(from the Coyote blog)

Activist: A person who believes so strongly that a problem needs to be remedied that she dedicates substantial time to … getting other people to fix the problem. It used to be that activists sought voluntary help for their pet problem, and thus retained some semblance of honor. However, our self-styled elite became frustrated at some point in the past that despite their Ivy League masters degrees in sociology, other people did not seem to respect their ideas nor were they particularly interested in the activist’s pet issues. So activists sought out the double shortcut of spending their time not solving the problem themselves, and not convincing other people to help, but convincing the government it should compel others to fix the supposed problem. This fascism of good intentions usually consists of government taking money from the populace to throw at the activist’s issue, but can also take the form of government-compelled labor and/or government limitations on choice. (…)

This is in no way an exhaustive list.  But if you’re fishing around, I recommend them all.  Genres include super hero, mystery, horror and comedy.

Agents of Atlas (2008, 2009), by Jeff Parker
The Atheist or Antoine Sharpe, The Atheist (2008-2009), by Phil Hester
Atomic Robo (2007-2009)), by Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener
Brawl (2007), by Dean Haspiel and Michel Fiffe
Captain Britain, in the run by Alan Moore and Alan Davis (ca. 1982-1984, and a little beyond).  It can be More →

Here’s a great article a few months ago by Paul Cella in the New Ledger about the patriotism of Bob Dylan.  The article is thoughtful if a little pushy.  The patriotism in question is not that of waving the flag or supporting a war, but of loving the country, walking the land, singing of its people.

Around the end of last year, I had the thought that the legal realist position of someone like Oliver Wendell Holmes holds that rules do not interpret themselves. There must always be a personal element, i.e. a person who decides what rule to apply and how to apply it. I think that on some level this is actually nihilistic, because it denies that any principle applies.  More →

“Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made.”

–Otto von Bismarck

One of Hayek’s rules for distinguishing good laws from bad is an extension of the Kantian categorical imperative, as follows. Hayek observes that strictly speaking, many laws do not affect everyone equally. For instance, some laws restrict the rights of the young, some of the old (old people must get their driving licenses again in some places). I believe that rape laws only apply to attacks of men on women, or at least that was true until quite recently. Laws apply also differentially across space (driving laws, zoning laws) and across social estate (protecting some job estates, punishing or rewarding some economic estates) and so on. Hayek argues that this does not mean that the notion of equality before the law is totally garbage, but that it can be salvaged by More →

“We lived in the hope that, if we survived and were good, God would allow us to become pirates.”  –Mark Twain

Schmitt’s notion of polemical oppositions is profound. I don’t think that he ever really defines the notion. In part it seems simple. What is the rule of law, exactly? It is not the rule of men. It is not simply not-the-rule-of-law. The opposite of parliamentarism is dictatorship. The opposite of Rechtsstaat is Machtstaat. The opposite of state is More →

“How can limited government and fiscal restraint be equated with lack of compassion for the poor? How can a tax break that puts a little more money in the weekly paychecks of working people be seen as an attack on the needy? Since when do we in America believe that our society is made up of two diametrically opposed classes – one rich, one poor – both in a permanent state of conflict and neither side able to get ahead except at the expense of the other? Since when do we in America accept this alien and discredited theory of social and class warfare? Since when do we in America endorse the politics of envy and division.” – Ronald Reagan 1982 (pg. 197 in Liberty and Tyranny by Mark Levin, quoted here)

“Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” - George Washington (1732 – 1799)

I finally realized why I associate these two thinkers. Both of them argue against formal interpretations of rules. Wittgenstein points out that a rule is always interpreted by an actor in a specific game or subcontext, with specific possibilities. There are probabilities and irrational factors. “Reasons come to an end somewhere; this is how I act.” Schmitt sets as the foundation for his theory of sovereignty that formal law (black-letter rules, procedures, things on paper) form only one necessary but not sufficient part of law. The other is the personal element: law is always interpreted and applied by an actor or actors. Rules for the interpretation of laws cannot abrogate this personal element, but only seek to hide it. (Which is why in Constitutional Theory he says that to speak of the sovereignty of the constitution or a sovereign process of law is to hide the personal element, indeed deceitfully.)

“It is a misleading cult that teaches that the remedy of our ills is to have the law give over, once and for all, the strivings of the centuries for a rational coherence, and sink back in utter weariness to a justice that is the flickering reflection of the impulse of the moment.” –Benjamin Cardozo

“By a free country, I mean a country where people are allowed, so long as they do not hurt their neighbours, to do as they like. I do not mean a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like.” - Lord Salisbury (1830-1903) (courtesy of The England Project)

Following is the abstract I just wrote for Stephen Toulmin’s Foresight and Understanding (1961).  Toulmin studied with none other than Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1946.  Drifting horizontally over Toulmin’s thought for years, I think that I think that his philosophical discussion of science in that book speaks to the good question of what the rule of law and legal certainty are.  The two best treatments of the rule of law and legal certainty are those by Friedrich Hayek (Constitution of Liberty, 1960) and Bruno Leoni (Freedom and the Law, 1961).

My recollection from ten years ago is that Toulmin’s point is as follows:  Some sciences are characterized by foresight and others by understanding.  Greek pre-Socratic science More →

Legal realists like Oliver Wendell Holmes reject the use of reason, in claiming that laws do not interpret themselves.  That is, they imagine that a judge sits with the facts of a case before him and in a Fregean manner grasps and judges legal principles.  For Holmes to imagine that the judge can be somehow separated from thinking about the law reminds me of Machiavelli’s metaphorical advice to his reader, i.e. to any would-be prince:  Sometimes you must be the fox, sometimes the lion.  More →

Take a look at this map. Contains spoilers, if you still haven’t finished the series.

sacralizing/consecrating, founding, starting

the problem of beginnings in e m law

there was a pan-European colonial conception of time and title to rights of every sort

rights came from point source

conquest, transmission, loan, clan obligation, prerogative

More →

“The term “postmodernity” itself, while obviously insufficient and kind of hilariously woozy with indeterminacy, implies a fairly obvious narrative, in which modernity is a thing which it’s important that we’re post.” –Eve Tushnet (her blog, 5/10/2009

I’d like to draw your attention, dear reader — yes you, the one in the back — to two new links in my list (at right). These are to my friends Anne and Jared’s inspired websites The Carnivore Project and Pornokitsch. TCP is a review of delectable meat products, focusing especially on bacon and hamburgers. Pornokitsch reviews science fiction and other fantastic fiction, with special reports on the London comic book and fantasy fiction scene to boot.

