Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Saturday, May 21, 2016
What’s the Problem With the Commons in Environment and Health Care?
For generations economists have recognized the “problem of the commons.” The phrase harks back to when villagers all shared a common pasture. The natural incentive for each villager was to graze as many livestock on it as he could, because if instead he restricted his herd so the demand on the pasture’s grass growth was sustainable, his neighbors would run more livestock, the commons would still be exhausted, and he’d be left behind. When instead each person must own the land on which he grazed livestock, his incentive changed from short-term but fleeting gain to long-term sustained gain, so he grazed as many livestock as his pasture’s growth could sustain year after year, but no more.
Friday, May 20, 2016
The Trump-Sanders Two-Step
The upshot of the Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump phenomena is that both parties are moving to the left. Sanders’ and Trump’s styles and affects are very different — the rumpled, oddball lecturer in Socialism 101 vs. the boastful, power-tie-wearing business mogul — but they have worked in tandem to ensure that the center of gravity in this fall’s presidential election will be further to the left than it has been in decades.
College Boots Ex-Delta Force Hero After Complaint From LGBT Activists
Jerry Boykin is the kind of man you’d want teaching your sons — a good and decent man, an honorable man — a Christian man. For the past nine years the retired lieutenant general has taught leadership and ethics at Hampden-Sydney College, a highly regarded, all-male school based in Virginia. By many accounts — he is beloved and deeply respected by students. But Gen. Boykin will not be returning to the classroom this fall. That’s because he tells me he’s been fired.
Tired of Being Bullied
I’m so tired of being bullied. Bullied by Obama, for instance. (In fact, my new name for him is Obambully.) He now even bullies people who want privacy- bathroom privacy, at that. He bullies small businesses owners who want to stay in business. He bullies patients who want to choose their own doctors and make their own health care decisions.
Supreme Court Avoids the Issue: Little Sisters Get a Win
In a highly unusual move, the Supreme Court passed off the case of Zubic v. Burwell like a hot potato. It passed the case to the lower federal appeals courts. The high court, short by one justice due to the death of Antonin Scalia, was unwilling to address head-on the issues on the merits raised by the Little Sisters of the Poor and other religious organizations. In fact, the opinion states that no determination is being made about whether the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is violated by Obamacare regulations which refuse to exempt certain religious entities from providing their employees with mandated contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs.
EgyptAir’s Fate and Ours
EgyptAir Flight 804 — carrying 66 people, including three children — departed from Paris on Wednesday night. Just before it was scheduled to land in Cairo, it appears to have made a 360-degree turn before plunging 9,000 feet and disappearing from radar. Was it terrorism? Donald Trump leaped onto Twitter at 6:27 a.m. to suggest as much: “Looks like yet another terrorist attack. Airplane departed from Paris. When will we get tough, smart and vigilant? Great hate and sickness!”
‘Ferguson Effect’ Is Real, and It Threatens to Harm Black Americans Most
University of Missouri at St. Louis criminologist Richard Rosenfeld has had “second thoughts.” Like many academic criminologists, he had pooh-poohed charges that skyrocketing murder rates in many cities in 2015 and 2016 result from a “Ferguson effect” — a skittering back from proactive policing for fear of accusations of racism like those that followed the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.
The Surrender of Principle
This past week, a group of conservatives were invited to meet Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in California. Facebook scrambled to do damage control over a story that suggested conservatives were being censored on Facebook. The specific allegation, made by one aggrieved self-identified conservative former Facebook employee, was that humans controlled the trending news section on Facebook and those humans were predominately liberals intentionally ignoring conservative news. On the basis of this one report, Facebook’s CEO summoned leading conservatives from around the country for a face-to-face meeting.
Who Are the Real Deniers of Science?
Why do liberals hate science? The left has long claimed that it has something of a monopoly on scientific expertise. For instance, long before Al Gore started making millions by claiming that anyone who disagreed with his apocalyptic prophecies was “anti-science,” there were the “scientific socialists.” “Social engineer” is now rightly seen as a term of scorn and derision, but it was once a label that progressive eggheads eagerly accepted.
What Would Our Grandparents Think?
