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- Harold Pollack breaks down conventional wisdom about the unemployed: "People seeking work aren't dogs fighting over bones. The real insult is that we act as though they are." These are words worth keeping in mind as you read Timothy Noah's article on the return of Gilded Age-scale income inequality. You know American exceptionalism is humming along when we have greater income inequality than any number of "backward" Latin American countries.
- Two political pet peeves of mine addressed by Jonathan Bernstein, prompted by the recent American Political Science Association conference in D.C. First, never trust anyone who begins an argument with "the Founding Fathers intended..." It is an admission that they don't actually have an argument and are instead relying on implicit reverence for our forebears as a substitute for reason. Second, there is no such thing as a state's "interests." People have interests, governments and their officials have interests, but states do not. When a person invokes "states' rights" they are merely cloaking an interest group's agenda in pseudo-constitutional principle.
- Daniel Larison ponders the dearth of "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" voters in the context of the mythical "liberaltarian" vote, but I think he unintentionally makes the case against the libertarian vote instead. The reason there is no significant libertarian vote is that most people who pursue a socially conservative agenda do so strictly in the context of securing rights through the federal government. This, of course, requires more government -- "bigger" government, if you will -- which is anathema to the libertarian creed.
- Holiday Remainders: The Washington Post demonstrates once again that it is more interested in drawing eyeballs than meeting the fact-checking responsibilities of a kindergarten book report; governing by public opinion is a really bad idea; and interesting counterfactuals about the composition of the 111th Congress exist only because the Senate is such a ridiculous institution.
--Mori Dinauer
