The welfare state, as conceived by the great social reformer Sir William Beveridge and implemented by the Attlee government after the Second World War, was a sublime idea. It rescued millions of British citizens from the degradation of poverty and lifted the fear of illness. It guaranteed employment or, if jobs were not available, universal benefits. It offered security in old age.
A Nutshell History of Climate-Change Hysteria
At a time when the push is on to subject humanity to more crazy, shortsighted progressive environmental programs (read carbon regulations) to “save the earth” from its human population, a brief look at progressive airy predictions of the past is in order.
Enlightenment from the campus teach-ins of the 1960s and early 1970s slowly invaded conventional college classrooms so that the hippie-generation mentality of the time eventually became the hip academic norm. But, excitement over such topics as the planet’s imminent collapse from too many people and too much ice quickly waned when population increases yielded no global food fights and Mother Earth began to melt her once-advancing ice caps.
Editorial: Greece’s Only Cure Is The Free Market
Debt Crises: What a sorry spectacle to watch Greeks rioting in the streets in reaction to austerity measures. As if tantrums can change reality. It’s Exhibit A of how socialism infantilizes citizens. The only cure is free markets.
As Greece’s legislature heads for a vote Wednesday to cut the size of its government by $40 billion in exchange for the last $17 billion of a $156 billion International Monetary Fund bailout on July 3, the world’s television screens are flooded with images of young “indignantes” calling a riotous 48 hour-strike in Athens.
The Republican Who Can Win
To win the presidency in 2012, the Republican candidate will require certain strengths. Among them, a credible passion for ideas other than cost-cutting and small government. He or she will have to speak in the voice of Americans who know in their bones the extraordinary character of their democracy, and that voice will have to ring out steadily. That Republican candidate will need, no less, the ability to talk about matters like Medicare and Social Security without terrorizing the electorate.
What If Jews Had Followed the Palestinian Path?
It is doubtful that there has ever been a more miserable human refuse than Jewish survivors after World War II. Starving, emaciated, stateless—they were not welcomed back by countries where they had lived for generations as assimilated and educated citizens. Germany was no place to return to and in Kielce, Poland, 40 Jews who survived the Holocaust were killed in a pogrom one year after the war ended. The European Jew, circa 1945, quickly went from victim to international refugee disaster.
Yet within a very brief time, this epic calamity disappeared, so much so that few people today even remember the period. How did this happen in an era when Palestinian refugees have continued to be stateless for generations?
As we go over the cliff, just who is in the driver’s seat?
A few months ago, I asked the question, “How did we get here?”
If you have to ask where “here” is, then you may as well not read this column. But if you, too, believe that “here” is the end of the road for Western civilization, then you may as well read it and weep.
If you have to ask where “here” is, then you may as well not read this column. But if you, too, believe that “here” is the end of the road for Western civilization, then you may as well read it and weep.
I have explored a few possibilities already to explain the collapse of American values and American traditions in the past 50 years (which roughly correspond to my own life span up till now). Most of them seem to be linked to the phony Marxist philosophy of “redistribution of wealth,” whether in the guise of the New Deal, the Great Society, social justice or “the myth of permanent plenty.”
Reaganomics Vs. Obamanomics: Facts And Figures
In February 2009 I wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal entitled “Reaganomics v Obamanomics,” which argued that the emerging outlines of President Obama’s economic policies were following in close detail exactly the opposite of President Reagan’s economic policies. As a result, I predicted that Obamanomics would have the opposite results of Reaganomics. That prediction seems to be on track.
Killing Bin Laden: An Act of Absolute Moral Clarity…and then there’s “President Boring.”
On May 1, 2011, President Obama announced to the world that he had personally shot Osama bin Laden in the head.
Well, not exactly. But it was close.
“I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al-Qaida,” he said. “I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden … I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action … Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan …”
Race, Fantasy, and the New Yorker’s Editor
A New Yorker article by editor David Remnick gives away the game in the headline, “Trump, Birtherism, And Race-Baiting.”
According to Remnick, the “irrepressible jackass” Trump has inspired idiot America to believe a series of fantasies about Barack Obama: “There is the birther fantasy; the fantasy that Bill Ayers wrote “Dreams from My Father”; the fantasy that the President has some other father, and not Barack Obama, Sr.; the fantasy that Obama got into Harvard Law School with the help of a Saudi prince and the