MODERN DENTISTRY is remarkable. Everytime I go to the dentist – and lately I have been there a lot – the instruments of torture have been streamlined and updated. It’s true that the jackhammer used to blow a tooth to smithereens is not much quieter than the jackhammers of yesteryear. But many other things are different. (more…)
HERE is the faculty of the Columbia Law School Center for Gender and Sexuality. Eleven full professors comprise the center’s staff, easily totaling more than a $1 million in annual salaries. The center doesn’t feel the need to mask its partisan agenda with a token white male. There is one male and he is, of course, black.
By the way, Katherine Franke (pictured to the far right) is director of the Gender and Sexuality Program. She recently called for a new frontier in homosexual activism: public sex. She worries that the legalization of same-sex “marriage” in New York has stigmatized promiscuity. Therefore, homosexuals need to be more publicly and openly sexual. She writes, (more…)
WHAT nation has the most egalitarian workforce, with the least occupational segregation of men and women? Is it one of the many countries that have tried to accomodate mothers in the workforce with family-friendly policies, such as paid parental leave? Is it Sweden or Norway with their enlightened equality policies? (more…)
THIS boy is one of six students listed as a plaintiff in a lawsuit against a Minnesota school district accused of a dismissive attitude toward “antigay bullying.” The Anoka-Hennepin school district, the largest in the state, refuses to teach “sexual diversity” to its students. (more…)
I HIGHLY recommend Kristor’s most recent comments on trade policy, which offer a coherent, traditionalist approach to foreign competition. To call Kristor’s views “libertarian” is grossly inaccurate. He recognizes the integrity of the community and its duty to protect members from economic harm.
Since it is difficult to read his points in the current format, I have chosen a few excerpts to highlight here:
Freedom does not mean lack of constraint; it depends upon proper constraint of what would otherwise be mere chaos. Only in the context of such constraints can behaviour be orderly (or therefore either good or bad). Determining the nature and bound of proper constraint is the basic matter of political discourse. Mercantilists get the constraints wrong at one extreme; doctrinaire libertarians at the other. Mere liberty does not suffice to order a society, because it does not suffice to order a life. But central planning overdetermines on the basis of inherently insufficient data, and thus leads to grotesque errors of resource allocation… (more…)
BOB writes:
The entire free trade discussion is wrong-headed. We are in a transition in manufacturing technology that will eventually eliminate almost all manufacturing jobs. Someday, working in a factory will be as common as working on a farm. The real economic question is, how do we distribute the wealth created by manufacturing if there are no workers in the factories? (more…)
DIANA writes:
Sometimes I feel as if I am living in a country that’s been hijacked. Pretty much everything has become “365 black.”
This has happened even to tennis. I watched the women’s final of the U.S. Open yesterday because I was certain Serena Williams would lose – and she did! I am not alone in despising Williams. It was a wonderful moment. But not without some drama, as I will relate.
(more…)
THE DISCUSSION on free trade continues here, with comments from additional readers and a very lengthy response to his critics from Kristor, who concludes his argument with this:
From my point of view, protectionists are urging us to slap a big Ace bandage over an open gangrenous wound. The rot in our culture goes deep. In dealing with our fix, trade war should be the last weapon we use, not the first. The first thing we should do is eliminate the absurdities in our own system. Let the Chinese continue to fund the absurdities in theirs. Most likely, they’ll end up like the last unstoppable mercantilist Asian Tiger we used to be all worried about: Japan. Remember when Reagan and Thatcher were just rolling up their sleeves, and the common wisdom was that the Japanese were about to take over the world? Then Reagan and Thatcher tweaked a few things in a rational direction, and we took off – while Japan cratered.
Kristor’s comments appear below in full. Thank you to all of the readers who have taken the time to discuss this important subject so knowledgeably. (more…)
“WE WILL NEVER FORGET” is both a beautiful and an ugly phrase. We should embrace it and utterly reject it.
“We will never forget” is beautiful in the sense that we will never forget those who died on 9-11 or the heroes of that day and its immediate aftermath. And, we will never forget the suffering of their survivors. I will never forget, and could never forget, the horror of that morning.
“We will never forget” is beautiful in the sense that it calls on us to remember the truth, specifically the truth revealed to us again on September 11. Islam is a false and dangerous faith. It threatens to destroy us. If we honor the dead, we will not just realize this truth in words, but act upon it and take it seriously. (more…)
LAURENCE BUTLER, a reader of this site, is the author of the following essay, which was written for an essay contest held by the Libertarian ISI group in Virginia. The topic of the contest was, “Can Character and Community Survive in an Age of Globalization?” Mr. Butler’s response was, in so many words, “No, they can’t.” The essay is relevant to the recent discussions here on free trade and, though it is quite lengthy, I think readers will enjoy it and so I am posting it in its entirety.
