Looting as the psycho-spiritual symbol of the welfare age:
“But it’s more than childish destructiveness motivating the rioters. At a more fundamental level, these are youngsters who are uniquely alienated from the communities they grew up in. Nurtured in large…
Caleb Stegall
“[I]n February, Thomas Hoenig, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, warned against the violent possibilities of a farmland bubble, telling the Senate Agriculture Committee that ‘distortions in financial markets’ will catch the U.S. by surprise again.…
What kind of conservative takes a dim view of his country’s established institutions, feels something less than at home with its way of life as it actually lives it, and finds it difficult to identify himself with the political and moral principles on which it has acted through its history?
Last time, Palin wasn’t the point. This time, she is.
Is the Porch anti-American?
A clarifying discussion.
Where else can one find such a wide ranging, wise, witty, and downright winsome collection of thinkers and writers in one tactile, fold-over-double, take-to-the-porcelain-throne, nap-with-on-the-couch, 100-percent-carpal-tunnel-free place?
What’s left? The overschooled and the underschooled, both of them unusually dependent upon government largesse, or upon government largeness.
Michael Kinsley amps up Patrick’s “false choice” rhetoric.
Where does that leave us? With the difficult job of recovering the sturdy Jeffersonian virtues of the freeman—virtues of thrift, being rooted in one’s place, hard work, pride of ownership, the orderly use of time, fierce independence of spirit, self-sufficiency, charity towards one’s neighbor, a refusal to bend the knee to any master, membership in a communal identity, and a return to family economies that place a strong incentive on having children.
It may turn out that both intellectual development and the pursuit of filthy lucre are best pursued without the millstone of a college degree (and the debts, both monetary and intellectual, that come with it).
Because the rent is too damn high!
It’s not “climate change” per se that arouses opposition from the heartland, but rather it is that these issues are stand-ins for and advanced by command and control methods wielded by the managerial classes operating from a far away centralized power—this is the real issue.
I am not convinced that the Austrian School doesn’t have the better argument, but the distributists bring a vital perspective and there is probably no better place to start hearing it right now than Toward a Truly Free Market.
David Brooks youtube-ized.
Here is a tragic example of the soft tyranny of bureaucratic goodie-goodies backed by corporate muscle in favor of closing markets.
