Rick Perry is someone I have long underestimated; his policies have kept us in relatively safe economic order despite the effect of national energy policies on a state that makes much from oil and despite the fact that some of the highest rates of illegal immigration and drug wars are on our borders. Instapundit links his policy on education. Reining in academic bureacracies, perqs and salaries is not anti-intellectual. It is egalitarian. Expecting state colleges to prove the value of the credentials they “sell” is the responsibility of government regulation.
Ginny
Trade-Offs
This began as a comment and, given my extremely limited (nonexistent) expertise, it is rambling observations and questions and if Michael & Madhu say I’ve got it wrong, well, I probably do.
Mental hospitals dotted the landscape in the 50’s and 60’s. That was another time: some of us got through college pulling night shifts at them. Psychiatric counseling was a rite of passage among the artsy. (Note Girl Interrupted and Emily Fox Gordon’s Mockingbird Years. ) Gordon treats that particular perspective with irony. But such approaches were not always helpful and certainly those public wards filled with the less affluent were sad and lifeless.
What Makes Us Tick
In the last 20 years, conservative ideas, including the value of all work, which binds us to each other through the strange beauty of commerce and voluntary exchange, have done more to turn around American cities than four decades and hundreds of billions of dollars of welfare entitlements, social programs, and public housing ever did. More than 10,000 minority males are alive in New York City today who would have been dead, had New York’s homicide rate remained at its early 1990s level. A policy triumph doesn’t get any more concrete than that.
Heather McDonald, “Restoring the Social Order,” City
RIP – Denis Dutton
A&L is clothed in black. Denis Dutton did much to make the blogosphere a better and more thoughtful place. Obits here and here. The Art Instinct site blog; a presentation. Authors on Google gives us a sense of his own vision — one implied by A&L’s subtle and evenhanded framing. The Chronicle’s blog appreciation and comments. D. G. Myers gives a more heart-felt and warmly written obit. And at National Review.
Taxes and Tithes
My husband and I both feel ill at ease in the churches we have been attending. His has become more evangelical, more charismatic. That is the wave of the present and it is likely to evoke in congregants a more passionate belief. But it is not his way. Even less is it mine. Mine is bloodless in its Christianity, dismissive of the church’s role in shaping values we hold dear. And politicized. My husband and I like and respect the people in the congregations. And we have a loyalty – his people were around in the Battle of White Mountain and my people arrived in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century from Wales and Scotland, Protestants to the core. He’s related by blood to many in his small congregation; I’m related in spirit the church is like the church of my youth.