“We got rules, we got regulations, we got laws,” said Washington, D.C. Taxicab Commission (WDCTC) Chairman Rob Linton after his January sting of Uber, a new private car service and competitor to the unbelievably inconsistent (read: horrible) cab service in D.C. Linton directed driver Ridha Ben-Amara to take him to the Mayflower Hotel, where several [...]
The spate of young (or youngish) people eager to denounce each other as racist is one of the more distressing trends of recent months. Far from being over the political correctness wars of the 1990s, a new generation steps forth to wage war against having ideas deemed offensive by the PC Police. Controversy roiled the [...]
Government officials in Norfolk, Va., are not only taking a local business, they are telling the owners to be quiet about it. Central Radio Company has been in Norfolk for nearly 80 years. Founded in 1934, Central Radio serviced radio equipment for the U.S. Navy during World War II. Today, it employs more than 100 people [...]
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform… -Alexis de Tocqueville, from “Democracy in America.” Getting a [...]
In the Institute for Justice’s 20-plus years, we have challenged all manner of senseless occupational licensing schemes—from those restricting entry into fields like interior design to tax preparation as well as eyebrow threading and African hairbraiding—all the while showing how they keep ordinary Americans out of work at the behest of more politically powerful competitors. [...]
Money in politics corrupts, and huge sums of money corrupt hugely. At least, that’s what we’ve been led to believe. Think tanks have popped up to ensure we have a democracy where “the will and concerns of the people aren’t drowned out by the financial influence of the few.” Newspaper editorials decry the fact that [...]
In a crudely-titled op-ed published on the Daily Beast last week, author Stephen King joined the ranks of the super-rich demanding higher taxes. After taking several cheap shots at Governor Chris Christie’s, R-N.J., weight, King expresses frustration at the governor’s suggestion that rich people concerned about tax revenue should simply write voluntary checks to the [...]
Jonah Goldberg’s latest book, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, is a quick and breezy read. A series of essays on the ways in which buzzwords are used to short-circuit debate, Goldberg lets slip the dogs of snark and has a good time doing so, dropping zombie jokes (three [...]
Coming soon to a town near you? Photo by nic0 on Flickr Imagine having your cash, car, or home seized by police without ever being convicted of a crime. For Americans today, this nightmare is increasingly common. The reason is civil forfeiture. Civil forfeiture represents one of the worst violations of private property rights [...]
President Obama keeps proposing increased taxes on successful people. However, will those taxes go to constitutional activities or to propaganda for children? Our nation’s problems can’t be fixed by throwing pixie dust on them or waving a magic wand. However, the Energy Department thinks they can. A taxpayer-funded public information campaign on billboards and the [...]
Columbia Heights, my Washington, D.C., neighborhood, has seen a boom in growth over the last few years. New condos and apartments attracted a younger, upwardly mobile populace which has in turn attracted businesses of all stripes. Once ravaged by crime and riots, 14th Street, the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare, is now dotted with an impressive mix [...]
For anyone interested in limiting the size and scope of government, we’ve seen firsthand that legislatures and members of the executive branch cannot be trusted to restrain their own power. That is why the role of the judiciary to act as a check on the other two branches of government is so important. But in [...]
And I disagree with voices in my own party who argue we should not engage at all. Who warn we should heed the words of John Quincy Adams not to go “abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” With these words, Tea Party darling Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., officially severed himself from anti-war allies in the [...]
Last week’s “Equal Pay Day” – the political equivalent of a Hallmark holiday – provided Democrats with yet another opening to attack presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney. When pressed on his views on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Romney offered a weak “I have no intention of changing the law” answer, which both failed [...]
On Monday, President Obama announced that the U.S. will allow sanctions on foreign nationals using technology to commit human rights abuses. Obama gave the speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The speech was primarily about efforts that the Obama administration will take to prevent atrocities like the Holocaust in the future. But a closer [...]
photo by Matti Mattila on Flickr D.C. is so bad that talented writers who have spent their career in the Imperial City have to make things up to fully flesh out its perfidy. (At least, that’s what David Frum thinks, who had to turn “to fiction to try to describe what has happened in Washington [...]
