URLs du Jour

2017-08-30

Karma

Proverbs 21:13 sounds a little Karma-esque:

13 Whoever shuts their ears to the cry of the poor
    will also cry out and not be answered.

Well, that'll teach 'em.

But as it happens, our very next item…


■ … may be behind the WSJ paywall, sorry, but Arthur C. Brooks has a point about the elites screwing over the poor, in the form of state-sponsored lottery gambling: Powerbull: The Lottery Loves Poverty

Who are these lotteries’ most loyal customers? Poor people. Lots of folks buy the occasional ticket, but studies have long shown a steady association between poverty and lottery play. Many scholars report that the poorest third of Americans buy more than half of all lotto tickets, which is why states advertise so aggressively in poor neighborhoods.

It's a pretty sleazy way to obtain government revenue. But (trivia) do you know which state was the first to establish a lottery?


■ At NR, Heather Mac Donald writes more on the fascinating story we discussed a few days back: Scandal Erupts over the Promotion of ‘Bourgeois’ Behavior. At issue is an op-ed from lawprofs Amy Wax and Larry Alexander which dared to claim "All cultures are not equal." Mac Donald looks at some waxing-wroth reactions, for example that of the so-called "IDEAL Council":

A glad cry must have gone out among IDEAL manifesto writers when they discovered that Wax had taught at the University of Virginia law school until 2001. Voilà! Irrefutable proof of bigotry! “Prior to teaching at Penn, Wax was a professor at the University of Virginia Law School,” the manifesto gloats. “On August 12th, White supremacists marched through the University of Virginia carrying torches, chanting ‘You will not replace us,’ and yelling racial and anti-Semitic slurs.” The causality speaks for itself, but in case the reader needs help, IDEAL explains that the white supremacy “can find its intellectual home in the kind of falsely ‘objective’ rhetoric in Amy Wax’s statement, which positions (white) bourgeois culture as not only objectively superior, but also under incursion from lesser cultures and races.”

"Are you now, or have you ever been, a faculty ID card-carrying member of the University of Virginia?"


■ At Cato, Ryan Harvey connects Bad Economics and Hurricane Harvey.

Disasters seem just about the worst possible time to discuss economic concepts. Ask Forbes columnist Tim Worstall, whose column on “price gouging” in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey has purportedly been removed from their site.

I used to subscribe to Forbes. It went downhill. Their ad-filled website is pretty obnoxious. And now, to boot, they're buckling to the anti-market mob? Eesh.


■ At the WaPo, DeNeen L. Brown remembers The day President Reagan comforted a black family who had a KKK cross burned on its lawn

President Reagan read the story about the cross burning in his morning Washington Post. A black family in College Park, Md., had just won a civil suit against a young Ku Klux Klan leader who had been convicted of terrorizing the family five years earlier.

Reagan’s deputy press secretary, Larry Speakes, said the president was jarred by what had happened to Phillip and Barbara Butler. “That was the first thing on his mind this morning,” Speakes told The Post on May 3, 1982. White House Chief of Staff James Baker and Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver walked into the Oval Office, and the first thing he said to them was, “ ‘I’ve read this story. I’d like to go see these people.’ ”

Would it be too hard for President Trump to draw a lesson from this?


Last Modified 2018-12-28 3:06 PM EDT