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Daily Blogs for 11/2007
by Christopher Chantrill
So Bush Was Right on Stem Cells | 11/30/07
One thing you can say about President Bush. He makes a decision and then accepts ...
What Should Harry Do? | 11/29/07
Yes, what should Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) do? In case you forgot, here ...
Middle Class Benefit Most from Welfare State | 11/28/07
We have been banging on for weeks here about the middle-class S-CHIP chiselers, ...
Revived Libertarians | 11/27/07
Since the shock of 9/11 we haven’t heard much from libertarians, not until Ron ...
Income tax in the United States | 11/27/07
The chaps at Wikipedia have a nice article on the US Income tax: ...
In Guatemala Today | 11/19/07
In the highlands of Guatemala it’s one volcano after another. Of course, ...
No Child Left Behind. End It or Mend It? | 11/15/07
Don’t blame me, says conservative elder ...
A Tale of Two Narratives | 11/14/07
How’s the American family? Time to write the obituary yet? According ...
Income Mobility | 11/13/07
Our friends at the Wall Street Journal edit page (not to be confused with the ...
Inventing the New Conservatism: Education(1) | 11/12/07
We conservatives are running around wondering what the new conservatism means. ...
Entitlements: Life is not a defined benefit | 11/09/07
The GAO chappies issued a report on the nation’s entitlements recently, ...
Hillary's No Maggie. Who Cares?(1) | 11/09/07
Hey, it’s worked in the past. When Hillary Clinton played the helpless ...
Rangel's Taxes Raise Republican Morale | 11/08/07
Last week good old Charlie Rangel (D-NY), the chairman of the House Ways and Means ...
Rail Still the Fashion? | 11/07/07
Economist Randal O’Toole is upfront about government planning, and he’s ...
We Should Thank the Socialists | 11/06/07
Dear old lefty Guardian columnist ...
Fixing the mortgage crisis, but how? | 11/05/07
Now that the mortgages are well and truly melting down the experts are gathering to ...
Who Needs ID Anyway?(1) | 11/02/07
For ordinary Americans the flap over illegal aliens and drivers licenses is a ...
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
Living Under Law
Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
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