In the ongoing debate about the Wright/Obama relationship, I am most concerned about the apparently widespread idea that we should not hold African-Americans to the same intellectual and moral standards to which we hold white Americans.
Political Philosophy
The Left’s Deal with the Devil
The Democrats face a dangerous quandary. People who support Obama because he is black are in conflict with those who support Hillary because she is a woman. Regardless of who wins the nomination, those who support the loser based on racial or gender identity may feel so betrayed that they will sit out the general election and cost the party the Presidency.
I think this is trap the logical consequence of the genteel fascism of identity politics that the Left adopted in the 1960s. It may become a permanent bar to their power from here on out.
The Failure of Parliamentary Democracy
Writing about the political turmoil/deadlock in Belgium, Megan McArdle observes:
In the long run, in the modern world it seems hard to have a state without a nation.
America is a state without a nation. Ideology, and not innate identity, unites Americans.
The Real Chicago Boys
From City Journal:
“Pinochet had no clue about economics,” Lüders recalls, “and our country was in a desperate situation.” But when Pinochet asked Friedman, who had helped mold Chicago’s economics department, to provide solutions for hyperinflation, the great economist proposed just the right cure: monetary control. Harshly criticized in the U.S. for his “collaboration” with the dictator, Friedman responded by asking whether he should have let the patient—the Chilean economy—die instead.
Lüders admits that he and his fellow academics relished the chance to devise a new economic model on a blackboard and observe the results. At first, those results weren’t much to brag about. In the early 1980s, external shocks, capital flight, declining prices for copper (the main Chilean export at the time), and excessive trust in the market’s self-correcting mechanisms caused many glitches—and a severe recession.
Beginning in 1985, however, the more pragmatic Hernán Büchi, who served as finance minister under Pinochet, helped correct the errors through tighter control of capital flows into and out of the country. Though he holds a degree from Harvard, Büchi is still deemed a Chicago boy in a land where that city’s name has become a generic term for free-market economists. “The economic solutions we provided for Chile had nothing extraordinary about them,” Lüders says. “We privatized the companies, which had been nationalized by the Socialist Allende regime. We stabilized the currency. We opened the borders to trade. The strong Chilean tradition of entrepreneurship took over from there.”
(Thanks to Val Dorta for the link.)
Becker and Posner on Gun Control
Can Gun Control Laws be Effective? Becker
I find their arguments here disappointing, mostly because they beg the question by assuming that the net effects of gun ownership are negative. Nonetheless the exchange is thoughtful and worth reading, as are the critical comments (particularly those of John Lott, who points out the error in the central assumption about costs).