Natural law is “the eternal refuge of malcontents opposed to the established order.” –Raoul van Caenegem, “The Rechtsstaat in Historical Perspective,” in Legal history: A European Perspective, p. 194, London: Hambledon Press, 1991

One of the central ideas of classical liberalism is that many useful institutions in society are created not by a concerted, unilateral plan, but are developed by several parties, often not acting in concert, over a period of time. I think that the Scottish moral philosopher and political economist Adam Ferguson was the first to describe this process in his Essay on the Origin of Civil Society (1767), and it was elaborated most famously in the 20th century by Friedrich Hayek. In The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Hayek described what he called the British “antirationalist tradition” including this Scottish idea. According to this Fergusonian idea, things like constitutions in pre-modern societies develop slowly over time, More →

What are we to make of the famous hair band Starship’s mysterious 1985 hit, “We Built this City (on Rock and Roll)”? What import likes behind the words and images? Is there an esoteric message hidden behind the flimflam, glam and assorted shazam? Consider the following: To rise to the commanding heights (well, sort of) of music-industrial capitalism by the 1980’s, Starship were financiers who refused to pay their laborers “real” money, having compensated them with their rock. The “progression” from Jefferson Airplane to Starship coincides with the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It’s all there in the video and the lyrics to their 1985 hit, “We Built this City (on Rock and Roll)” More →

Batman is an example of an independent social entrepreneur. As the wealthy Bruce Wayne, he is a gentleman of leisure. At night, he can fund his own single-minded crusade to fight crime, independently of other forces and groups in society. He funds it himself and obeys his own code. The city is by turns soft on crime and itself run by corrupt magistrates. Batman is a self-driven force, unattached to the habits and cycles of his society, who acts upon the society around him, trying to change it.

What follows is a phrase net, a form of visualization of semantics. The link to the IBM site is below in the thumbnail form. You can click on either big or small version to see a bigger version of this. A phrase net is a visualization of text, in this case a visualization of the 100 most common adjacent words in this incredible 161,000-word manifesto, the Cyphernomicon (1994).

Carl Schmitt was a German legal theorist who lived through most of the interesting events of the last century and played a role as a minor court intellectual to the Nazi regime in the early 1930’s.

His corpus may be divided into three stages: the Weimar period, the Nazi period and the post-war writings, with the latter forming a rough continuity and spanning the majority of his writing life.

The “Constitutional Theory of Federation” was written in 1928, making it somewhat contemporaneous with The Concept of the Political, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy and Political Theology, interestingly enough.

An interesting article about the apparent contrast between Schmittian authoritarian statism and liberalism is Renaldo Cristi’s “Hayek and Schmitt on the Rule of Law”,” which Cristi later worked into a book on the same. More →

The remark by Irad Kimhi I posted the other day is at once creepy and profound. It is also more familiar than it at first appears; think of the stories and narrative methods employed in the following:

In several television shows and films, a character’s everyday ego (his I) is unaware of who he really is. He really is a saboteur or a murderer, another person, and so on. Think of “The 4400″ (Kyle Baldwin, son of the putz secret agent protagonist); “Angel Heart” (Harry Angel); “Battlestar Galactica” (the false surface consciousness of Sharon “Boomer” Valeri, as in Episode 1×3, “Water”); “Fight Club” (the narrator); “Evil Dead” (Ash’s hand, which went bad, so he had to cut it off).

A different kind of thing-beneath-you is the fascinating depiction of the Echo-consciousness in Joss Whedon’s current going concern “Doll House.” Echo is perhaps a being underneath the surface of Caroline, the woman who semi-voluntarily gave up her body for five years for employment as a doll. In the first season finale [spoiler alert!], More →

Found this on the nerd family blog. As NerdMom put it, “Apparently back in the 1920’s people didn’t take blood rivalries quite so seriously.”

This is just a short note of a kind of introduction, but not to me. I am not very familiar with academic blogs, though I know they exist. The point here is just to say a few words about Irad Kimhi. Kimhi is an Israeli philosopher who had taught in both the United States and Israel. In the mid-1990’s he was an assistant professor in the Philosophy Department at Yale. He has guest-taught courses on a couple of occasions for the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. As I understand it, his regular gig is to teach courses in Tel Aviv in Israel. His name and reputation are well known among a fairly small group of cognoscenti, including friends, colleagues and former students (like myself). He has a kind of magical reputation to him, unique as far as I know in the academic world: He has not to my knowledge published a book and I don’t know that he has published even any articles, but several of his draft manuscripts circulate privately among ravenous devotees of his thought. When he taught courses at the U of C this past Autumn and Winter, established, famous professors sat in on the classes and took notes as eagerly as the attendant graduate students. More →

“Who is dreaming your dream? It is not you, but it is also not someone else. It is not like your heart beating. The… point in Freud is that the one who is dreaming my dream is the one who is living my life. [It is not a man within the man, but rather another form of] strange agency… This is an inversion of the [expected relation of conscious and unconscious.] It is not that the conscious has an unconscious, but rather that the unconscious has a conscious…” –Irad Kimhi, October 8, 2008

A common philosophical account holds that there is a difference between positive law and natural or moral law, or between convention (nomos) and nature (physis). This distinction was articulated in ancient Athens by Socrates (Plato tells us) and has more or less recurred over the centuries as a tool for criticizing standing conventional laws and customs. In brief, the typical drama goes like this: A principality or power injures some party, say taking away their patrimony or other pretiosum. The injured party then says, Hey! It’s wrong for you to do this! It’s wrong by nature, it’s against the moral law! The government says that what is the law is what is right. And indeed, the powers that be have to believe this and do tend to believe this. Put a man in the oval office and he’ll be quite sure of his righteousness, even as he orders people murdered (consider Kennedy and Nixon, to say nothing of our more recent presidential murderers). More →

From Schmitt’s “Plight of European Jurisprudence” (1943). Schmitt wrote this work as a lecture (later published as an essay) during composition of his Nomos of the Earth (1950).

