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- According to the Heritage Foundation, America continues its steep descent on the "economic freedom" scale, dropping to ninth overall, firmly in the "mostly free" bracket. Now, I happen to believe economic freedom is a good and important thing. But it is one freedom among many. For the libertarian right, however, economic freedom is freedom, QED. Similarly, this Washington Post editorial that reads a gloomy Freedom House report and concludes that Obama and America need to "advocate" more for freedom in the world. Haven't we done enough "freedom advocacy" this past decade?
- Jonathan Bernstein has a great post about how recent events have revealed the pervasiveness of the conservative movement's "epistemic closure" problem (remember that?). And to be honest, I'm not clear how the echo chamber works. I don't buy that it's as simple as Rush (or whoever) says something and everyone's got their marching orders. Rather, I suspect it has to do with a set of shared assumptions that bind conservatives together so when an argument is presented, it does or does not "make sense" given those presumptions.
- Speaking of presumptions, I think there's a great deal of explanatory power in Paul Krugman's column on the division of American politics into two forms of morality that inform your position on the scope of government, and it would be beneficial if partisans were more open about these moral leanings. You saw a bit of this when Democrats coalesced around passing health-care reform, calling it a "moral imperative" to cover the uninsured. Conservatives, I imagine, would take offense at having their morals described as retributive, but it sure seems accurate to me.
- Remainders: Even if the U.S. fails to raise the debt ceiling, it won't default; Ta-Nehisi Coates on the "petrified society" that was the antebellum South; Rand Paul makes the principled libertarian argument for slashing government programs by an arbitrary percentage; and shockingly, oil prices sometimes rise because production has not increased with demand.
--Mori Dinauer
