Pun Salad

I wish I had more insightful things to say about this book by Cass Sunstein. I was inspired to get it via Interlibrary Loan (thanks, UMass-Amherst!) by David Friedman's brief discussion of Sunstein's newfound fondness for classical liberals and outright libertarians.

Alas, I didn't get much out of reading the book. It's pretty short, ten chapters and 140 pages of main text. There's not much of a coherent discussion, each chapter seems to be unrelated to the others. And some of those chapters are kind of weak.

Sunstein starts out bold in Chapter One: "On Being a Liberal". It's a collection of 85 numbered propositions about liberalism; he pitches it as a "wide tent". There's room for fans of Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher, as well as fans of FDR and LBJ. At a certain point, his discussion seems to devolve into "liberals like good things, but not bad things." E.g., #75: "Liberals believe in kindness, humility, and considerateness." Or #34: "Liberals like laughter. They are anti-anti-laughter." I wished for #86: "Liberals are partial to self-flattery."

And from there on, it's a hodgepodge: a paean to J.S. Mill's "different experiments of living"; a discussion of Hayek's look at Mills' relationship with his (eventual) wife, Harriet Taylor; looks at liberal attitudes toward the rule of law, freedom of speech, free markets, and "opportunity". In most cases, he gives short shrift to libertarian views.

But let me dive a bit deeper into that "opportunity" thing: Sunstein does something kind of neat in that discussion, telling us about the famous singer/songwriter Connie Converse, who inspired countless musicians in the 1950s and 60s.

If you're saying "who, now?", that's the point. Connie was a real person and a real musician, but never famous. She vanished in 1974, driving a VW Beetle to nobody knows where.

A haunting story, no matter how you feel about Sunstein's take on liberal "opportunity."

What I've left out is Sunstein's Chapter Seven, "The Second Bill of Rights". It's a look back at FDR's 1944 State of the Union address, which he gave via "Fireside Chat" radio. Sunstein doesn't just like the speech: he deems it "the greatest of the twentieth century."

What goes into that "Second Bill of Rights"? Oh, geez, so many rights:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

A vague, and probably expensive, laundry list. (Eleanor probably helped write it.) And note that this speech was made at the time we weren't doing so hot on the original Bill of Rights, what with Japanese internment and FDR's other attacks on American liberties.

But what really bugged me about Sunstein's discussion was his effort to obliterate the distinction between "negative" and "positive" rights, and to trample on the "myth" of laissez faire. (So much for the "wide tent" he talked about earlier in the book.) He relies overmuch on the views of "legal realists" like Robert Hale; they observe that since "people are able to have rights, and to enjoy them, only because law and government are present."

This becomes, essentially, a blank check for "law and government" to enact arbitrary schemes of what Frédéric Bastiat deemed plunder. His brief rejoinder in The Law is worth excerpting:

Mr. de Lamartine once wrote to me thusly: "Your doctrine is only the half of my program. You have stopped at liberty; I go on to fraternity." I answered him: "The second half of your program will destroy the first."

In fact, it is impossible for me to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary. I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed, and thus justice being legally trampled underfoot

So: sorry Cass: I'm on Team Bastiat.

Specifically, for this:

A correction will appear in tomorrow's print edition:
"A headline with an article on Friday about President Trump’s threats to leave NATO misstated the full name of the body. It is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, not the North American Treaty Organization."

— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) April 3, 2026

"Some say" that the Times editors got too caught up in the headline's "American"/"America" cutesiness, bypassing their critical faculties. I buy that.

Also of note:

• Sinister, or just stupid? Well, let George Will explain why he thinks The verdict against Meta and Google carries sinister implications. (WaPo gifted link)

  The most sinister idea in modern politics has received a California jury’s endorsement, and much applause. It contradicts democracy’s foundational belief in individual agency.

  This concept presupposes that individuals can, in common parlance, “make up their minds.” They can assemble and edit their beliefs and convictions. When this idea is diluted, government expands its ambition to curate the public’s consciousness.

  As Congress did when banning Chinese-owned TikTok, ostensibly for “national security” reasons. For the first time, Congress targeted a specific speech forum because of conjectural harms that might result from what a congressional committee called “divisive narratives.”

  Hey, maybe the WaPo could change its motto from "Democracy Dies in Darkness" to "Democracy Dies in an Ambitious Government Curating the Public's Consciousness".

  (I realize that doesn't exactly sing.)

• But in case you didn't know… David Harsanyi thinks Everyone Knows What the Democrats' AIPAC Obsession Is Really About. Starting off with failed presidential candidate Tom Steyer's claim that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) "is a dark money organization that should have no place in our politics." And it's not just Steyer.

  The Democrats' new AIPAC obsession is just a convenient way to tap into some ugly conspiracies and fearmongering about Jewish money and its alleged control over our politics. Democrats are increasingly, as The New York Times might put it, "J-pilled."

  There are, of course, wholly legitimate criticisms of American foreign policy. But Jew-baiting progressives such as Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) don't merely argue that AIPAC sits on the wrong side of a foreign policy issue but that it wants to steal constituents' health care and child care to enrich war profiteers and genocidal maniacs.

  Data point for Granite Staters: Democrat Senate candidate Chris Pappas and Democrat Congressional candidate Maggie Goodlander have accepted AIPAC donations, and the "Jew-baiting progressives" running against them have made it a campaign issue. As have the "Jew-baiting progressives" at the anti-Israel Track AIPAC site.

• Delusional or demented? Javier Milei has changed his mind about that:

  Javier Milei: “I thought being on the left was a mental problem. The empirical evidence is so overwhelming that it never worked anywhere, and they refused to accept it.”
  
  “But what I discovered is that being on the left is a disease of the soul. The left is built on envy, hatred,… pic.twitter.com/e7NzxNinSM

  — Javier Milei Quotes (Fan) (@MileiSays) April 3, 2026

  

  Coincidently weighing in on that topic is Jonah Goldberg, who sermonizes insightfully on this Easter Sunday: Man, Sin, and the Modern Lens. He plugs a recent essay in National Affairs by Steven F. Hayward & Linda L. Denno: Envy and Social Justice. Which (in turn) plugs  Helmut Schoeck's 1966 book Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour. (Amazon link at your right)

  In these days of modern times, these authors point out that envy is an unappreciated sin. And there's a reason for that. Jonah:

  [Envy] stopped being a serious subject of study because the progressive “social agenda” depends heavily on envy. I’m willing to concede that the obsession with income inequality and the desire to “ban” billionaires is about more than envy. But if you’re not willing to concede that envy plays a major part in the rhetoric and politics of these programs, you’re either lying or in denial. Conceding that a political project is grounded in one of the seven deadly sins is problematic. As Schoeck writes:

  The aversion of the radical left-wing writer to any consideration of the problem of envy is comprehensible. This is a sphere that must be made taboo, and he must do all in his power to repress cognition of envy in his contemporaries. Otherwise he might lose the support of serious-minded people, who, while sharing his views for sentimental reasons, and even following him in his demands for a policy and a political ethic dependent upon common envy's being regarded as an absolute, yet are aware how little esteemed envy is and how little it is capable of legitimizing itself openly in most Western societies even today.

  Jonah goes on to mull on the other Deadly Sins, and I agree it's time to (heh) resurrect them as underlying your modern progressive's "disease of the soul."

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