“The danger the spirit of European jurisprudence faces today comes no longer from theology and only occasionally from a philosophical metaphysics, but from an untrammeled technicism which uses state law as a tool. Now jurisprudence must take a stand against the other side. The scholarly jurist is no theologian and no philosopher, but he is also no mere instrument of arbitrary prescriptions and endless enactments. We must now withstand a subaltern instrumentalization, just as in other times we have had to resist dependence on theology. We remain a science and a jurisprudence against both sides. That is the reality of our intellectual and spiritual existence, More →

[From the Ney York Times' Dealbook: May 5, 2009, 6:07 pm: "Hedge Fund Manager Strikes Back at Obama. Clifford S. Asness is not afraid to defend himself against attacks from the Obama administration. The outspoken managing partner of AQR Capital Management, a $20 billion hedge fund in Greenwich, Conn., has written a scathing letter striking back at President Obama for his harsh words blaming hedge funds for Chrysler’s bankruptcy. The letter is making its way around Wall Street, where it’s being met with cheers from other hedge funds managers, one of whom sent it to DealBook. Among other things, Mr. Asness said he was “aghast at the president’s comments” and called them “backwards and libelous.” I found this through Diana West's blog. While she is quite the American Zionist, I think her angry skepticism of the GOP's post-election strategy is right on. This comes the same day that I noticed Richard Posner's recent renunciation of the GOP or the rump conservative movement as any kind of home for intellectual conservatism. It seems clear to me that the various forces and players on the non-evangelical American right have the tools, the talent and the ideas to recenter the Republican Party, to rebuild from the centrist pussyfootery of the recent McCain-Palin campaign which, despite my measured enthusiasm for the governor of Alaska last fall, I readily agree as a disaster. The party needs to convince disappointed lovers, fellow travelers, moderates, people who work for small business, and all kinds of independents, professionals and other dynamists that the Grand New Party should be and will be the opposite of the waxing Obama Mussolini-style corporate state...]

Unafraid in Greenwich Connecticut
Clifford S. Asness
Managing and Founding Principal
AQR Capital Management, LLC

The President has just harshly castigated hedge fund managers for being unwilling to take his administration’s bid for their Chrysler bonds. He called them “speculators” who were “refusing to sacrifice like everyone else” and who wanted “to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.”

The responses of hedge fund managers have been, appropriately, outrage, but generally have been anonymous for fear of going on the record against a powerful President (an exception, though still in the form of a “group letter,” was the superb note from “The Committee of Chrysler Non-TARP Lenders,” some of the points of which I echo here, and a relatively few firms, like Oppenheimer, that have publicly defended themselves). Furthermore, one by one the managers and banks are said to be caving to the President’s wishes out of justifiable fear.

I run an approximately twenty billion dollar money management firm More →

(I never thought of myself as a Chuck Norris fan. I mean, who doesn’t like his movies, his persona on some level? But things started to get interested two years ago when I noticed two odd things at the same time. First, Chuck Norris jokes had begun to proliferate as a new genre (see the widget on my website here, lowest text in the right column). Second, Norris endorsed Mike Huckabee for Republican Presidential candidate. I was never much of a fan of Huckabee, except in that he played guitar. So Norris was emerging as something of the new old Arnold Schwarzenegger, an action hero with a moderately astute political message. Anyway, here is a bit from an article Norris recently write for World Net Daily, a kind of political right-side clearing house website:)

“The reason that government is cracking down on private instruction has more to do with suppressing alternative education than assuring educational standards. The rationale is quite simple, though rarely if ever stated: control future generations and you control the future. So rather than letting parents be the primary educators of their children — either directly or by educating their children in the private schools of their choice — [government] want[s] to deny parental rights, establish an educational monopoly run by the state, and limit private education options. It is so simple any socialist can understand it. As Joseph Stalin once stated, ‘Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.’” (See full Norris article.)

[What follows is my reportage of the Panel 1 of the conference, which I attended. I took pretty thorough notes, but they are necessarily incomplete. I welcome corrections. In the coming week I will better type up my notes on Panels 2 and 3. I did not attend Panel 4. The impatient can find the rough notes to Panels 2 and 3 in my earlier stub post.]

Conference on the Financial Crisis
Co-sponsored by the Money, Markets and Consumption Workshop, Economica, and other organizations. Held at the Franke Institute in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, April 10, 2009. It was mighty.

Panel 1: Sources of the Crisis

Moderator: Gary Herrigel (Department of Political Science, University of Chicago)

Douglas Diamond (University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business)

Diamond gave a slightly slow-moving but persuasive talk on financial crises in recent historical perspective. He argued that basically such crises are all the same, being caused by runs on short-term debt. Diamond unfortunately did not do a great job dumbing down his talk, so that my sense was that it was difficult for many people in the room to understand it well. (See below my account of the Q&A session at the end of the panel, where I give more detail on Diamond’s ideas. I took bad notes at the beginning and good notes at the end.)

Mark Mizruchi (Sociology Department, University of Michigan)

Mizruchi presented other, perhaps deeper causes More →

[Dear Reader: What follows is a transcript of the conference held today at the University of Chicago on the origins and implications of the current financial crisis. It was enormously stimulating. The panelists were twelve professors of economics, history, sociology and anthropology from the University of Chicago, Rutgers, the New School for Social Research, the University of Michigan, and the University of Missouri at Kansas City. NB This is the raw transcript; I will correct it for spelling and turn it into full Thucydidean prose in the next week or so.]

