Rail Still The Fashion - Road to the Middle Class

I’ve realized all government planning is bad. Government planning... always does more harm than good because the planners don’t have an incentive to make sure that their plans are the right plans.

Real planning in the real world is an adaptive business. You plan and adjust, day to day, as conditions change. But government doesn’t have the will or the bandwidth for that kind of planning. So government simplifies. And doesn’t often update the plan.

Also, governments follow fads and right now the fad is Smart Growth, pushing light rail transit and infilling of urban areas, building up not out.

Then there are the unanticipated outcomes. Rail transit usually costs a lot more than anticipated. So transit agencies have to cut back on bus service. The result: lower transit ridership. In Los Angeles:

They were sued by the NAACP for building rail lines into white, middle-class neighborhoods at the same time they were cutting bus service in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

But at least they were trying to save the planet!

The transit guys had a setback in Seattle yesterday, according to Andrew Garber. A big transit proposal to extend the expensive light rail system, sweetened with road projects (they called it a road-and-transit proposal), went down to defeat.

"People like roads, people like transit, people don’t like taxes," said state Rep. Fred Jarrett, R-Mercer Island, the ranking Republican on the House Transportation Committee and a Proposition 1 supporter.

Amazingly the Sierra Club opposed the plan because they thought it had too much road and not enough transit. What is with those guys!

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

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Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

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David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

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Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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