Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Entrepreneurs Under Attack
Every day, federal, state and local governments stifle small businesses to privilege well-connected incumbent companies. It's a system of protectionism for influential insiders who don't want competition. Every locality has its share of business moguls who are cozy with politicians. Together, they use the power of government to keep competition down and prices high.
I, Market Economy
No one in the world knows how to make the newspaper you are holding (and, if you're reading this on your phone, computer, iPad or Kindle, no one knows how to make those things either). Even the best editor in the world has no clue how to make a printing press or the ink, or how to operate a communications satellite.
How American Football Became the World's Greatest Game
It is ironic that the most boring contest ever played -- the Princeton-Yale game of 1881 -- helped make American football the world's greatest game. The college men who invented American football in the decades after the Civil War approached the game with the same imaginative spirit that drove American capitalism in that era. When their invention did not work, they simply reinvented it -- until they developed something thrilling to players and fans alike.
Iraqi Change Vexes Obama
According to recent public opinion polling data, U.S. President Barack Obama is a highly controversial and divisive political figure -- public opinion polling data from Iraq, that is. In a poll conducted by Asharq Research Centre, a private Iraqi polling company, 42 percent of Iraqis said they don't think President Obama cares about Iraq. Sixty percent of the respondents claimed "it was the wrong time for a major withdrawal of U.S. combat troops."
The Sin of Indulging Your Guilty Conscience
Newly returned from a week in Paris and well sated with delicious cheeses, magnificent art, and glorious (inexpensive!) wines, one is disinclined to reflect upon the decline of Europe. But the demographic reality so scathingly limned in Mark Steyn's "America Alone" cannot be long avoided. Those adorable French babies are not quite as scarce as, say, Lithuanian ones (a 2.1 total fertility rate is required for a society to maintain itself -- Lithuania's rate is 1.2), but the French tots are not quite adequate (1.9 percent). As for Europe as a whole, it's disappearing -- the average fertility rate is 1.53.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Why the Right Fears Transforming America -- and the Left Seeks It
One unbridgeable divide between left and right is how each views alternatives to present-day America. Those on the left imagine an ideal society that has never existed, and therefore seek to "fundamentally transform" America. When liberals imagine an America fundamentally transformed, they envision it becoming a nearly utopian society in which there is no greed, no racism, no sexism, no inequality, no poverty and ultimately no unhappiness. Conservatives, on the other hand, look around at other societies and history and are certain that if America were fundamentally transformed, it would become just like those other societies. America would become a society of far less liberty, of ethically and morally inferior citizens and of much more unhappiness. And cruelty would increase exponentially around the world.
An Evening with Arne Duncan
Dear Diary -- Went to hear Arne Duncan the other evening at Little Rock's convention center. It's always good to have a member of the Cabinet come to town, one who's making a difference instead of just an appearance.
Teaching Compassion and Respect for the Disabled
Nearly every evening, they are there at their neighborhood pool—a father and his nine-year-old son, Michael. The boy’s smile captures attention instantly. You can’t help but be drawn to watch the two of them as they paddle around, dive for rings, and play “Marco Polo.” Michael stands out from the other children in the pool for one reason: He has Down Syndrome.
The End of Affirmative Action
It's been a rough year, politically, for the glass-ceiling smashers. Neither feminism nor the civil rights movement, which claimed credit a couple of years back for the golden gifts of Nancy Pelosi and, especially, Barack Obama, cannot have anticipated what their breakthrough moment in 2008 would lead to.
Political Fables
President Barack Obama boldly proclaims, "The buck stops here!" But, whenever his policies are criticized, he acts as if the buck stopped with George W. Bush. The party line that we are likely to be hearing from now until the November elections is that Obama "inherited" the big federal budget deficits and that he has to "clean up the mess" left in the economy by the Republicans. This may convince those who want to be convinced, but it will not stand up under scrutiny.
What Revival Looks Like
In calling for a spiritual revival in America at his Lincoln Memorial rally Aug. 28, talk show host Glenn Beck reached back into history and touched on a familiar theme. What would a genuine revival look like and how did those that have transformed America several times in the past get started? Earlier revivals were not created from the mobilization of large crowds. They occurred when people did something infrequently observed in modern times: humbled themselves.
Monday, September 6, 2010
The Case Against Mortarboarding
I have received a number of e-mails over the years from disgruntled parents griping about the left-wing indoctrination their kids are forced to undergo at colleges and universities all over America. One minute, it seems, the kids are sane, or at least as sane as one can expect of 18-year-olds, and the next thing you know they’re parroting the likes of Ward Churchill, William Ayers and Noam Chomsky, bad-mouthing America and yodeling the praises of such left-wing troglodytes as Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers and Barack Obama. I feel their frustration. Even if the little nincompoops can’t do long division or write a coherent sentence, parents feel like child abusers if they don’t pony up the dough to send their kids off for what is laughingly referred to as higher education.
The Higher Education Bubble: Ready to Burst?
Imagine that you have a product whose price tag for decades rises faster than inflation. But people keep buying it because they're told that it will make them wealthier in the long run. Then, suddenly, they find it doesn't. Prices fall sharply, bankruptcies ensue, great institutions disappear.
A Labor of Love
On this Labor Day, like most Americans, I come to praise labor, not indulge in it. Has there ever been a people that speechified more about the joys and satisfactions of work and the work ethic, yet was so enamored of labor-saving devices? American efficiency, American organization, and therefore American prosperity has been something of an example around the world -- at least since Henry Ford, that half-genius, half-crank and all-American revolutionary, put the world on wheels. And sagely raised his workers' pay to unheard-of levels ($5 a day!) so they could buy the Model Ts they were making.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Godzilla in the Mirror
WASHINGTON -- The collapsing crusade for legislation to combat climate change raises a question: Has ever a political movement made so little of so many advantages? Its implosion has continued since "the Cluster of Copenhagen, when world leaders assembled for the single most unproductive and chaotic global gathering ever held." So says Walter Russell Mead, who has an explanation: Bambi became Godzilla.
Is God an Appointed Position?
The only people I’ve ever heard of who got to wear their bathrobes to work were Hugh Hefner and America’s judges, and however you may feel about the man from Playboy, I’d venture that judges have created far more havoc for society.
Ghosts Will Get You
I have long held the notion that nothing good comes from messing with ghosts. I'd like to say I don't believe in them, but then there is the "Holy Ghost." I was taught in Sunday school about the Father, Son and Holy Ghost and I can go along with that. But the paranormal, and séances where you conjure up dead people so you can talk to them, makes me awfully nervous.
Boxer, Fiorina and the Endless Recovery
At the end of Obamaland's Recovery Summer, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer is betting that Californians want the federal government to keep growing. GOP challenger Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO, is betting that Californians want more private-sector jobs, not more government jobs. At Wednesday night's televised debate at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, Boxer -- anti-Wall Street -- faced off against Fiorina -- anti-Washington.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Puppets and Puppet Masters
It will soon be Election Day and already I’m catching heck from a number of readers who are taking me to task for suggesting that it’s better to vote for a mediocre Republican than for a wonderful Democrat, although I can’t for the life of me think of anyone who fits that description.
From The Comedy Store
Los Angeles sweltered in triple-digit temperatures when the Santa Ana winds came in off the desert. Tourists aren't mollified when you tell them that it's just dry heat. Their ovens back home have dry heat but they don't go there on vacation.