Panel 1: Sources of the Crisis
(see separate posting, where I have typed these up complete)

[What follow are the rough notes to Panels 2 and 3. I will turn them into prose soon.]

Panel 2: Crisis in Perspective: Historical and International Comparisons
More →

Dear Sir,

How does your argument apply to language games which are more complex than true/false scenarios? You articulate immanentism in terms of one of the classic paradigms for the study of logic, namely as determinables which are bipolar, availing themselves of either affirmation or rejection. An important difference between the Tractatus and the Investigations is that the Tractatus uses bipolar logic for which the Investigations substitutes the logical relation among possibilities within the grammar of language games. In simple terms, the the Tractatus uses bipolar logic, Investigations multipolar. Does this mean that the extension of the logical realism and logical psychism from your account would be that all the possibilities of the grammar in which we find ourselves have the same qualities as bipolar determinables? Thus if I tell a Knock, knock joke More →

Myth #1: Capitalism is unpopular with ordinary people and popular with certain elites in business and the DC policy world. Free-market reforms can therefore only be implemented through trickery. Naomi Klein has authored just this argument in her infamous Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2008). To give but one of many possible examples, Klein willfully quotes remarks by Friedman out of context, making a sociological remark of his look like a nefarious plot to spring surprise capitalism on the innocent, unsuspecting People. (See exposes of her shameless arguments and revel in the gullibility of her readers in The Agitator, Friedman Facts, Reason and even The New Republic.) It is simply untrue that the liberalizing (i.e. pro-market) reforms of the past three decades More →

1. The rebooted “Battlestar Galactica” recently came to an end. In my opinion, it ended pretty well. One of the overriding themes of the show was what it means to be a person. Are cylons people? How does a human know he is a human? Are we more than our memories? Are our emotions but software?

The recent “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” has taken up the same question. (See my post below for a different philosophical aspect of the “Terminator” myth.) The new program plays with the question of where the line is between machine and person, metal and man. Does River, er, I mean Cameron, have emotions? Are we to take her outburst in 2×01, “Samson & Delilah,” to mean that she actually loves John? Anyway, man & machine, together first the first time again.

2. I think I have figured out the theme of Joss Whedon’s new show, “Dollhouse.” As others have said, the show really turns a corner at around episode 6 or so. Here’s the idea: Can you give up being a person? More →

[This article was published in the Wall Street Journal on March 25, 2009. The author, Hernando de Soto, published a remarkable book entitled The Mystery of Capital in 2000, which blew my mind. In the book, de Soto argued that one of the chief things keeping poor countries poor was bad legal regimes. The idea was that people in poor countries have huge amounts of assets locked up in real estate (even shanty houses) and small businesses. In a country like U.S., someone who owns a house or business can use that asset as the basis for borrowing more money, in the form of a line of credit or home-equity loan. Money can beget more money. But this requires that the government of the area keep good track of who owns what - that there be good recordation practices. If the records are bad, uneven, subjective, unreliable, corrupt, or simply absent, then how can lenders trust that borrowers have what they say they have? In sum, better title records and tax records are a major ingredient in a better lendind environment, and therefore lower interest rates. Now read on:]

Toxic Assets were Hidden Assets
We can’t afford to allow shadow economies to grow this big

by Hernando de Soto

The Obama administration has finally come up with a plan to deal with the real cause of the credit crunch: the infamous “toxic assets” on bank balance sheets that have scared off investors and borrowers, clogging credit markets around the world. But if Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner hopes to prevent a repeat of this global economic crisis, his rescue plan must recognize that the real problem is not the bad loans, but the debasement of the paper they are printed on.

More →

The “Terminator” franchise (1984, 1991, 2003, 2008-present) is a dramatization of the Industrial Revolution, set not in the 18th and 19th centuries but in the 20th and 21st centuries. The parallels are quite striking. A good playbill for the Industrial Revolution in this application is Marx, Capital, which I do not otherwise endorse. Marx narrates the Industrial Revolution as a shift from laboring that is organized and performed by humans to the industrial capitalist system in which humans become almost as pieces in a giant industrial machine, the factory. The factory is built not for humans More →

“Gran Torino” - why it’s good: here is Eastwood sending up himself as an old geezer actor-character, at the end of his life, and of course he kills himself off at the end. (The writer kills off the character, the character in effect kills himself off.) And as though for a nod, the narrative of the film takes a left turn about 15 minutes in, as soon as you see that this is not really going to be a man-against-the-world story.

Go back and read Niccolo Machiavelli’s Prince (1513) again, or read it for the first time. I strongly recommend the Mansfield translation–it’s opulent and intimate. I think I’ve read the book about six times and taught it once. Bracket for a moment the received hand-wringing about whether Machiavelli was a teacher of evil, a republican or a friend of tyrants. When you read this book, you put on ancient robes and go meet the author outside of his countryside farm, in his exile, and he teaches you, the reader, to look into the future and think about what might come. He reminds you that “time sweeps everything before it and can bring with it good as well as evil and evil as well as good.” Endearingly and intimately, Machiavelli teaches you to look to the successful efforts of past leaders, but to think for yourself, and always be daring. He shows you that you are always free to create something new and free yourself from “modes and orders pre-created for you by others. This is a summons to self-emancipation.

I just returned from a weekend trip to Detroit to visit a friend from college. The town gets a bad rap because of high gang-related crime rates, job loss and abandonment of real estate. Property crime in the town stands at twice the national average, arson some six times. Unemployment just reached 22% (Michigan’s over all is 12%). The average selling home price as reached (down to) about $19,000, but to me the median seemed to be about $16,000. In the words of Vladimir Lenin, what is to be done? Some social entrepreneurs already know what to do: Artists and other innovators are moving to Detroit because of the low cost of living. There have recently been news stories about people buying cheap houses on a couple of blocks, at around $500-$2000 per house. One couple had found More →

genre: tales of moral collapse in supernatural context.

