In today’s Wall Street Journal Juan Williams argues that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is “America’s most influential thinker on race.” Here are two slices:
Justice Thomas, meanwhile, is reshaping the law and government policy on race by virtue of the power of his opinions from the bench. Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American on the Supreme Court, stood up as a voice insisting on rights for black people. Justice Thomas, the second black man on the court, takes a different tack. He stands up for individual rights as a sure blanket of legal protection for everyone, including minorities.
….
The principal point Justice Thomas has made in a variety of cases is that black people deserve to be treated as independent, competent, self-sufficient citizens. He rejects the idea that 21st-century government and the courts should continue to view blacks as victims of a history of slavery and racism.
Writing in the Washington Post, Wendy Kaminer reports on the lunacy into which “Progressive” academics often sink. You can’t make this stuff up. (HT Todd Zywicki) A slice:
How did we get here? How did a verbal defense of free speech become tantamount to a hate crime and offensive words become the equivalent of physical assaults?
You can credit — or blame — progressives for this enthusiastic embrace of censorship. It reflects, in part, the influence of three popular movements dating back decades: the feminist anti-porn crusades, the pop-psychology recovery movement and the emergence of multiculturalism on college campuses.
In the latest issue of the Cato Journal, my old Auburn University professor Randy Holcombe discusses “political capitalism” – a fascist-spawned
economic and political system in which the economic and political elite cooperate for their mutual benefit. The economic elite influence the government’s economic policy’s to use regulation, government spending, and the design of the tax system to maintain their elite status in the economy. The political elite are then supported by the economic elite which helps the political elite maintain their status; an exchange relationship that benefits both the political and economic elite.
Has inequality in the U.S. risen since 2007?
Sheldon Richman documents some of the hubris, failures, and dangers of Uncle Sam’s interventionist foreign policies. Here’s Sheldon’s closing:
If those populations and the American people are to get any relief, U.S. foreign policy will need deep rethinking from outside elite circles. That won’t be easy. As over two centuries show, American hegemony—”exceptionalism”—is in the nation’s political DNA. Even the opening of foreign markets to American producers was always seen as a government program backed by a navy with global reach.
It’s well past time for us to think about what horrifies our rulers: nonintervention.