The case for tarring as “activists” justices who question the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act is even less persuasive than the administration’s floundering attempts to square the law with notions of federalism and limited government. A prime example of that comes from Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne and his feature, “Judicial Activists in the Supreme Court.” [...]
Senior Republican leaders from House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon to Congressman Ron Paul have blasted the Obama administration’s proposed defense budget, announced in January, for its cuts to healthcare benefits for the U.S. armed forces. Congressman Joe Wilson declared that the proposals “break faith with the military, military families and veterans.” The [...]
American declinists are wrong to see the unraveling of the British Empire as a roadmap for a “soft landing.” The stubborn idea of American decline is a complicated animal. President Obama has decried it, arguing in his latest State of the Union that declinists “don’t know what they’re talking about.” Robert Gates has a [...]
I wear bow ties because it’s a hell of a lot harder to spill food on them than it is neckties. That’s not exactly why I wear them, but it’s a convenient excuse to give at cocktail parties and wedding receptions. And you’ll need an excuse if you’re going to wear bow ties these days, especially if you’re a twenty-something who doesn’t have the luxury of being pardoned as a cantankerous old fart who doesn’t know better than to dress like a Supreme Court justice.
When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, he largely rode in on a tide of lofty promises. An important component of the trademark “hope and change” of the Obama brand was to be a return to public accountability. The White House website features a memorandum from Obama himself calling for transparency and an open [...]
At the edge of a D.C. city block dotted with mildewed, two-story brick housing projects is Cornerstone School, a private Christian school located in a section of Southeast Washington known as Anacostia, one of the worst neighborhoods in America. Proclaiming its mission to “[bring] a Christ-centered, nurturing, and academically rigorous education to the children of [...]
A liberal congressman defies his district and faces defeat in a bellwether re-election campaign. In 2010, a torrent of anger against statist intrusion swept away scores of Democratic incumbents. So strong was Tea Party enthusiasm, so energized was the Republican electorate, that even deeply entrenched House Democrats were dislodged: longtime leftist titan James Oberstar [...]
In 1890, the police reporter and photographer Jacob Riis published the grim and gripping How the Other Half Lives, the Muckracking era’s classic exposé of New York City tenement life. Riis’s book was a necessary cry in the wilderness for social reform, and a pointed critique of the elites of society who neither knew nor [...]
A new book on the politics of the segregationist movement examines a tension between libertarianism and civil rights that continues today. by Jordan Michael Smith Jason Morgan Ward Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement & the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965 The University of North Carolina Press, $34.95 In May [...]
How did Scientology, widely viewed as a cult either comical or criminal, brand itself as a Church and secure recognition as a religion in the eyes of the law? Follow the money. By the late 1930s, Lafayette Ron Hubbard was just one among many pulp fiction writers in New York City who were churning [...]
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults. –Peter De Vries Why don’t Americans know how to get and stay married? Whatever we think the word means we still value marriage very highly: The National Marriage Project and the Gallup poll organization have found that between 80 [...]
Balancing work and family life can be difficult for any politician, but Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), juggles motherhood, work, and constant cross-country travel. McMorris Rodgers, the number four House Republican (behind House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Chairman of the House Republican Conference Mike Pence), is the highest-ranking female Republican in [...]
by Charles Hughes Herman Cain and Rick Perry cast themselves as bold reformers, but wield flashy proposals only to evade the crucial political challenges at stake. Facing a flagging campaign after a brief stint as frontrunner, Rick Perry recently unveiled his tax reform proposal in an effort to regain some momentum. It is the [...]
In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea John Armstrong Graywolf Press, 2011, 208 pp., $24.00 By Peter Lopatin As the subtitle of John Armstrong’s latest book suggests—and correctly so—the notion of “Civilization” has lately fallen into disrepute and desuetude in intellectual and academic circles. Hostility to “civilization” as an intellectual theme and [...]
