Posts Tagged ‘ liberalism ’

Facts, Principles, and the Nature of Liberty

November 14, 2012
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Facts, Principles, and the Nature of Liberty

A truly liberal person will steadfastly oppose actions of government that force people to act against their conscience or allow individuals to do harm to other human beings. I believe that those are the principles we should consider when looking at facts about government-financed public education and a government-enforced policy of unlimited elective abortions. I welcome those who disagree, to state the principles by which they do so, with equal directness and brevity. Nothing else can justify any sort of collective action against individuals. .…

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Response to National Drift Requires Understanding of Fundamental Principles

September 30, 2010
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Response to National Drift Requires Understanding of Fundamental Principles

There are some false dichotomies in Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column denigrating what he calls the Tea Kettle movement (such as that diagnosing symptoms somehow makes it impossible to offer policies, that popularity makes a movement automatically suspect, etc.), but he does get a couple of things very right: the description of what kind of presidential and congressional leadership is needed today, the point that real decisions about spending cuts have to be made if the current public dissatisfaction with government is to have…

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Is There a Culture War, or What?

May 13, 2010
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Is There a Culture War, or What?

There is a culture war, and we need it, argues Carol Iannone on NRO’s The Corner. I don’t like martial metaphors, but I strongly agree with Carol Iannone that there are basically two worldviews competing irreconcilably in the United States today. One, called progressivism, derives from the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and tends to blame all human problems on imperfect social institutions. Individuals devoted to this worldview concentrate great effort on the perfecting of institutions according to their idea of social justice, which evolves as…

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‘Cop Out’ Doesn’t Just Stink, But It’s Racist, Too?

February 27, 2010
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‘Cop Out’ Doesn’t Just Stink, But It’s Racist, Too?

The new movie “Cop Out” has created a lot of buzz, and not just because critics are hammering Kevin Smith’s homage to the ’80s “buddy cop comedies” for being painfully un-funny. The film is apparently racist, too. Film critic Christian Toto gives us the run-down: Armond White of the New York Press, a reliably contrarian voice in film critic circles, slams star Tracy Morgan for his performance: “His broad face and goofy baritone are the essence of how Hollywood once tried to stereotype Louis Armstrong;…

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Steven Weber: A Huffington Post Clown Who Thinks He’s Smart

February 15, 2010
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Steven Weber: A Huffington Post Clown Who Thinks He’s Smart

Steven Weber, who starred in “Wings,” is a contributor to that font of mainstream Hollywood liberal thought, The Huffington Post. Can’t quite place Steven Weber? C’mon. Don’t you remember that NBC sitcom? It’s the one where the guys who played supporting characters — like the imbecile mechanic (Thomas Hayden Church) and the immigrant taxi driver (Tony Shalhoub) — went on to be big stars. Apparently, Weber — always billed as a “star” of that show (Weber was the cute, younger of the two protagonist brothers) — still…

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Climate Scientist to Colleagues: Don’t Dismiss Climategate

February 6, 2010
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Climate Scientist to Colleagues: Don’t Dismiss Climategate

The 13th Annual Energy & Environment Conference, held in Phoenix Feb. 1-3, isn’t the sort of place where global warming “deniers” are exactly welcome. In fact, by my observations, the skeptical caucus at the event consisted entirely of: James M. Taylor, a senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute; Keith Lockitch, a fellow of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights; and me. All the other attendees spent their time discussing how the U.S. government — or, even better, a “global government” — needs to compel us all to…

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David Mamet Swings to the Right

March 20, 2008
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David Mamet Swings to the Right

TAC correspondent Michael D’Virgilio analyzes the cultural implications of the political journey of David Mamet, another modern liberal mugged by reality.

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On the Ground in Iraq – The Logical Limits of Sympathy

February 12, 2008
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As regular readers of this site and my other writings know, I believe that the U.S. presence in Iraq served its purpose—the removal of the presumed threat to American lives within our borders (however plausible that threat may have been)—some time ago, with the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. Given that all individuals and all peoples have the right of self-defense, anything that happened thereafter, according to classical liberal principles, was neither our responsibility nor any business of ours, unless it should come to…

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A Classical Liberal View of the Great Depression

June 13, 2007
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A Classical Liberal View of the Great Depression

Kathryn Lopez, editor of National Review Online, is one of the very best interviewers around. Her conversation with former Wall Street Journal writer-editor Amity Shlaes is a fine example of Kathryn’s work. Shlaes’s new book, The Forgotten Man: A History of the Great Depression, published just yesterday, "serves up the Great Depression as you’ve never known it — challenging conventional wisdom, telling a gripping story of the triumph of the American spirit and the folly of big government," as Lopez smartly describes it. It’s a…

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The Brilliance of “Going My Way”

December 16, 2006
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The Brilliance of “Going My Way”

TV stations tend to show the great 1944 film Going My Way, directed by Leo McCarey and starring Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald, more often around Christmas, even though only a couple of scenes are set during Advent. The film, however, always repays watching. In particular, it illustrates the superiority of moral suasion over coercion in the creation of civil order — a lesson always worth remembering. Although Going My Way won several Academy Awards, including Best Picture, the film’s reputation rapidly declined beginning in…

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Liberals and Statists

November 23, 2006
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Here are some thoughts in our continuing discussion of political nomenclature, in which we have noted the changing nature of what is really conservative, radical, and liberal in the current era, after the end of the Cold War: There are two parties of left and right today: liberals and statists. Liberals see authority as vested in the individual and handed over to the state only as appropriate to maintain both order and liberty. Statists see authority as residing entirely in the state. This is the…

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More on Classical Liberalism

November 14, 2006
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In my article yesterday in National Review Online, and in subsequent discussions here, I have suggested a return to the philosophy of classical liberalism as an antidote to both big-government conservatism (the current-day Republicans) and what I call New Age conservatism (the current-day Democrats). As I pointed out six months ago on Tech Central Station, big-government conservatism is a mess both politically and as policy . And the Democrats’ success in the recent elections suggests that they will stick with their New Age conservatism for…

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U.S. Political Culture: Big Loss for Classical Liberalism

November 8, 2006
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Tuesday’s elections were, as widely expected, a solid thrashing for the Republican Party. But the real loser was classical liberalism. And the winner was conservatism. Republicans lost fewer House and Senate seats than was expected earlier in the year, dropping about the average amount lost in a President’s sixth year. They have lost control of the U.S. House of Representatives and very possibly the Senate, as we await likely recounts in races in Virginia and Montana—states that had trended Republican in recent years. Very tellingly,…

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