It would appear that MacLean’s ideological disdain for school vouchers is so intense, so fervent, and so unwavering, that she’s willing to countenance a direct partnership with racial segregationists in the service of that cause.
And yet MacLean has the temerity to charge [Milton] Friedman, [James] Buchanan, and other voucher-supporting economists with “collusion with segregationists” that they never in fact pursued? Or to charge libertarians with an unwillingness “to reckon with their cause’s long history of working against civil rights reform”? As the example of the VEA and VCPS partnership with Battle’s segregationist anti-voucher campaign illustrates, MacLean’s history is not only exactly backwards; is personally guilty of the very same allegations she recklessly and baselessly throws at Friedman, Buchanan, and other supporters of the school voucher movement.
What does Adam Smith mean to Vernon Smith?
Doug Bandow is justly angry at the presumptuousness and officiousness of politicians. A slice:
Over the long term the news is grim. Debt-to-GDP will run about 106 percent in a decade, matching the record set after World War II. By mid-century that number could be over 200 percent. Even modest increases in interest rates would sharply drive up total federal payments. And if investors increasingly doubt Uncle Sam’s ability to carry such a debt burden, the possibility of a financial crisis will grow. The US already includes individual jurisdictions, such as Illinois, that look like Greece before its financial collapse. Imagine similar US government insolvency nationwide.
Jeff Jacoby is correct: The inflation hawks have indeed been right all along. A slice:
This is what happens when the government unleashes an avalanche of spending, flooding the economy with trillions of dollars it can’t afford, and insisting against all evidence that it won’t lead to inflation, or that the higher prices will only be temporary, or — as Biden claimed recently — that more government spending will somehow reduce inflation. Or even, as some in the media are now contending, that rising inflation is something to celebrate. There was a time when you had to tune in to a comedy show to hear something like that.
Nick Gillespie busts an environmentalist myth about Bitcoin.
California gets ever-more-crazy and hostile to commerce.
Mike Munger pleads: “Don’t blame the ‘greedy wealthy.’”
George Will applauds a victory in court against “institutional derangement.” A slice:
Universities, rather than forming sturdy students exercising freedom of speech, encourage student brittleness by providing freedom from unwelcome speech. Churches, having saved sufficient souls, turn to saving society with the sort of social policies approved of by the New York Times, which, having perfected journalism, decided to “reframe” the teaching of U.S. history. The Federal Trade Commission’s chair decrees a “holistic” approach to antitrust enforcement that licenses the FTC to correct economic practices that it thinks impede the proper “distribution of power and opportunity across our economy.” Because the White House evidently was just kidding in July when it said mandating vaccines is “not the role of the federal government,” the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, disregarding Supreme Court rulings about compulsory vaccinations lying within the states’ police powers, has ordered them.
George Leef brings no good news about higher “education.”
There is a larger argument to be had here: what is most pernicious about the incontinent Woke mentality is that it often robs the individual of moral agency. Your value as a person is not determined by your own acts or even your intentions but by your association with a race (or class) over which you have no control. That is what should be the subject of discussion at universities, rather than a narcissistic cult in which hurt feelings are the measure of everything.
What may remain significant about this incident in which a 21 year old said some idiotic things and then took them back, is what happened next. John Cleese announced that, as he too had been known to impersonate Hitler, he was now cancelling himself and withdrawing from a Cambridge Union debate. The author Louis de Bernieres followed suit.
Let us hope that what follows is an avalanche of such self-cancellations – not just at Cambridge – which would make a mockery of the whole enterprise. And perhaps that is the key to undoing this: ridicule. Maybe it is the secret that explains why British life is not torn asunder by culture wars in the way that the United States so often is.