• Resurrection
• Jericho
• Chabin, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union
• zombie stories like The Walking Dead
• generally the depiction of the morality of vampires, from Angel to Cassidy (Preacher)
• Steven King’s The Stand

Government Policies encouraged Wall Street’s Risky Business
By Randall G. Holcombe
September 26, 2008

For going on two years now the economy has been sinking ever-deeper into a financial crisis started by a meltdown in the subprime mortgage market. Many observers argue this crisis is a result of the breakdown of private markets, but a more careful look shows that it was government policy that, step by step, led us to the current crisis. Here are the main factors.

First, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created to help provide mortgages for people who did not qualify for conventional mortgages. Fannie Mae, established by the federal government in 1938, was spun off as a “government sponsored enterprise” (GSE) in 1968. More →

The idolatry of progressivism must be stopped.
Typical candidate scripts:
Pagina: We know how to protect our local producers — this already exists — it’s tarifs.
Common man: The free market has failed! Friedman is a stooge! The banks must be managed or nationalized until it is safe!
Corporatism: The big three, and three or four bigs in any given industry, are too big to fail. The logical cosequence of this idea is that the gubberment has to manage all aspects of

such industries, like hiring and firing, salaries, prices, new ventures, bankruptcy/creditors/investments, etc.
Finance: The gubbrment needs to guide the management of all aspects of the financial sector.
Taxes: This is a new age of robber-baron capitalism, whether that is a real category or not.
Myth of robber barons and progressivism.

The earliest dictionary definition for sewerp (swerp, zewerp, zeewerp, seaupwerpe, seawerpe) of which I know is to be found in Charles du Fresne sieur du Cange’s Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis (1651). Du Cange defines it as like wreckum, that is “jactus marinus, seu quidquid ad littus ejicit maris æstus quod ad dominos feodales pertinebat.” That is, sewerp is flotsam, stuff washed up on the seashore, or by extension the same flotsam in its legal aspect as stuff that the lord of the land claims by “feudal” right as his own. Because he is, you know, lord. More →

Check out Eve Tushnet’s recent short story “Love” in Third Order, a recently started literary magazine ensubtitled “faith, fiction & the occasional extraterrestrial.” Yes, you read that correctly. Since at least the time I read C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy and Philip Pullman’s trilogy of His Dark Materials I have wondered if there was or would be a viable genre of genuinely religious experience set in worlds of science fiction.

(a think-piece in draft)

I will be sorry to waste my reader’s time in writing about some dull topics, but will do so nonetheless. While it might be more contemporary and punch-drunk and fantastalicious to write about the coming Obama Millenium, when business as usual will cease, the sun will never set, scarcity will be overcome, dogs and cats will live together peaceably, all children will be above average and there will be free ice cream for all, I will regale my reader with swashbuckling tales of state revenues and public goods, i.e. real things in the real world that really matter and the orthodox versions of which are rarely questioned.

I’ll put it simply: The state of New Hampshire could be called a fee state. That is, more than many other states in the United State, the state government of New Hampshire mixes fees, means-based assessment, and business-side income tax. There is no sales tax and no personal income tax.

In a fee-based system, you pay a marginal use fee for each marginal service you obtain. More →

(The following is an excerpt from Gary Becker’s post at the Becker-Posner Blog of this past November 16, entitled “Bail Out the Big Three Auto Producers? Not a Good Idea“.)

I believe bankruptcy [sc. for the Big Three automakers, GM, Ford and Chrysler -ed.] is better than a bailout for American consumers and taxpayers. The main problem with American auto companies is that during the good times of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, they made overly generous settlements with the United Auto workers (UAW) on wages, pensions, and health benefits. Only a couple of years ago, GM was paying $5 billion per year in health benefits to retirees and current employees because their plans had wide health coverage with minimal co-payments and deductibility on health claims by present and retired employees. In those days, the UAW was one of the most powerful unions in the US, and it bargained aggressively with the auto manufacturers, carrying out strikes when its demands were not met. More →

In her recent post to Ladyblog (‘Higher Education and Aristocracy: A Match Made in Heaven, and by “Heaven” I mean “Nashville”’), Helen Rittelmeyer begins by quoting Eugene Genovese in The Southern Front:

“As is well known, the slave states sent a higher proportion of their white youth to college than did the free states. Although most southern college students undoubtedly came from well-to-do families, an important minority did not. Throughout the South schoolteachers kept their eyes open for especially talented students, whose education in classical academies and colleges was then paid for by wealthy patrons. More →

(draft; contains spoilers)

The recent reboot of “Battlestar Galactica” (2002-2009) can be thought of as a political myth, a literal mythical foundation of a human eternalism. Specifically it is a conservative political myth of a certain stripe, namely one which illustrates one of Carl Schmitt’s famous tenets, even while cutting right across another.

1. What is a political myth? What would it mean to say that a story expresses an ideology?

It is worth beginning by considering the difficulty of the very category of question we are approaching, namely that of trying to interpret a story as expressing a political message. What for instance would it mean for a story to be conservative or feminist? Is a story about women feminist, a story about a group that thinks collectively a lot somehow socialist?   While we might be tempted to affirm these points, we quickly run into problems. More →

Grab your gun and bring the cat in
Notes on “Battlestar Galactica” rebooted (2003-2009)

(Warning: Contains spoilers. Also, the show’s narrative is a cumulative arc, so please don’t read this if you are not up to date to the mid-4th-season, for I would not want to ruin the surprises for you. These are notes and are impressionistic. They start from the strong hunch that there is something conservative about this television show. If that strikes you as right, then read on, because I don’t know that anyone else has argued this. If that strikes you as bizarre, then read on and scoff.)

What are the major themes of the show? Or ask, What are the moments or characters or ideas on which the meaning of the program seems to hinge? There are redundancies and contradictions in this list.