Please join me on a whirlwind tour around the zany world of modern leftism. Many stops are available, so the following ones were just the first ones I saw. Seeing as President Obama and his fellow leftist ideologues can’t permit themselves to stimulate the economy by getting the government off people’s backs, they continue to resort to top-down methods to transfer wealth from certain groups to others. As such, the Department of Labor issued a new rule to guarantee overtime benefits for salaried workers earning less than $47,476 a year.
Ugly Attacks on a Good Man
In recent days there has been a brutal attack leveled against well-known conservative leader and intellectual Bill Kristol. Bill has been in the cauldron of The Washington battle for many years. He has crossed swords with the left’s best attack dogs and regularly defeated them. But this attack comes not from the left but from some on the right, and the level of vitriol hurled at Bill has crossed the line of civil discourse.
Beyoncé’s ‘Sweatshops’ Help the Poor
“How Much It Sucks to Be a Sri Lankan Worker Making Beyonce’s New Clothing Line,” reads a recent headline on VICE’s “Broadly” channel. Well, it probably sucks, a lot. But for many Sri Lankans, the only thing suckier than working at a “sweatshop” is not being able to work at one. This, after all, is the choice that many Sri Lankans face. So, rest assured, Beyonce is doing more to improve the lives of Sri Lankan workers than all fair-traders and finger-wagging journalists combined.
In Loo of Common Sense...
Twenty-sixteen was supposed to be many things — but the Year of the Bathroom? America has the president and his party to thank for that, as they squander their remaining months ascending a different kind of throne. Unfortunately, the White House’s obsession with redefining gender has turned out to be one of the worst political miscalculations of the Obama era.
Donald, Hillary and the Bernie Factor
Among the abundant ironies of this election cycle, there is this: We are now in the eighth year of the most liberal administration since Lyndon Johnson’s. The primary elections reveal a national mood of anxiety, apprehension and anger, in turn reflecting stagnation at home and failure abroad. Two-thirds of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. Yet after nearly two terms of Barack Obama’s corrosively unsuccessful liberalism — both parties have decisively moved left.
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Six-Figure Fines for Gender Pronouns?
The left used to congratulate itself on being the “Free Speech Movement.” It used to celebrate the rebellious anarchists who used obscene words and forced sexually graphic images and conversations into the public sphere. Conservatives were the ones who insisted on decency in the public discourse and demanded regulation, both within the private sector and from the federal government, to protect the public from that obscenity.
Saving Your Soul by Fighting Climate Change?
What does it take to be a good person? Different cultures have different answers. The floors of Karni Mata Temple in Rajasthan, India, heave as masses of fat rats clamber to get to food offered by devout Hindu worshippers. Feed the rats, sight a white rat, or eat food discarded by rats, and you will be blessed. You are doing good just by being there. But if you accidentally step on a rat it is a grievous sin. Only the purchase and offering of an expensive golden rat statue offers hope of forgiveness.
Which Bathroom Did Klinger Use?
In MASH, one of America’s longest-running TV shows, the beloved character Max Klinger dressed as a woman. Klinger hoped to get a so-called “Section 8,” which is a mental-health discharge in the military. Everyone who watched the show when it ran in prime time understood that a man who thought he was a woman had a mental-health challenge. According to the script, not even Klinger himself really believed he was woman. Today we are confronted with the challenge of how to respond to individuals who truly believe their mental experience of gender does not match their biology.
School Drops Musical Version of ‘Lord’s Prayer’ From Graduation
A musical rendition of “The Lord’s Prayer” has been performed at East Liverpool High School’s commencement for nearly 70 years. Lisa Ensinger performed the sacred song when she was a senior at the Ohio school in 1986. “It’s a tradition,” she told me — a tradition that she continued when she became the high school’s choir director.
Here’s Why Trump Tap Dances on Taxes
Donald Trump has reason to be reluctant to release his tax returns. In a New York Times piece about Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Rhodes cynically explains that today’s journalism consists of young people whom he flat-out describes as ignorant. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old,” Rhodes said, “and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Obama to Visit the Land of State-Owned Enterprises
President Barack Obama next week will visit Vietnam, which his own State Department last month certified is still controlled — four decades after the fall of Saigon — by the Communist Party. “The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is an authoritarian state ruled by a single party, the Communist Party of Vietnam,” says the Country Report on Human Rights in Vietnam that Secretary of State John Kerry released in April.