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Daily Blogs for 10/2008
by Christopher Chantrill
The Rest of the Credit Story | 10/31/08
Here in the US we are naturally concerned about the damage that the mortgage meltdown ...
Poisoning the Chalice | 10/30/08
For the past thirty years conservatives have been trying to reform the vast empire of ...
Spread-the-Wealth | 10/29/08
Conservatives have been pushing the Obama-is-a-socialist meme pretty heavily in the ...
From Smarts to Song | 10/28/08
You can often tell someone by trying to understand their enemies. You ask what the ...
One Tough Politician | 10/27/08
You can’t tell a dog when it’s out hunting. You can only tell how good it ...
An Obama Market Panic? | 10/24/08
Are the markets panicking at the prospect of an Obama presidency and his presciption ...
Stimulus, for Sure, But What Stimulus? | 10/23/08
We’re at the point of the business cycle where governments enact bold stimulus ...
Two Americas Updated | 10/22/08
Sometimes you learn more from losing than from winning. Lessons learned, and all ...
Good News on the Economy! | 10/21/08
Yes, I know that it’s the end of civilization as we know it. But there are some ...
The Welfare State's Freeloader Problem | 10/20/08
Here in Washington State we are voting this fall on Initiative 1029. It would require ...
Yes There is Room at the Inn | 10/17/08
The post-WWII American conservative movement started out as an elite movement, with ...
Liberals and Joe the Plumber | 10/16/08
My liberal friends like to put it this way: “Why is America ...
Could Republicans Reverse the Ratchet? | 10/15/08
Go ahead America, some Republicans argue. Vote for Obama. Then when you suffer ...
After the Rescue | 10/14/08
It looks as though the US Cavalry made it on time, and that Americans and indeed the ...
Street Cred for ukpublicspending.co.uk | 10/13/08
The newest member in the vast firmament of our far flung web empire is the helpful ...
Sunspot Provokes Big Market Runup | 10/13/08
If anyone needed to know what drives the stock market, this last weekend should have ...
Searching for the Answer | 10/10/08
Everybody is searching for the reason for the meltdown and confidently trying to dig ...
"The Great Moderation" Did It? | 10/09/08
Is there no end in sight? Today the market nosedived in the final hour of trading on ...
It's the Solvency Stupid | 10/08/08
Monday and Tuesday the stock market tanked, and today it’s been on a ...
Obama, ACORN, and the Smoking Gun | 10/07/08
Here’s the story so far on the mortgage crisis.
In the 1970s the Carter ...
At the End of the World... | 10/06/08
With stocks down seven percent in Europe and the United States today, it looks like ...
Hey Katie, May I Call You Joe? (Wink, Wink)(3) | 10/03/08
My boxing days are over, but after the Vice-Presidential Debate last night I allowed ...
David Cameron's Greatest Speech | 10/01/08
That’s what they are saying at ...
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
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
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
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
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
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