1. trust, loyalty, duty, obedience
–though to be sure this gets abrogated in the name of higher needs, as when Starbuck steals the cylon raider to fly back to Caprica to fetch the arrow of Athena
The definition of trust:
(on the eve of the rescue mission to New Caprica)
Athena: Can I ask you something? How do you know I won’t betray you?
Bill Adama: I don’t; that’s what trust is.
More →

(Here follows an excerpt from John Kenneth Muir’s A History and Critical Analysis of Blake’s 7, the 1978-1981 British Television Space Adventure (1999) (pp. 181-184). Contains slight spoilers.)

By the time Blake’s 7 reached American shores in 1986, many genre fans in the States were starting to express a sort of ennui with the oft-rerun Star Trek. Trek’s original 79 episodes had been broadcast to death, and more disturbingly, no new series had yet arrived to further the genre with provocative ideals and philosophies. In 1986, it very much seemed that the best days of sci-fi television were 20 years past or even 25 years past…But then Blake’s 7 came along, working its way into the hearts and minds of genre fanatics through PBS outlets, and American fans had the chance to view a series that seemed similar to Star Trek in some ways, but was a twisted reflection of Gene Roddenberry’s vision in others. As a result, Blake’s 7 became known far and wide as the “anti-Star Trek.” More →

(This is an incisive microhistory of the Paulson team’s botched efforts to prevent financial collapse by Donald Luskin, CIO of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an economics and investment-research firm. The article was published in National Review Online and on Trend Macrolytics’ own website.)

National Review, November 17, 2008

Death by Rescue
How botched bailouts doomed companies that didn’t need to fail
By Donald L. Luskin

The road to hell is paved with bad interventions. This year’s emergency sallies into the banking system by the Fed, the Treasury, the FDIC, and the SEC have backfired. They were intended to ameliorate a credit crisis and to keep it from spreading. Instead they’ve inflamed the crisis into an outright panic that now has spread around the world and triggered a recession.

Conservatives may rightly object to all this government meddling in private markets on general principle. But the more salient objection is that government has botched it. The attempts to deal with failures at Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia were not rescues or bailouts at all—they were wipeouts More →

[From Camille Paglia's most recent column on Salon.com. Paglia is a rare bird, a kind of conservative feminist quasi-leftist, blah blah blah. She's very much her own woman, sometimes seeming to be pugnacious just for its own sake. That said, she has perspective, wit and authority. Seems that she subscribes to the same divination that I do about Sarah Palin's future. The first part of the column is a post-op of McCain's loss and Obama's win; the second is about Palin and is on page 2; the third, an unrelated obituary. The following excerpts are from about two thirds of the way through the Paglia column.]

Sarah Palin… has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.

How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the State University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don’t know their asses from their elbows. More →

De vita evenienda gestisque Sarah Palinensis conspectu haruspicis id est mihi libellumellum; being a sort of continuation of my confessions from inside the grip of Sarah Palin.

When the ancient Roman augurs sought to tell the future, they cut open birds and looked at their entrails, a rather more visceral version of reading tea leaves and playing with cards. Journalists borrow the term “post-op” from doctors to describe a prognosis for the future after the finish of an operation (post operationem). All things considered, I am sad to be able to apply these terms here and now: Perhaps now that this bird has been cut open and lies dying, we can read its entrails and speculate about her future.

The dream of Sarah Palin is over. Her first speeches were surprisingly inspiring and captivating, but you didn’t have to be a mindless leftist stooge to see that by the time she “debated” Joe Biden, it was clear that she didn’t make the cut. It’s one thing to hold that high culture, elite learning and so on are overrated, especially in leaders, and a whole other thing to excuse ignorance and disruptive knavery in leaders. She didn’t know what she was talking about half the time Biden put a serious point to her, and, damn it, it is to his credit that he didn’t stuff her ignorance down her throat on that occasion. But almost everyone can see that she, or someone like her, has potential. I think that the future is hers. I’ll tell you what I mean. More →

(All lines are spoken by Kerr Avon, except where noted.)

It is frequently easier to be honest when you have nothing to lose.

Civilization has always depended on courtesy rather than truth.

He who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken. More →

(During the last several months, the University of Chicago administration has made plans to establish an economics center to be named the Milton Friedman Institute, in honor of one of the university’s (many) highly acclaimed economic scholars of the 20th century. Over the last few months, a strong opposition has arisen among some of the faculty and students against the proposed MFI. Earlier today there was a round table / debate featuring University of Chicago professors on the MFI, namely Yali Amit (Statistics), Lars Peter Hansen (Economics), James J. Heckman (Economics), Melvin Rothenberg (Mathematics), and Marshall Sahlins (Anthropology). Here is a summary of the debate:)

Lars Peter Hansen presented the argument that as a scholar, Milton Friedman was innovative, wide-ranging, very widely acclaimed, and still today widely regarded as More →

Bank Bailout: Scholars’ Views Fuel Republican Revolt

[At the end of September, 200 prominent economists signed a joint letter petitioning the White House and Congress NOT to rush quickly to bail out failing banks. Here is the body of the letter]

As economists, we want to express to Congress our great concern for the plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson to deal with the financial crisis. We are well aware of the difficulty of the current financial situation and we agree with the need for bold action to ensure that the financial system continues to function. We see three fatal pitfalls in the currently proposed plan:

1) Its fairness. The plan is a subsidy to investors at taxpayers’ expense. More →

[While I do love me some Sarah Palin, in an unguarded moment of cityslickedom I might be willingto admit that she is a little green in the foreign policy department, even while in the green department she's hot and sticky (I'm talking about crude oil, of course). So hopefully the Palin-McCain campaign can refocus on some other things that are as important as our tw0 fronts of endless war, namely the economy and health care. Here follows an NRO editorial about McCain's health care proposal. Sounds good...:]

Healthy Line of Attack

By the Editors [sc. of NRO]

In recent days, Barack Obama’s campaign has intensified its attacks on John McCain’s proposal for reform of our health-insurance system. Based on a spate of recent radio and television ads, and on the line Joe Biden took in last week’s vice-presidential debate, McCain should expect some sharp attacks against his bold proposal in this tonight’s debate. He should be ready to respond, because the attacks are either false or grossly distorted, and his plan deserves to be defended and touted.

