Sam makes some fair points, but I don’t think Wilkinson was saying that anyone in general can get rich on Wall Street now that Washington is so powerful. What he actually said is a little different: [I]t really isn’t the Citizens United decision that’s about to make Peter Orszag a minor Midas. It’s the vast power of a handful of Washington players, [...]
Check out Will Wilkinson’s post on Peter Orszag’s disappointing decision to cash in at Citigroup. First Wilkinson suggests that this sort of co-optation of government officials by market forces is a fatal flaw in progressivism. “[M]arket institutions find ways to use the government’s regulatory and insurer-of-last-resort functions as countervailing forces against their competitors and, in the end, against the very [...]
America is the richest country in the world. Karl Smith suggests three reasons why: I am going to go pretty conventional on this one and say a combination of three big factors 1. The Common Law 2. Massive Immigration 3. The Great Scientific Exodus during WWII You’ll notice that four of the top five countries in the Human Development Indexhave the Common [...]
In Federalist No. 63, James Madison wrote that the defining principle of American democracy, as compared to Athenian democracy, “lies in the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity.” But since Madison wrote those words, several direct-democratic institutions have been introduced into American politics. California became the first state to adopt a ballot-initiative process in 1911, enabling citizens [...]
Andrew Breitbart's May 2010 defense of the Tea Party in an exclusive interview with the HPR
I want to comment on Sam’s final club post from the other day, which I find compelling but nevertheless insufficient. Let me try to explain why. Sam gives us the standard-line “progressive critique” of the clubs. His is an argument that’s been made many times before — by the likes of April Yee here, Sabrina Lee here, and most recently by [...]
You know who is one of the most dependable Democrats in the Senate right now? Arlen Spector (D-PA). It does not take any great insight to figure out why that is; Spector is rightly afraid of a successful primary challenge from Joe Sestak over his insufficient progressivism. On the Republican side of the aisle is further proof positive: the threats [...]
To begin with, the confusion is grotesque, not the inestimable Samuel Barr – I must post if only to stress that. Said grotesquerie is an innocuous, though unfortunate, consequence of progressivism, in the same manner that my ineptitude at mathematics (which could only charitably be called grotesque) is an unfortate consequence of being a social studies major. I think the [...]
Chris, I fear, has read too much into my use of the word “reactionary.” I meant only to suggest that Republicans have gone with libertarianism over, say, Huckabee-ism or Olympia Snowe-ism, because they are reacting to Obama’s ambitious economic progressivism. This is exactly what we would expect from a minority party: the majority gets to lay out its agenda first, [...]
A changing legal landscape In American history civil rights issues have often found their footing in the high courts. Decisions such as the recent Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts’ ruling legalizing same-sex marriage in Goodrige v. Department of Public Health exemplify the courts’ ability to swiftly expand civil rights. However Proposition 8 in California, which amended the state’s constitution to [...]
Well, I don’t know quite where to start. Maybe it’d be hyperbole to say that it’s the most ambitious move for liberalism* in 40 years. But maybe not. I’m certainly happy with his instincts. One particularly wonky detail was a decisive cut to farm subsidies, which he is moving to cut decisively. This will, of course, be cut from the [...]
