Everything you need to know about the Bundy face-off with the feds you learned in your childhood — that is, if you had the kind of childhood in which you read all the Robin Hood stories. If you want to know the rudiments of what is going on now, just substitute in phrases like “Prince …
Aluminum Deniers
A couple of posts ago, I said that limited government was absolutely dependent upon public virtue. Here’s why. It all goes back to Burke’s “little platoons.” Raw individualism is not the opposite of the collective. It is what makes the collective possible. The collective likes it. The Hive can handle a pothead bee. The collective …
What Mardi Gras Has for Breakfast
This is happening in lots of different areas, so I don’t want to pick on Rand Paul. But for the sake of convenience, let us start with him. He recently called for a “truce” within the Republican Party on “social issues,” but what such a truce would actually amount to is total capitulation on the …
Skootch Around a Bit
After my post on Rand Paul and National Review, I got various responses, and so I want to write about two divergent but representative takes. In effect, one response is that things are better than I think, and the other response is that things are way worse than I think. Because I am Chestertonian in …
Ukraine Your Neck, But Still Can’t See
“And Hiram king of Tyre had supplied Solomon with cedar and cypress timber and gold, as much as he desired, King Solomon gave to Hiram twenty cities in the land of Galilee. But when Hiram came from Tyre to see the cities that Solomon had given him, they did not please him. Therefore he said, …
Rand Paul, National Review, and a View From the Cheap Seats
I first subscribed to National Review when I was in high school, which would be somewhere northwards of 42 years ago. IÂ have been a faithful subscriber since that time, and — disagreements and all — it remains my favorite magazine. They are still genuinely conservative, although it should be said at the outset that …
Weapon of Mass Confusion
So yesterday, or whatever it was in Indonesia, our Secretary of State beclowned his office by saying that climate change could well be considered as a weapon of mass destruction. This means any number of things, but the central thing it means is that somebody doesn’t want to have the 2014 elections hinge on the …
Her Other Hand Comes Too
In order to understand the politics of our time, we have to understand the paradox of inequality. The way the debate is usually framed, we are forced to choose between liberty and equality. Now when I am charged to pick one of these, I am happy to do so, provided it is the right kind …
Let’s Watch Them for a Bit
A policeman doesn’t need a warrant, and shouldn’t need a warrant, to look at your house. But there is more to it. I have noted before that many contemporary Americans are demanding privacy when what they really want is anonymity. But these are not the same thing at all. If I am walking down a …
Hygiene Lectures From Typhoid Mary
A bill now before the Idaho legislature raises a thorny question. The choice facing our legislators is this. If they vote yes, and they remove the religious exemption shield, then they will be seen as encroaching on the religious freedom of parents to care for their children according to their conscience. But if they vote …