Among the many mistaken and, frankly, repellent notions of today’s Right is its nearly constant invocation of the nation’s origins and its founders as somehow ideologically ancestral only to them. Here is a very fine reminder that the truth is very different, from Ron Chernow’s op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times. Op-Ed Contributor – The […]
Big Government II: What Preserves Us
I ended yesterday by noting that the effective “usurpation” by the federal government of the states’ power to tax, which was at least a pretended concern of some eighteenth-century constitutionalists, turned out to be unfounded. Reader Neil wrote in again to comment, Unfunded federal mandates which eat up state budgets, to the detriment of local […]
Big Government I: Hysteria as Reality
As a major hurdle has been taken on the way to health reform legislation, with the Senate vote to close debate, some further consideration of BIG GOVERNMENT seems in order. I’ve been having a pleasingly civil back and forth with reader Neil (so little space for satisfaction in sarcasm, so much more in sense), which, […]