“Third, vouchers expose the essential hypocrisy of many of our attitudes on public policy. Educational vouchers are nothing but food stamps for conservatives. It is remarkable how often we do not see the principle involved. We simply react to some ‘wasteful’ program, defining wasteful as ‘someone else getting the money.’ Until we learn to fight …
Culture Pouts
“Avant-gardism, money, status, Le Chic, and even the 1960s idea of sexiness – it all buzzed around Pop Art. The place, without any question, was Leo Castelli’s gallery at 4 East Seventy-seventh Street. Castelli had Johns, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, most of the heavies. It was there that the Culture buds now hung …
Vouchers and State-Sponsored Theft
[Speaking of school vouchers] “This essay is not calling for tax revolt — a refusal to pay taxes because I am being stolen from. Rather, the point is that we should stop clamoring for yet another program that would require the government to steal still more. The reason we are stolen from is that we …
Bohemian Lockstep
“It was all sheer rhetoric, of course, the antibourgeois sing-along of bohemia, standard since the 1840s, as natural as breathing by now and quite marvelously devoid of any rational content . . .” [Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (New York, Bantam Books, 1975), p. 48.]
Or Eminent Domain Maybe
“The Bible teaches that the civil magistrate may require a certain level of taxation (Rom. 13:6-7) and that Christians are required to pay those taxes cheerfully. But the Bible also teaches that civil authorities are capable of breaking God’s law, including His prohibition of stealing. Even if Ahab had had his wits about him and …
Lonely Artists Congregate
“Likewise in the United States: believe men, you can get all the tubes of Winsor & Newton paint you want in Cincinnati, but the artists keep migrating to New York all the same . . . You can see them six days a week . . . hot off the Carey airport bus, lined up …
Free Market Non-Responses
“We see private schools and homeschools springing up all over, we see programs like Hooked on Phonics, and we see Sylvan Learning Centers. All these are intelligent responses to the disasters caused by the government’s teaching disability. But we will never see a chain of Dyslexia Underwriting and Mentoring Businesses (DUMB). That’s a job for …
The Cape and Beret Problem
“The artist was still the Gentleman, not yet the Genius. After the French Revolution, artists began to leave the salons and cénacles, which were fraternities of like-minded souls huddled at some place like the Café Guerbois rather than a town house; around some romantic figure, an artist rather than a socialite, someone like Victor Hugo, …
Corporate Servanthood
“The answer is found in the nature of corporate servanthood. When a school establishes itself to serve parents by teaching certain subjects to the kids, this does not mean that any given family has complete authority over the school. What happens is that the school clearly notifies the families of a given community what service …
The Cult of Intolerance
“And that was the final irony: that an intellectual establishment that had dedicated itself for thirty-five years to the Nonjudgmental gods of tolerance and open-mindedness should finish as an anti-intellectual cult of intolerance, propped up and held in place by a vast network of cultural prohibitions and quasi-legal injunctions, and distinguished chiefly for its poverty …