Leftism

The Laissez-Faire Left

by

Historically, one cannot find more passionate and consistent defenders of laissez-faire capitalism than most leftist, articulate intellectuals.

Throughout the last two centuries, leftists fought ardently to protect the freedom of producers to create and sell as they thought best, and the right of consumers to purchase the products they thought best served their needs, without fear of government coercion or even informal social sanction. Whenever the unenlightened or economically naive threatened the voluntary choices of producers and consumers, leftists have always been the first in the fight to protect this most basic of human economic rights: the right to choose what one creates and the right to consume what one wishes.

Read more

Goon Squad

by

A speech by David Horowitz at Emory University was shut down by rowdy “protesters.” He was scarcely able to finish a single sentence, and had to leave after only half an hour. More here.

Credit where credit is due: After the event disintegrated into a shambles, the president of the Muslim Students Association came over to Horowitz at Starbucks and expressed her regret at what had happened. Horowitz opines that most of the disrupters were leftist non-students over the age of 30.

Maybe so. But this kind of thing happens far too frequently at American universities. There are few other venues in which one could get away with this kind of disruptive behavior. Try it at your local Rotary club and I bet you will find yourself spending the night in jail. Too many American universities have promulgated that idea that no one should ever be exposed to speech that makes them feel “uncomfortable” and have winked at actions like stealing and destroying newspapers with content someone dislikes. The wimp’s veto, the heckler’s veto, and the thug’s veto have all become common in academia. Indeed, there was virtually no old-media coverage of the Emory incident. Apparently, the shutting down of free speech in academia has become so common that it isn’t even news.

See my Goon Squad thread for many examples of thuggish behavior, especially in academia.

Following an incident at San Francisco State University, a campus Jewish leader named Laurie Zoloth summed up the situation there iin these words: “This is the Weimar republic with Brownshirts it cannot control.”

If thuggish political behavior is allowed to become the norm in academia, it is only a matter of time until such behavior becomes the norm in the larger society as well.

CNBC Has Competition

by

It’s about time. CNBC is maddeningly journalistic rather than business-oriented in its style, and its news coverage and program selections are shot through with leftist, anti-business bias. You would think that a network devoted to markets and business would be run by people who actually know something about markets and business. Instead we get hot babes and snarky voiceover “analysis” from j-school hipsters who have all the elitist and group-thinking instincts of modern professional journalists. What a herd. Every once in a while they stumble onto something good and unique but not PC, like Kudlow or the WSJ editors’ show, but then they try to kill it by changing its scheduling and promoting the conventional-wisdom news show or screaming-asshole trading show of the moment in its place.

Finally, they are going to have real competition. This will benefit everyone other than CNBC’s owners and staff.

Subsidized Light Rail and Reactionary Politics

by

Jim Miller has an excellent post on Portland, Oregon’s mass-transit boondoggles, and on the religious zeal and overarching intrusiveness of the Pacific Northwest’s political class in support of wasteful programs that most local citizens don’t want:

Some may wonder why I call Seattle reactionary. That seems obvious to me, but may not be to others, especially those on the left. On the whole, the political class in Seattle wants the races to be treated differently, is fond of 19th century technology, such as trollies and light rail, and generally wants to manage every detail of a citizen’s life. All of these, especially the last, are very old ideas. In fact, the last idea goes back to ancient Sumeria. I think it is fair to call their support for outmoded ideas, ideas that have not met the test of time, reactionary.

Worth reading in full.

Down in the Gutter With $30,600 a Year Plus Benefits

by

The recent kerfuffle over the middle-class family of Graeme Frost who can’t “afford” medical insurance got me to thinking: Why do we think it unfair that some people must pay rather a lot for medical insurance?

Bonnie Frost works for a medical publishing firm; her husband, Halsey, is a woodworker. They are raising their four children on combined income of about $45,000 a year. Neither gets health insurance through work. Having priced private insurance that would cost more than their mortgage – about $1,200 a month – they continue to rely on the government program

Why do we as society seem to feel that a family who makes $45,000 should not have to accept the loss of lifestyle that paying $14,400 a year for medical insurance would entail?

Read more