URLs du Jour

2007-10-21

My dreams of a free mattress remain alive this morning, thanks to Mr. Curtis Montague Schilling and Mr. David Jonathan Drew.

  • Today's "Read the Whole Thing" award goes to Mr. Steyn, who columnizes on SCHIP, goes from Pete Stark to General John Stark, from Nancy Pelosi to President Sarkozy, and the also the Frost family. Bottom line:
    I'm in favor of tax credits for child health care, and Health Savings Accounts for adults, and any other reform that emphasizes the citizen's responsibility to himself and his dependents. But middle-class entitlement creep would be wrong even if was affordable, even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover it every month: it turns free-born citizens into enervated wards of the nanny state. As Gerald Ford likes [sic] to say when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." But there's an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn't big enough to get you to give any of it back. As I point out in my book, nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: once a fellow's enjoying the fruits of Euro-style entitlements, he couldn't give a hoot about the general societal interest; he's got his, and who cares if it's going to bankrupt the state a generation hence?

    That's the real "war on children": In Europe, it's killing their future. Don't make the same mistake here.

  • On a related (albeit belated) note, Viking Pundit describes how that whole socially equitable communitarianism thing plays out for the "first boomer," who recently signed up for her Social Security payouts.

    (I'm a boomer in good standing. And not one for class warfare. But I'm amazed that everyone younger isn't more pissed off at us.)

  • New York Times columnist Paul Krugman whines about a "dismissive" review of his new book in … the New York Times. (Via Don Luskin, who's especially tickled.)

  • We noted yesterday that Stephen Colbert's presidential campaign was showing up in our continuing research into political phoniness. Kenneth P. Vogel at Politico tries to keep a straight face while investigating how Colbert might land in trouble for "violating election laws, including those barring corporate campaign contributions."
    "You don't get a different set of rules because you're running as a joke," aid Marc Elias, a leading Washington election lawyer who represents Democratic candidates.

    You may get a different set of rules because it's a joke and you're not really running," said Elias, who stressed he was not speaking for any client. "But if it isn't a joke, then there may be any number of issues."

    As the article (perhaps unintentionally) demonstrates, the real joke is arbitrary election law that restricts political expression.

    Alas, it's not that funny.

    But wouldn't it be neat if Colbert actually did some good in pointing that out?


Last Modified 2007-10-21 9:50 AM EDT