The McCain plan begins by addressing the fundamental health-care concern of the middle class: that insurance is too expensive, too rigid, and too insecure.  Rising premiums More →

[This is an NRO article by Stanley Kurtz]
[October 7, 2008]
[Following is the beginning:]

‘You’ve got only a couple thousand bucks in the bank. Your job pays you dog-food wages. Your credit history has been bent, stapled, and mutilated. You declared bankruptcy in 1989. Don’t despair: You can still buy a house.” So began an April 1995 article in the Chicago Sun-Times that went on to direct prospective home-buyers fitting this profile to a group of far-left “community organizers” called ACORN, for assistance. In retrospect, of course, encouraging customers like this to buy homes seems little short of madness.

Militant ACORN

At the time, however, that 1995 Chicago newspaper article represented something of a triumph for Barack Obama.  More →

What makes Sarah Palin attractive as a candidate transcends her specific qualifications and disqualifications for Veep of this o’ermighty state. By about the same token, what I predict will make her magnetically, mythically attractive to voters, and to American man (i.e. hu-man), is her family romance.

“Family romance” is an ambiguous term of Sigmund Freud’s (via Lynn Hunt) to describe the mythical relationships between members of typical, or representative members in society. Typical examples of this might be fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, uncles and nephews, or perhaps brothers and sisters, maybe even husbands and wives.  (The “romance” in that phrase, the Freud connection notwithstanding, here means political eros, not incest.)

There are two levels of this family romance: On the first, more literal level: Hers is a great, classic, typical, modern sympathetic story of an American family.   More →

[This is a web review I wrote about "The Prisoner" television series in 1998. I wrote it then because I was then especially taken with the story and because I found the literature about it (fan blogs stuff, a few books) suggestive but thematically a bit superficial. So, here is my deep review: "The Prisoner" as Political Myth]

What is the Village? What does it symbolize? The Village is literally a prison colony for former spies. Whether it is Britain’s alone, or somehow shared by the various great powers to their mutual security, or belongs to some other kind of international organization a la SPECTER is unclear from the intentionally inconsistent clues given in various episodes. More →

[This is a little review of Carl Schmitt's little book (in translation), The Tyranny of Values, which I wrote about ten years ago. For some time I have been appalled by the typically superficial reception of Schmitt among intellectuals, who tend to read his Concept of the Political and stop there, probably because enmity is such a relatively exciting topic, the book is so short, and his prose is so lucid, especially for a lawyer. Yet as it turns out, his other sixteen books are also worth reading. The present volume is less than a hundred pages also. Here Schmitt takes off his jurist's hat and puts on that of the ethicist or metaphysician, comparing successive regimes or fads of moral philosophy through Europe's last several centuries. He finds our current regime -- the cant of VALUES -- superficial and even foreboding.]

Carl Schmitt’s Tyrannt of Values reprints two similar short works by Schmitt on the philosophy of values. It’s great reading, especially for those unacquainted with Schmitt’s lesser known works, because it gives the lie to the usual rather unfair picture that he was a mere Nazi and authoritarian, when in fact his career and intellectual corpus is much more varied than this. More →

by Meghan O’Rourke
(posted on Slate)

Sarah Palin loved being onstage, and people loved watching her love it. This was no Sarah, plain and tall. There was a palpable eros in the room at the RNC tonight, and not just when she made a subtle crack about the great “package” her union husband had offered her. To be clear: What made Palin appealing wasn’t that she was pretty in a beauty-contest kind of way, but that she possessed a real charge as she spoke, a charge that derived from her palpable sense of enjoyment at finding her voice and being loved for it. More →

“The New Englander is attached to his township because it is strong and independent; he has an interest in it because he shares in its management; he learns to rule society; he gets to know those formalities without which freedom can advance only through revolutions, and becoming imbued with their spirit, develops a taste for order, understands the harmony of powers, and in the end accumulates clear, practical ideas about the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.” — Alexis de Tocqueville

“Shine, Perishing Republic”
by Robinson Jeffers

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught—they say—God, when he walked the earth.

[This is, famously, allegedly a college admissions essay. It has been floating around the information super highway for at least fifteen years. Learn it! Love it! --C. Ferox]

I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row. I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty Brownies in twenty minutes. More →

[Here is the opening of Hitchen's classic review of biographies of John F. Kennedy. --C. Ferox]

In Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire. More →

(excerpted from an episode of “The Six-Million Dollar Man,” which we all just called “The Bionic Man,” re-run in much-cycled syndication in Spring 1994…)

Dramatis Personae:
The Six-Million-Dollar Man
The Scientist-Industrialist

This is a brief scene in the third act or so of the episode. The Scientist-Industrialist has a nefarious plan to copy people’s thoughts and memories and reproduce them. The good of this would be to reproduce great minds; the bad of this, probably, to rob people of their individuality. The Six-Million-Dollar Man breaks into the Scientist-Industrialist’s laboratory. They talk. Part of it goes something like this:

The Six-Million-Dollar Man: There’s a difference between motion and progress. It’s unnatural.

The Scientist-Industrialist: But think of the benefit! What if scientists had the memory of Einstein, or if musicians had the memory of Chopin? What beautiful music they could make!

Six-Million-Dollar Man: You can replace all of a man’s parts, and he’s still a man, because of his mind. Now you want to go and replace that. And then all you have is what? A bunch of parts. And what have you proved? Only that you can do it.

Scientist-Industrialist: And what are you trying to prove?

Six-Million-Dollar Man: That man is more than the sum of his parts.

