Think Tank West

Over at the new WashingtonWatch.com blog, I’ve posted a piece illustrating the simple modern mechanics of something Jefferson warned against: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Congress is considering a bill to cancel the scheduled termination of a commission that studies minority veterans issues. It would only [...]

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Senator John McCain’s advisers evidently told him to crank up the rhetoric a bit yesterday, because his longstanding stump speech line about “rather lose an election than lose a war” became this: When we adopted the surge, we were losing the war in Iraq, and I stood up and said I would rather lose a [...]

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A man who is willing to show how clean he is by initiating an ethics probe into his own fundraising activities surely wouldn’t mind explaining his motivation for terminating a study on Chinese trade practices that he himself commissioned to great fanfare. Until he does give this explanation, we can only speculate. On May 23, 2007, House Ways [...]

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Kudos to the Adam Smith Institute of London, which has succeeded in remarkably short order in commissioning, funding, and erecting a statue of Adam Smith “on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile – right in the heart of Scotland’s capital city, where Adam Smith worked and died.” Appropriately enough, the statue stands on the site of an ancient [...]

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Paul Gigot has an outstanding piece on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac today in the WSJ. “The abiding lesson here is what happens when you combine private profit with government power.” Exactly. Here’s what I said about the twin-headed hydra in my 2005 Downsizing the Federal Government: Federal taxpayers also face financial exposure from the mortgage [...]

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The presumptive Democratic nominee is getting some negative attention for his plan to kill the 2003 tax rate reductions, which would boost the top tax rate by 4.6 percentage points. But a far more radical proposal is his scheme to extend Social Security payroll taxes so they apply to income above $250,000, a change that [...]

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If you want the YouTube equivalent of the past six years of Weekly Standard and Commentary magazine articles condensed into 10 minutes–and why wouldn’t you, really?–here you go: It’s been a long six years.

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Here’s a good article by Declan McCullagh on New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s outrageous vendetta against Usenet. The article is good not only because yours truly is quoted.

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Via Ezra Klein, Tim Fernholz seems to be confused about the nature of censorship: Conservatives argue (often with comparisons to communist states) that the doctrine, which hasn’t been in effect since 1987, forced the state to mandate speech. It really just provides for reasonable discussion of views, but the Right demagogues the issue to raise [...]

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… when compared to public schooling? For the interesting answer to that question, have a look at Jay Greene’s edu blog.

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