Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
The slow, slow fading of the color line is one of the most important long-term trends in America’s self-understanding–the inexorable expansion of who gets to be part of the American folk community. Once, Irish Catholics, Italians, and Czechs couldn’t take part in the Jacksonian tradition. Now they’re the heart and soul of it. Hispanics are now headed in that direction.
RTWT
(Hat tip: James McCormick)
This evening I was wandering roung the National Portrait Gallery, just off Trafalgar Square, as it was open late (I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of which museums and art galleries keep late hours on which day of the week in London). Among other small exhibitions I found a selection of caricatures from Vanity Fair in the late nineteenth century.
There was a very fine picture by Baron Melchiorre Delfico, the man who created the Vanity Fair style in caricatures, of Baron de Reuter, founder of Reuter’s news agency, now known Thomson Reuters. The man clearly had a very impressive pair of mutton-chop whiskers. What was particularly interesting, however, is the comment that the editor had added in that long-ago issue of the magazine (December 14, 1872, since you ask).
As foreign news is now managed it is not too much to say that he who has the command of telegrams has the command of public opinion on foreign affairs.
First telegrams, then telephones, satellite phones, even e-mails. That is how journalists have viewed their own position in the world for some time now. It is not easy to accept that the Vanity Fair editor’s comment no longer applies.
The international gun control movement keeps working on gun grabbing with an eye to eventually killing off the 2nd amendment. It’s a King Canute enterprise because the technology for distributed manufacturing is coming and guns are inevitably going to be on the list of things to build right along every other tool. Once every man can be a gunsmith simply by hitting print on a computer, the foolishness of control efforts via law instead of via personal responsibility will have been fully exposed.
John Robb has related, more generalized, thoughts on resilient communities.
“Bottom line: mature democracies trust populists more, while authoritarian states like fellow rightists.”
I like Barnett, and many of his ideas. However, quotes like this that make me think that he belongs in a cloistered think tank deep in the beltway, where his thoughts would probably have less impact than they currently do.
Blaming speculators for inflation is like blaming surfers for tsunamis.