Good Op-Eds

 The Economist magazine reported on the successes of the Biden administration during the last year and the moderation of American voters in the 2022 election.  The article said: It mustered a bipartisan majority to pass the  chips  and Science Act , a $280bn effort to shore up America’s microchips industry, thanks to growing wariness of China. After unsuccessfully pushing a grand economic redesign of America, the administration eventually compromised enough to overcome the resistance of Joe Manchin of West Virginia, often the swing Democrat in a 50-50 Senate, to pass a more modest, inaptly named  Inflation Reduction Act , promising spending of $369bn over a decade. Its climate spending will be the most substantial in American history (in a year when disasters from  drought in the West  to  Hurricane Ian  in the East, to a nationwide winter storm at Christmas, served as a reminder of climate perils). Together with an  infrastructure pack...

  George   Will writes in the Washington Post   that the decline of newspapers’ ad revenue has led to a big change in news reporting.  People now read news in on-line papers and social media for validation of their views on the news, according to a book by Andrey Mir, “how the Media Polarized Us.”  Will concludes by saying: Mir says that whereas journalism used to want its picture of the world to fit the world, “post-journalism wants the world to fit its picture.” This, he says, “is a definition of propaganda. Post-journalism has turned the media into the crowdfunded Ministries of Truth.” Although he paints with a broad brush and few pastels, there is an adjective that fits his depiction of today’s media world: newsworthy.

  I resent the fact that Democrats revile Southerners who have positive feelings for the Confederacy.  Our ancestors fought for the Confederacy. It is normal to have positive feelings about your forebears, especially when they did brave things.  My great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy at Shiloh and at Mobile Bay.  I will not condemn him for that.  For me the Confederate battle flag is a symbol of respect for Southern bravery and devotion. The Confederate army did not fight against blacks.  They fought against other whites.  Slavery was an issue, but it was not part of the war; it was part of the politics.  White Confederates did not kill blacks unless they were on the battlefield as troops of the Yankee army.  Lincoln made a point of creating black military units, because there were none when the Civil War started. By and large the white veterans of the Confederate and Union armies reconciled after the war.  Blacks took no great ...

  An op-ed in the   Financial Times by Martin Wolf   calls for strong action by the UK government to prevent the increasingly high energy prices from falling disproportionately on the poor.  He says: It would be a crime and a folly to let the domestic costs of the war fall disproportionately on the least well off. Solidarity in sharing these burdens is obligatory. So, too, is willingness to shed shibboleths. In wartime, markets are not sacrosanct. Price controls, even rationing, must be on the table. So, while imported gas is a big tail, there is no reason at all why it should wag the energy dog. As an emergency measure, the government can and should impose price controls on domestic gas producers and generators of nuclear and renewable electricity. These prices should be substantially higher than prewar, but not at today’s “Putin levels”. The government should also subsidise the price of gas imports to these controlled levels. These controls (and subsidies) should e...

  The Founding Fathers were not enthusiastic about pure democracy.  In his excellent book, The Quartet, historian Joseph Ellis describes James Madison’s views on a democracy that represented the direct choices of “the people.”   “Madison’s experience at both the state and the federal level had convinced him that “the people” was not some benevolent, harmonious collective but rather a smoldering and ever-shifting gathering of factions or interest groups committed to provincial perspectives and vulnerable to demagogues with partisan agendas. The question, then, was how to reconcile the creedal conviction about popular sovereignty with the highly combustible, inherently swoonish character of democracy. Perhaps the most succinct way to put the question was this: How could a republic bottomed on the principle of popular sovereignty be structured in such a way to manage the inevitable excesses of democracy and best serve the long-term public interest?   “Madison’s one-word...

 TV news lives on polls, but I don’t think they are accurate.  They show to some extent what some people are thinking, but they don’t necessarily predict the outcome of elections unless there is a substantial spread between the responses.  I would not even trust a 10% differential. I think there are many people, like myself, who do not reaspond to poll questions, so the people polled are not representative, and many do not respond honestly.  Those who do respond may strongly favor a candidte and thus tend to respond in wsys they think will help their candidate, e.g. by saying what issues they think are important. One big problem is that most pollsters are elite Democrats from left-leaning media or academia.  Conservatives sense this and when these leftist pollsters call, Republicans are not going to cooperate with them, because they see them as the enemy. The pollsters have contempt for the conservatives they interview and the interviewees know that.  ...