•As Jacob Levy pointed out to me, the remake of the anti-authoritarian TV series The Prisoner is described in an article as having a sympathetic instead of purely-sinister No. 2 (played by Ian McKellen, who apparently found no point or meaning in the original series, he says) with a troubled teen son — and will end with the message that community is valuable.
•A front-page article suggested Ron Paul may actually be winning his decades-long war against the Fed — but will the result just be a more politicized Fed? (Insiders already say that the poll-numbers-driven fight to keep unemployment low trumps all economic rationality at the Fed. Is Congress likely to improve that by meddling even more?)
•And some idiot letter-writer, in the perfect summary of pro-gun control illogic, said the Ft. Hood massacre is a reminder that America needs to limit handguns. That’s right — we need to do something about all those guns on military bases. That sounds like a fixable problem.
P.S. Elsewhere: for a statist, TNR’s John Judis wrote a fairly decent summary of America’s history of anti-statism (note the near-synonymity of anti-statism and conservatism in this tale, something I hope will hold true going forward and am much more optimistic about right now than I was during the Bush years).
9 comments:
“Ben Bernanke turns out to have better political instincts than anybody thought,†Mr. Frank said in an interview last week. “They accept the fact that I know what I’m doing up here.â€
Just out of curiosity, did he say that with a straight face?
Frank? A straight face? Are you trying to hand us a straight line?
I think we should have a limit on handguns. Every non-prohibited person should be required to carry no less than one handgun with them at all times when outside of their primary domicile.
Hey, a LOWER limit is still a limit :)
“Telling you what the New York Times wrote yesterday is not the most exciting use for a blog…”
I’m offended!
Clay
Editor, TimesWatch.org
Sorry — I meant to say “is not really my niche.”
In addition to clicking on and reading Clay’s blog, check out
http://www.seanreadsthenews.com
…which looks at business news through a PR guy (Sean Dougherty) lens, today’s entry being heavily infused with libertarian thinking, noting the GM Turnaround story in The New York Times; dueling stories on monetary policy among CNBC, Bloomberg, and the WSJ; carping about the NPR report that assumes the government can creat jobs; a WSJ story on low flow showerheads; and of course the NYT story on Pfizer pulling out of New London after only eight years, having used eminent domain (in the Kelo case) to expand their reach there only recently.
I’d like to note that I credit Clay as inspiration on my “About” page. Even though I’m really trying not to do what he does.
The scary part is that I didn’t even notice the double entendre embedded in my previous comment.
In any case, I don’t think the issue is whether the government can create jobs, which it can-I’m sure that during the Great Leap Forward there was full employment among those who hadn’t yet starved to death-so much as whether it can create wealth or productivity, which is impossible.
“•A front-page article suggested Ron Paul may actually be winning his decades-long war against the Fed — but will the result just be a more politicized Fed?”
Gosh, what a shocker…
This is a lesson I learned 20 years ago, the year after RP’s LP run, when I was an RP enthusiast and then interned for an agrarian-populist Congressman. The actual political energy for opposing, reforming, or replacing central banking will always come from the inflationists, and any marginal damage done to the Fed by gold bugs just increases the likelihood of monetary policy being set by a House Subcommittee on Noble Heroic Family Farmers With Big Mortgages Who’d Really Heroically Like Negative Real Interest Rates.
Todd, it’s unlike you not to have made this connection: the article on the Fed quotes Democratic Congressman Dan Maffei, your Brown classmate and longtime WBRU morning news anchor.
Dey say lotta fellas in Providence, dey got Maffei ties. Ain’t somethin’ we goes an’ blabs about all da time.
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