The Happy Warrior Why and how someone becomes a Libertarian varies from person to person. For Bryan Caplan, one of America’s leading economists, it all started with a little book called Atlas Shrugged. Since its publication in 1957, that book has inspired countless intellectual conversions throughout the world. For Caplan, it was the beginning of [...]
The left’s frustration with President Obama has been much discussed of late. But their disappointment is nothing new, and shouldn’t be much of a surprise, either. In March 2009, just three months after Obama took office, liberal economist Paul Krugman claimed to be in “despair“ over administration policy. At this early stage, though, few [...]
Last Friday, I joined my co-workers on a trip to the Occupy Wall Street protest in Manhattan. The plan was to film interviews with protesters and hand out Boom and Bust by Alex Pollock—a little free-market evangelism, if you will. On the drive from DC to Manhattan, I wondered how the “occupiers” [...]
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London James L. Haley, Basic Books, $17.99. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote facing a wall. He found his window to the cold meadows and deep forests of Massachusetts too distracting. Edith Wharton wrote in bed. I always picture her draped in white sheets, bed covers, and thin, lacy shawls—far removed from [...]
Profiling the talented economics professors who are inspiring the next generation of libertarians. A Kid in a Candy Store Many libertarians experience a gradual migration to the movement, perhaps beginning with Atlas Shrugged or a lecture by a prominent libertarian, and then becoming more deeply informed and active in the movement. But Donald Boudreaux [...]
The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America By Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch PublicAffairs, 288 pp., $25.99 For budding libertarians, certain issues of urgency in the libertarian world may seem esoteric: opposition to the Federal Reserve, proposals to allow young people to opt out of social security, and [...]
The New Watchdogs by Rob Bluey Bill Osmulski stepped outside his office into a boisterous crowd of protesters in Madison, Wisconsin, earlier this year and spotted a group of doctors offering to write sick notes exempting from work “mentally anguished and distressed” teachers at a pro-union rally. His discovery led to a news-breaking video that [...]
Conservatives should resist pressure from within to retreat from world affairs and embrace their diplomatic heritage.
As the “mancession” continues to displace the traditional male breadwinner and prolong young mens’ extended adolescence, the state of American manliness is much in debate. A clash between two titans of classical liberalism points the way toward the masculine ideal that deserves to make a comeback. Men at Arms: Rousseau and Burke Debate Masculinity [...]
The administration’s alumni two years on.
Lessons from Right to Left:The Rise of the Liberal Policy MachineEmily SmithThe rise of DC’s liberal policy machineFeaturesGame OverElizabeth Nolan BrownPickup artists and social conservatives hook up.An Investment PiecePhoebe MaltzOn the new feel-good frugality.Full HouseAlexandra SquitieriOur fascination with super-sized families.The Bushies Strike BackJohn McCormackThe administration’s alumni two years on.CultureFull HouseAlexandra SquitieriOur fascination with super-sized families.
A Vet for Freedom talks health care.
On the new feel-good frugality.
The rise of DC’s liberal policy machine
Our fascination with super-sized families.
Pickup artists and social conservatives hook up.
How “Glee” became a preachy after-school special.
Open Source DemocracyAre bloggers the new legislative watchdogs?John McCormackAre bloggers the new legislative watchdogs?FeaturesAll Camped OutRita KoganzonHow “Glee” became a preachy after-school special.The Rise of the Muckraking RightJacob LaksinHow conservative bloggers are scooping the New York Times.Average JanesHelen RittelmeyerTo save feminism, get rid of the lady blogs.What’s Your Story?What’s Your Story? Matt ContinettiEmily SmithDefending Sarah [...]
Defending Sarah Palin against her critics.
Christopher Caldwell’s reluctant case for an Americanized Europe.
Source: AFF Doublethink Online | Matthew Hurtt
Source: AFF Doublethink Online | Sonny Bunch
