Charles C.W. Cooke has a piece in the current print National Review, titled Chasing Lost Edens. and I'm spending one of this month's gifted links on it.
Why? Because he describes my own current attitudes to a T. After admitting his overall optimism despite ominous political trends:
One might suppose this means that I do not take my strong political opinions seriously — or at least that I am willing to ignore them in favor of thinking happy thoughts. But that is untrue. I am, for example, sincerely pro-life, which in practice means that I consider the vast majority of American states to be sanctioning murder. I am a constitutional originalist, which in practice means that I consider an enormous amount of what the federal government does every day to be flatly illegal. I dislike the president, as I have disliked every president we have had since I moved to this country in 2011. I think that the media is a national disgrace, that academia has fatally beclowned itself, and that the entertainment industry has lost its way. If you were to invite me to gripe, you would, after the end of the second hour, wish to throw me out of an airplane.
It’s just that I also think that we live in the midst of an unparalleled miracle, and that, while every age features terrible problems, not every age has the upsides that ours enjoys. I could rehearse, as I often have, the intellectual case in defense of this view. But here’s the thing: While making that case is important, doing so will not be sufficient to overcome the great divide I am describing, because the great divide I am describing is not the result of disagreement about the facts. Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley Jr. had access to the same facts, and yet one of them experienced life as tragedy and was perpetually uncomfortable in the world, while the other offered his critiques with sprezzatura and remained at ease even among his adversaries. Could either man have argued the other into altering his disposition? I think not.
See what you think.
Also of note:
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As Karl Kristian Steincke said: "Det er vanskeligt at spaa, især naar det gælder Fremtiden". You probably recognize the translation: "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future."
That insight did not stop Matt Ridley from wondering in print: Why does nobody see new technology coming?
There is a paradox at the heart of innovation that I have yet to resolve in my own mind. Looking backwards, innovation looks inevitable and therefore predictable: once you invent the drone, warfare changes; once you invent the internet, social media arrives; once you invent electricity, the light bulb is unavoidable. Looking forwards, however, nobody sees these things coming.
Search the writings of defence experts from even ten years ago and you will find few people realising just how much drones were going to change the nature of war. Comb through the work of internet pioneers in the late 1980s and you will encounter almost nobody foreseeing the profitability of search engines, let alone social media. Read the musings of DNA experts in the 1970s and none of them expected forensic applications of DNA fingerprinting to transform criminal justice.
As if you needed further evidence, Matt notes the bonehead prophecies from Paul Krugman, Ken Olsen, Steve Ballmer, …
Bottom line: take predictions with a grain of salt. If the predictions seem more confident, more grains are indicated.
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I like Hayek's road metaphor better. But David Harsanyi deploys his own: Economic Populism Is a Dead End for the GOP.
It was probably inevitable that the Right's economic populism would degenerate into promises of more government checks.
Early in the week, the administration floated the idea of redirecting federal childcare aid so low-income married stay-at-home parents could get a $9,000 subsidy per child for daycare.
The policy, reportedly hatched by Vice President JD Vance, would use the Department of Health and Human Services' Child Care and Development Fund, originally created in the 1990s for low-income single parents. Vance's defenders stress that the program merely redirects "existing subsidies" and wouldn't add to the debt.
The notion that Vance was fiscally responsible was quickly shattered later in the week when he appeared on television defending President Donald Trump's promise to hand every adult a $5,000 "dividend" check should Republicans hold on to Congress.
David's penultimate paragraph should be obvious: "Modern Republicans are increasingly embracing economic demagoguery and doomerism. In the end, though, they will never be able to outspend or outpromise the Left."
(Yeah, I said "penultimate". You can't expect me to avoid that word forever!)
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