“The Heart”
by Stephen Crane

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

I think that this came from Free Republic about seven years ago. File under “Plays well with rednecks”:

“I’m a Bad American - this pretty much sums it up for me. I like big trucks, big boats, big houses, and naturally, pretty women. I believe the money I make belongs to me and my family, not some midlevel governmental functionary with a bad comb-over who wants to give it away to crack addicts squirting out babies. I don’t care about appearing compassionate. I think playing with toy guns doesn’t make you a killer. I believe ignoring your kids and giving them Prozac might. More →

In 1991 Rolling Stone interviewed Bob Dylan on the occasion of his 50th birthday, and at one point the interviewer asked Dylan if he was happy. This seemed to puzzle him a bit, and he was silent for a minute. Then he said, “You know,” he said, “these are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It’s not happiness or unhappiness, it’s either blessed or unblessed. As the Bible says, ‘Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.’” (quoted from the link given above)

I’ve recently been caught up by the following line:

“With the perdition of dreams, the rites of youth fade like pale smoke, and ember’s dust by blood of loss. We ask for whom serves this vantage of hideous strength, to reap another harvest in–”

It is spoken in passing in the distopian television series “Aeon Flux” (aired about fifteen years ago), specifically in the episode “The Demiurge.” I always thought that the style of the line seemed incongruous with that of the rest of the show; it feels older, perhaps more wistful and poetic and sorrowful, breathing a pathos deeper than even the best other moments of this brief, underregarded series.

Research on the information superhighway finds only reference to the novel That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis, the third in his Space Trilogy (1946). He prefaces that work with an epigrammatic quotation from a book by David Lyndsay (fl. 1490-1555), Ane dialog betuix Experience and ane courteour off the miserabyll estait of the warld (etc.) (1554). More →

What’s wrong with Europeans these days? Writes Cromwell, in the County of Kings:

“Got some bad news for all you little hunlets out there in autobahnland: 99% of Americans — from Christofascist theocon cheneybot worshipper of Chimpy McBushhitlerburton in East Jesus, Tennessee to racist videogame murder junkies holed up in a survivalist compound in Fanatic, Idado — are really completely indifferent to what Germans, or for that matter Spainiards, Italians, Belgians, Frenchpersons, Russians, Swedes, Norweigians, and all the other huddled massed of PC-euthanized, welfare-state besotted, noodlewrist eurogoobers think about us. More →

A Neocon Attacks Ron Paul
by Paul Gottfried

[Despite its title, this is not so much about Ron Paul as much as occasioned by a show of sympathy to South-First'ers. If one may say that there is a real continuity, whatever the criterion for that is, between the Old Right up through the 1950's, and the Paleoconservative movement such as grew up in the 1970's or 1980's, the present article is a good example of the ongoing effort to construct an accurate and underrepresented revisionist picture of the history of the U.S. and the European powers in the last couple centuries. --Colignius]

Richard Brookhiser is a National Review senior editor and the author of a readable biography of Alexander Hamilton. But his job in recent years seems to involve repeating neoconservative opinions, perhaps in his capacity as an upper-class WASP with a courteous manner and a soft voice. Typically I skim over Brookhiser’s commentaries as déjà vu, but one morning in late February I broke this habit by noticing a column he had written for the New York Post. I imagined this column, which dealt with Obama and Abraham Lincoln, would not treat Mr. Change very gently. But I was wrong. More →

by Joshua Snyder

[From the "peace-and-love left wing of paleoconservatism": This is a fun, very touching, and totally over-the-top article by Joshua Snyder about the lives of two Austrians (Charles Hapsburg (Charles of Austria) and Franz Jägerstätter) who have recently been beatified. That means that the Roman Catholic Church, also known as The Church, has declared them blessed ("beatus"). This is an important pre-qualification to being later declared a saint. The former man was born an emperor, the latter a peasant. Snyder lays it on a bit thick, but what's not to like?]

At first glance the two Austrian holy men couldn’t seem to be more different. His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty, descendant of Holy Roman emperors, died in poverty and exile on the island of Madeira, Portugal on April 1, 1921. His compatriot was a small farmer, the illegitimate son of peasants, who was beheaded in Brandenburg, Germany on August 9, 1943. Indeed, the emperor and the peasant remind us that in The Catholic Faith, in the words of the Apostle, “There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female” More →

[What follows is a letter from some correspondence with friends. We were living in Vienna; this was about five years ago. Someone had mentioned a story (i.e. a rumor) about how a bouncer at one of the city's night clubs had turned away some black men (in Vienna, this means generally African immigrants). Someone had said that the bouncer said they were drug-dealers. Everyone was wringing their hands about the terrible racism of Europeans (how's that for a change, American readers!). I guess I was itching for a fight, because I told them that it seemed perfectly fine with me for the bouncers to discriminate against the customers in the story. To which the next reply was: "Of course, Tuhaj Bej is wrong." I replied:]

Dear Gang,

“The [ancient] Greeks were superficial–out of profundity!”
–Nietzsche

I am not wrong.

> I hope Tuhaj Bej one day sees the light. Perhaps a library
> won’t let him in because of his beard and he will then
> know… that it is wrong.

I am not really kidding. Frankly, I don’t really have an opinion about Austrian nightclub entrance standards as such, but tend to hold to my principle about 99% of the time that freedom of association is an unalloyed good. I believe very very deeply in personal freedom. It may not be the highest good, but it is part of a small cadre of the best practical goods.

There are several examples of people or businesses practicing this kind of freedom of association (the complement of which is freedom of exclusion, i.e. discrimination), many of which would probably seem quite acceptable to you, and More →

…being a handful of arguments normative, descriptive, and probabilistic for curtailing compulsory education…

Oh, the problems with failing schools, unteaching teachers, children who don’t want to learn, and parents who don’t care! Having taught in a variety of classroom settings myself (tough urban high school, enrichment middle school, elite college), I have become quite convinced that improving the quality of teachers and teaching is important, but hardly a sufficient solution to the problem. For which reason, focusing on teachers’ salaries or even on breaking the shameful union monopoly (NEA, AFT) is only a first step.  No, I am afraid that I am quite convinced that parents usually are, and normatively and politically should be, the primary sponsors of their children’s education More →