Pun Salad

David Friedman tells A Tale of Two Horseshoes. He links to, and comments on, Cass Sunstein's August 2025 substack article: On Classical Liberalism. Cass admits a stunning adjustment to his worldview:

This is good news, although Cass still sees a number (specifically: six) flaws in mainstream libertarian ("classical liberal") thinking. David wonders:

"Horseshoe Theory" usually is used to describe how "extreme" lefties and righties tend to resemble each other in their distaste for markets, civil tolerance, and a certain fondness for authoritarianism. David wonders if we're seeing a more virtuous horseshoe between more sensible folks. Certainly, I've been treating certain folks with Strange New Respect over the past few years: Noah Smith, Jeff Maurer, Freddie deBoer, Jerry Coyne, Michael Shermer, …

I'd like to think they got more reasonable, but…

And it appears that Cass may discuss this stuff further in his latest book. Amazon link at your right, and I'm going to see if the University Near Here can get me a copy via Interlibrary Loan.

Also of note:

• Apparently things have started to go boom in Iran. Pun Salad will follow its usual diligent reporting on breaking news: ignoring it until at least tomorrow.

• Only four? That seems low. Veronique de Rugy picks off the top four, anyhow: Four Fallacies Behind Trump's Post-SCOTUS-Ruling Tariffs. Let's look at her number one:

  The first argument is the optimistic one: Tariffs "reshore" production, raise domestic demand, push wages up and leave consumers better off. It's a tidy story. It's also wrong.

  Tariffs don't conjure consumer demand out of thin air. Americans were buying plenty of washing machines, clothing and steel before the tariffs. What changes is where some things are made. Production shifts from foreign manufacturers with efficiency or cost advantages to more expensive domestic manufacturers. American producers stand to gain, except when they must pay tariffs to import the materials they need (as is often the case).

  But everyone who buys the product pays more. The extra $100 a family spends on a washing machine won't instead be spent at the restaurant next door, the repair shop or the shoe store. Real wages — what your paycheck actually buys — fall when the prices of most things rise.

  Remaining fallacies: foreign trade is zero-sum (it's not); tariffs aren't regressive (they are); and corporations will eat the tariffs (certainly not entirely, and that wouldn't wind up being harmless to Americans anyway).

• The answer may surprise you! Unless you've been paying attention. Drew Cline asks the musical question: Is State Aid to Public Schools Growing or Shrinking? The math isn't hard, but …

  This month, the New Hampshire School Funding Fairness project released a chart designed to show that the state’s share of education funding had fallen by nearly $200 million since 2010.

  That false impression is created by several measurement errors. The chart:

  1. Does not include the loss of 34,480 students.
  2. Includes federal American Rescue Plan Act funding in its 2010 state funding total.
  3. Includes SWEPT in its 2010 state funding total but not in its 2025 total.

  Fixing those errors lets us compare apples to apples. When we do that, we see that that schools have received substantial increases in both state and local revenue per student from 2010-2015.

  Specifically: real state per-pupil spending is up 25% between 2010 and 2025. While localities have increased their real per-pupil spending 133% over the same period.

  The slick website of the NH School Funding Fairness Project is here. As near as I can tell, they have no response to Drew's corrections.

• Yum. A few weeks back I reported reading The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, by Walter Isaacson, an analysis of (well…) the greatest sentence ever written, the one beginning "We hold these truths…" in the Declaration.

  It's an interesting and worthwhile topic, given the big birthday coming up. At Law & Liberty, from Joshua T. Katz is Savoring the Declaration. He comments:

  Although Isaacson’s book is frankly superficial, it is built around a conceit that I greatly appreciate, namely, slow reading. To be sure, other scholars have read the Declaration much more slowly and carefully: to take three since the Bicentennial that represent a range of historical and political perspectives, Garry Wills’s Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (1978), Pauline Maier’s American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997), and now Matthew Spalding’s The Making of the American Mind: The Story of Our Declaration of Independence (2025), reviewed by Bruce P. Frohnen in Law & Liberty at the start of this year. But it is Isaacson who explicitly writes of the second sentence that “on its 250th birthday, each of its words and concepts bears scrutiny and appreciation.”

  Nonetheless, Isaacson does not discuss each and every one of the thirty-five words. For example, the conjunction “that” and the verb “are” appear more often than any other words—three times each, so they constitute more than one-sixth of the text—but go unscrutinized and unappreciated. The purpose of this brief article is to say something about those “that”-s. Perhaps this sounds peculiar, but so-called function words tend to be unjustly ignored and, anyway, I have, as we will see, a very distinguished predecessor in a similar, albeit far more ambitious, endeavor.

  The sentence is memorable in both content and form. Understandably, people tend to think more about content, but form can obscure or, as here, magnify content and should not be neglected. Certainly it should not be neglected when it comes to Jefferson, a polyglot and historian of the English language whom John Adams and the rest of the Committee of Five selected to write the first draft of the Declaration on account of his rhetorical skill. Furthermore, as Jay Fliegelman neatly explains in his 1993 book Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language & the Culture of Performance, although himself “an anxious orator,” Jefferson wrote the Declaration to be read aloud: as a vocal musical event rather than an inert document.

  Katz (I think) does a pretty good job of teasing out some unappreciated Jeffersonian insights.

• When they outlaw snowballs, only … Well, you know how the rest of that quote would go. Nellie Bowles observes The Situation Has Snowballed.

  A massive snowball fight in Washington Square Park turned polarizing (literally) after cops showed up to control the crowd and got pelted by a snow-wielding mob. A 27-year-old man was charged with felony assault, with the police commissioner calling it “disgraceful” and “criminal” while Mayor Mamdani only shrugged: “I can just tell you from the video I saw, it looked like kids at a snowball fight.” Surprise, the felony assault charge was already dropped by DA Alvin Bragg. Something about watching cops running while 30-year-olds (which is a Mamdani 5) throw blocks of ice at them, I don’t know, the vibe is different from the snowball fights I remember. Less Olaf from Frozen, and more the beginnings of a hipster January 6. I honestly want to cry thinking about a cop getting home from work and his wife asking him “how was your day, sweetie?” smiling until she sees her loved one brushing snow out of his hood. Probably they don’t care at all. Anyway, let’s turn on CNN.

  Pun Salad doesn't dispense a lot of advice to readers, but I'll make an exception here: Don't throw anything at cops, all right?