THE DISCUSSION of free trade continues. Many readers passionately argue that economic ideologues have caused the catastrophic de-industrialization of America.
A reader in the latest thread writes:
I have a B.A. in economics, something I am profoundly ashamed of. I have most of a Masters in Econ and did some courses with Murray Rothbard who was a spellbinding lecturer and like Milton Friedman had a simple, clear, brilliant, wrong answer for every complex question. Economists have spectacularly failed to predict or forestall two massive economic bubbles, two recessions and worsening unemployment (that’s just in the last 10 years). My own view is that the discipline is corrupt. (more…)
JESSE POWELL writes:
Divorce has risen greatly since the government began to keep reliable statistics on the subject in 1870. In 1870, the divorce rate, the number of divorces divided by the number of marriages in any given year, was a mere 3.3 percent. This rate rose to 8.1 percent in 1900 and to 13.4 percent in 1920. The divorce rate rose continually in America from 1870 up until 1975, when it hit near 50 percent, and then, mysteriously, stopped rising any further. All the way from 1975 up until 2009, the most recent year available, the divorce rate has remained remarkably constant hovering around 50 percent during the entire time.
Does this mean that family life in America as regards the issue of marriage and divorce is now stable? Did America enter a permanent plateau in its divorce rate after this rate had risen continuously for 100 years?
The first thing I wish to point out is that prolonged stability in any social indicator, especially one as important as divorce, is highly abnormal. The cultural environment in America at the present time is anything but stable so an indicator such as the divorce rate being stable over an extended period of time is almost certainly due to conflicting forces working against each other that balance each other out. What is happening on the surface appears to be stable but what is happening underneath the surface certainly is in a process of great change. (more…)
GREG JINKERSON writes:
Kristor has made brilliant remarks about the drawbacks of protectionism, but all of his criticisms are leveled against state-planned protectionism, rather than answering the axiomatic truth that a businessman is just as bound up morally with his community as any other individual. I don’t know where Kristor stands on the issue of an entrepreneur’s free moral obligation to the community where he does business, but judging from Kristor’s allusion to his own theological writings, I get the impression that he is sensitive to the spiritual dimension of trade, and I am in no way presuming to inform him of something he is already well aware of. I am as alarmed as Kristor by the idea of granting bureaucrats in Washington D.C. the power to dictate how and with whom private businesses are permitted to do business. But central planning and pure free trade are not the only two options available, and in criticizing the latter, I need not embrace the former. (more…)
ONE WOULD think Barack Obama had rarely been in American schools, real American schools, by the misty-eyed romanticism he attaches to them. This fervor was on display again in his jobs speech last night. There is nothing, in Obama’s eyes, that a school fully staffed by the graduates of our brainless, monopolistic educational certification institutions can’t do to lift human potential.
Following the messianic quest for an optimally schooled populace through its torturous contradictions, Obama has proposed creating construction jobs by fixing 35,000 school buildings. He also insists we employ more teachers – now. This is his idea of getting America back to work. (more…)
I HIGHLY RECOMMEND the ongoing discussion of free trade, and especially Kristor’s excellent comments on protectionism.
Let me try to translate what he is saying into my own very simplistic terms. Let’s say the government had intervened to save our textile industry years ago and had imposed tariffs on clothing imports from Asia. Instead of buying pants, coats and shirts made in Indonesia and Vietnam, we would be buying clothes made in America. (more…)
SOME PEOPLE say that modern industrialization took men from the home, and that this in turn led to feminism. I don't deny that industrialization brought different demands, but men have for thousands of years left home in significant numbers. They left to fish, to hunt, to trap, to go whaling, to fight wars, to study, to mine, to pan for gold, to explore, and to sell goods. And women have always waited for them. It was only with modernity that large numbers of women lost the capacity for hopeful, watchful, ever vigilant waiting. It takes courage to wait.
A FEMALE READER writes:
Thank you for your site! Your thoughts have been very influential in my decision to quit my part- time job. I wanted to express my gratitude and share an article with you.
I came across this New York Times article about couples who decide to abort half of a pair of twins and I thought of the recent thread on your page, The Test Tube Family. Although the entire article is disturbing, on so many levels, I found this quote particularly horrifying :
If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner — in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me — and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control. (more…)