charles Krauthammer, generally regarded as a conservative writer, declared more than a year ago that he had been for a gasoline tax increase of $1 a gallon for 32 years. That would be, if I calculate right, since 1983. I’ve […]
In earlier posts I suggested that the top bracket income tax could be raised to up to 40%, as in the Clinton era, without hurting government revenues or damaging the economy. It still might not, but I have decided that […]
Josh Barro, an economics columnist at the New York Times who used to be at Forbes, has written an interesting column on what the food marketplace would be like if we owned lifetime resaleable futures in our food instead of […]
The ever-surprising Ralph Nader has recently been reading some paleo-conservative sources, and has written a book entitled Unstoppable; the Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. In the acknowledgements at the end, he specifically thanks Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a […]
Paul Krugman has just issued a column charging conservatives with being “addicted to inflation,” not that they are pro-inflation necessarily but that they believe, and always believe, that hyper-inflation is imminent. Well, we had the real thing back in the […]