FORWARD!!! (via Nate Beeler Cartoons)
“The mechanical optimist endeavors to justify the universe avowedly upon the ground that it is a rational and consecutive pattern. He points out that the fine thing about the world is that it can all be explained. That is the one point, if I may put it so, on which God in return, is explicit to the point of violence. God says, in effect, that if there is one fine thing about the world, as far as men are concerned, it is that it cannot be explained… To startle man God becomes for an instant a blasphemer; one might almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist. He unrolls before Job a long panorama of created things, the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild ass, the peacock, the ostrich, the crocodile. He so describes each of them that it sounds like a monster walking in the sun. The whole is a psalm or rhapsody of the sense of wonder. The maker of all things is astonished at the things He has Himself made. Job puts forward a note of interrogation; God answers with a note of exclamation. Instead of proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He insists that it is a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was.” — G.K. Chesterton (via The Transom)
Mapping the electoral power of shale
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One lesson is that Washington really hasn’t been taken over by moneyed groups. In a democracy, even the rich are entitled to promote their interests. It’s true that their lobbyists and lawyers sometimes win lucrative tax breaks, subsidies or regulatory preferences. But as the spending numbers show, their influence is exaggerated, especially considering their tax burden. The richest fifth of Americans pay nearly 70 percent of federal taxes (included in this group, the richest 10 percent pay 55 percent), estimates the CBO.
The larger lesson is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, American politics have not become insensitive to the “the people.” In many ways, just the opposite is true. Politicians are too responsive to popular will. The real Washington is in the business of pleasing as many people as possible for as long as possible. There are now vast constituencies dependent on the largesse of the federal government. This is the main cause of huge “structural” budget deficits, meaning that they aren’t simply a hangover from the Great Recession.
” — Democracy in America
Student Debt: feeling the squeeze
Anakin Skywalker Lightsaber Lamp
[video]
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Conservatives aren’t wrong to want to ensure that incentives to work and invest are robust, or to favor a predictable, rules-based monetary policy. But these principles have to be applied to the circumstances in which we find ourselves, not the ones of 1981.
Compared to the various mythical Reagans on offer, the real Reagan is less convenient for today’s Democrats — and a more challenging example for Republicans.
” — Ramesh Ponnuru“
The more that financial success depends on high IQ; the more demand there is for lawyers, lobbyists, and accountants; the more onerous regulations become for men-with-strong-backs to find work or for entrepreneurs to start businesses — then the more we move towards a society where the government rewards people based on their ability to navigate paperwork or fulfill quotas on a political to-do list. Complexity benefits statists because increasing complexity allows statists to claim we need more government to help people navigate through these complex times. In the process of helping, they make the government more complicated, creating new services for “fixers” of all stripes to solve problems the statists created in the first place.
The more you look around at spots where society and government intersect, the more you can see how pervasive and pernicious this dynamic is. The more rules you have, the more power you bequeath to the people well-suited to make or manipulate the rules.
” — Jonah Goldberg, April 20, 2012 G-file(Source: visitor.constantcontact.com)
“College tuition, up 300% since 1990, has outstripped inflation by a factor of four. The run-up in health-care looks tame by comparison.”