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George Leef justly celebrates the appointment to the Arizona Supreme Court of Institute for Justice (IJ) co-founder Clint Bolick [2]. (One of the more memorable of Clint’s many legal victories for entrepreneurs and workers threatened by an opportunity-denying, rent-creating-and-protecting state is his success at freeing Ego Brown to expand a shoeshine business in Washington, DC [3].) A slice from George’s essay:
Here’s a point worth pondering: Why is it that the so-called progressives, who incessantly say they’re concerned about the plight of poor people, never fight against the laws and regulations that take property from poor people and prevent them from engaging in honest businesses? Why is there no left-wing counterpart to IJ?
The answer, I submit, is that progressives are more concerned about preserving the myth that big government is the one and only friend of the poor than they are about the poor as individuals. Each time a lawyer like Clint Bolick wins a case that enables a poor American to gain when the yoke of government is removed from his shoulders, that myth frays a little more.
Kevin Williamson absolutely nails the arrogant essence of the intelligence-insulting spectacle that is the State of the Union “address. [4]” Here’s the opening, but do read the whole thing:
The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship — it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting — with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live.
My old professor Randy Holcombe argues that U.S. drug prohibition destabilizes other countries [7].