Archive for January, 2010

Greek Diary I

Greece is an ancient land but a young country, younger even than the United States, whose citizens have grown old, generation after generation, bragging about the youthfulness of their democracy. Here in Greece, as Toynbee pointed out in one of his last books, the multiple burdens of the past weigh down on every generation.

Crisis of the Government Party

President Obama is in a dilemma from which there appears to be no easy or early escape.

Democrats are the Party of Government. They feed it, and it feeds them. The larger government grows, the more agencies that are created, the more bureaucrats who are hired, the more people who become beneficiaries, the more deeply entrenched in power the Party of Government becomes.

State of the Union

You can see how seriously Obama is taking the hot populist temper of the American people and their eagerness to strangle every banker with the entrails of every insurance executive.

In Praise of Euphemism

I got into it recently—in cordial fashion—with the editors of an editorial page for which I used to labor. One of their columnists had used a word . . . well, let’s say we wouldn’t have printed it in Ye Olden Tyme. The editors took exception to the exception I took to the word’s appearance on their page. I riposted: whatever happened to euphemism?

Tax-Cut Time

It’s jobs, jobs, jobs now for the Obama team, rather than health care, health care, health care. You have to call it progress, particularly if you’re jobless, or fearful of becoming so at a time when 17 million Americans are either non- or underemployed.

Wall Street and Code Words

In the January 2010 issue of Chronicles, University of South Carolina law professor William Quirk noted that the federal government is “propping up Wall Street with $23 trillion in cash and commitments.”

Saving Professor Bernanke

“Elections don’t matter!” conservatives have long groused. “No matter who you vote for, things never change.”

Well, we may have an exception here.

Is Thomas Woods a Dissenter? A Further Reply, Pt. 4

Next let us turn to Woods’ comments on my discussion of scarcity as an economic concept. I again quoted Paul Samuelson who introduces the topic as fundamental to economic analysis and concludes by saying: “If you add up all the wants, you quickly find that there are simply not enough goods and services to satisfy even a small fraction of everyone’s consumption desires.”

Is Thomas Woods a Dissenter? A Further Reply, Pt. 3

Next we must look at another rhetorical device of Woods which serves to distract the attention of the reader from the point at issue and to prejudice him against what I actually wrote. Woods mentions the interventions of bishops’ conferences into economic matters. As a matter of fact I said absolutely nothing in my article about bishops nor do I want to go into the complicated question of their competence in the matter, except to say that it clearly is not the same as that of the popes.

Campus Rebellion

It’s a story told regularly in the conservative media. A student pleads for advice: The professors at his college or university are left-wing, and he must choose between regurgitating the leftist propaganda in class discussions, term papers, exam answers, and essays for an A, or telling the truth for a low grade. What to do?