URLs du Jour

2017-05-31

■ We wind up the merry month of May with more legal advice from Proverbs 25:9-10:

9 If you take your neighbor to court,
    do not betray another’s confidence,
10 or the one who hears it may shame you
    and the charge against you will stand.

Wait a minute. You are taking your neighbor to court, wouldn't the charge be against your neighbor? Or maybe judicial procedures worked different in ancient Israel. "You've been shamed, Moshe, so the charges are against you now."

Or maybe it's a tennis court, you're playing doubles against your neighbor, you let slip that your doubles partner cheated on his wife, your partner decides to make you look stupid, your neighbor charges the net, and suddenly you've just lost match point. Yeah, that works.

Anyway, it's clear that there's a lot of backstory that we're just not being given by the Proverbialist.

■ Gosh, I think I agree with just about everything Stephanie S. at The Right Geek suggests: What a College President SHOULD Say When Besieged by SJB's. Excerpt:

Over the past few days, I have carefully considered how I should respond to these students and their petition, and I have settled on the following course of action:

NO.

No, I'm not going to give you anything you want. You can scream, you can cry, you can stomp your feet -- but I'm not changing our policies one iota.

Too late to forward this advice to President Huddleston of the University Near Here.

I'm unfamiliar with the SJB acronym, but I assume it stands for "Social Justice something-that-begins-with-B" and not "Sexy Japanese Babe."

■ KDW@NR regrets that the commies have all the good songs in Spanish Bombs. The various forms of progressive ideology fit into catchy tunes and slogans just fine, while their opponents (me, maybe you) are left with…

William F. Buckley Jr. scoffed at American progressivism as the ideology of “free false teeth,” i.e., the belief that wherever there is want, it is the duty of the state to provide. Do progressives favor free false teeth? Yes, of course. Do conservatives also want impoverished grandmothers to have false teeth? “Well, it’s not that we don’t want grandmothers to have false teeth, but somebody has to pay for those false teeth, and you have to consider the opportunity cost and what they might have done with that money otherwise, and what the false-teeth subsidy will do to incentives and the long-term capital structure of the artificial-dental-implant markets, dentistry-related questions of moral hazard, interstate dental standards, and, hey, have you read Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth? Because it has some really interesting things to say about . . . ”

You’ll never make the top 40 with that.

Moreover, you'll never match progressives on being peevish, simplistic, and intelligence-insulting. Why would you want to?

■ Kyle Sammin at the Federalist reveals Why The Supreme Court’s Liberals Flipflopped On Race-Based Gerrymandering. There are neat maps and a clear history of how the Supreme Court has muddled the conflict between demands of (a) the Voting Rights Act and (b) the Constitution.

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that two of North Carolina’s congressional districts are unconstitutionally constructed based on race. In doing so, the court further clouded an already opaque line of case law and made it even more difficult for states to comply with the Voting Rights Act. It also inadvertently called parts of the VRA into question in a way that could reshape the congressional delegations from the South in a manner the court likely did not intend.

The only Justice maintaining judicial consistency on the issue: Clarence Thomas.

■ With Obamacare crashing and burning and the GOP repeal-and-replace going nowhere, it seems that "single payer" schemes (a euphemism for socialized medical care) is getting reconsidered. Whenever the current scheme of government control is failing, the progressive answer is always: "more government control".

Megan McArdle looks at States Where Single-Payer Health Care Could Work (If It Could Work Anywhere).

Casual believers in single payer often eyeball European governments, eyeball what the U.S. spends, and conclude that there must be fabulous cost savings to be had from a single-payer system, making it easily affordable even for states on a tight budget. Folks actually charged with designing a single-payer system know the truth: single payer will not make health care cheap. Analyses by single-payer-friendly sources (such as Gerald Friedman of UMass Amherst, and the heavily Democratic California State Senate) tend to indicate that moving to single payer would involve roughly doubling the budgets of even high-tax, high-spending states like New York and California. Less friendly sources suggest that the cost might be substantially higher than that. Unless they find some way to dramatically slash the incomes of health-care workers (not gonna happen), then single-payer advocates are going to have to persuade voters to support breathtaking tax increases. It hardly needs pointing out that this will be difficult.

Spoiler: "[…] New York and California represent absolutely the best possible scenarios for single payer in this country. If they can’t make it work (and I’m betting they can’t), then single payer cannot be done in this country--full stop, end of story, print as written."

Let 'em, if they can try it without dragging in the rest of us.