The Federal Bureaucracy in Check
Congress, despite many chances, has not been willing to take responsibility for checking “the administrative state,” as the aggrandizing bureaucratic power of federal agencies has come to be known. Arrival of a Democratic House makes it still less likely that Capitol Hill will resist the continued expansion of federal rules and regulations. As executive, President Trump has tried to slow Read More ›
Is Democracy in the United States Salvageable?
Book Review: “Politicians” By Bruce Chapman
There may be one or two Americans left in the country who don’t know that we are currently living in an anti-Establishment, anti-professional, anti-politician era. Nationally we have voted someone into the Presidency whose primary claim to high office is that he has never held office. (In my own state, we have had a smaller version of the exact same phenomenon.) In virtually every Congressional and state-level campaign beyond the Presidential elections, we have candidates (including incumbents) engaged in an ever-escalating rhetorical battle to claim the low ground of experience. In Politicians: The Worst Kind of People to Run the Government, Except for all the Others, Bruce K. Chapman argues that this disdain for long-serving public servants has to stop. Keep reading.
Politicians
About the Book
Americans love to trash their politicians as corrupt and self-interested, but they don’t agree on a solution. How can America attract good leaders to the thousands of elective offices in the land? In Polticians: The worst Kind of People to Run the Government, Except for All the Others, Bruce Chapman lays out a bold plan for the changes we need to make in our public life if we are serious about enable worthy leaders to emerge to and to succeed. Drawing on history as well as his own extensive experience in politics and public policy, Chapman challenges the conventional wisdom about politicians, arguing that their chief rivals — the media, bureaucrats, college professors, and even political “reform” groups — are often sources of further political demoralization rather than renewal. Republicans and Democrats alike, conservatives and liberals, have a stake in responding to the stirring and provocative challenge raised by this book.
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The Man Who Could Be King: A Novel
When young Josiah Penn Stockbridge accepts the position as aide-de-camp to George Washington at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, he thinks only of the glory and romance of battle. He is unprepared for the reality of America’s bloody fight for independence. The Continental Army is starving, underpaid, and dangerously close to mutiny, and Washington fights not just to defeat Read More ›
Goodbye California: A Lament
I was born at the French Hospital, City of Los Angeles, State of California, in 1949. As of this writing, I have never been outside my native state for more than three weeks. That’s about to change. Last week, I moved from California to the Washington, D.C. area after my wife accepted a journalism job there. The situation should last Read More ›
Elephants in the Room
Republicans 50 and up watched President Ronald Reagan and Speaker Newt Gingrich deliver national leadership. Today, Republicans of all ages watch “their” House and Senate and see nothing of the kind… A Republican-run legislative branch isn’t supposed to enable Iran Bailouts, rising deficits, the importation of saboteurs, the destruction of private health insurance, wars on entire industries, and IRS corruption. Read More ›
On Election Day, Discovery Institute President Steven J. Buri Says “Thank You” to Politicians
The Hobbit Party
Anyone who has read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings can gather that their author hated tyranny, but few know that the novelist who once described himself as a hobbit “in all but size” was—even by hobbit standards—a zealous proponent of economic freedom and small government. There is a growing concern among many that the West is sliding into political, economic, and Read More ›
George Gilder Is Optimistic That We’re Due For A Surprising Leader
We’re not doomed. At least not according to George Gilder’s challenging and insightful Knowledge and Power.
Plenty of nations have lost their way, and this present distress is not the first time we’ve gotten off course. But according to Gilder, although human beings are wired to receive information, we are currently starved of new ideas because our current ruling class in politics and media is basically just transmitting the same old noise. According to Gilder, when politicians try to match their message to ‘public opinion’ they stultify the political process. The job of leaders is not to reflect back ghostly images of the already spectral enough phantom known as public opinion. The job of leaders is to teach the public something they don’t already know. The third and final installment of our interview with Gilder follows below:
Jerry: “I kind of imagine you speak this signal into the current intellectual milieu and the libertarians say, “Wait, what’s all this stuff about family?” And the sort of nostalgic right say, “Wait, what are all these new jobs from overseas? They’re going to mess up American culture.” I mean, you’re at odds, to some degree, with the sort of religious right nostalgists, “let’s keep everything 9-5”, lunch bucket kind of thing. You’re also at odds with the libertarians who want to redefine family and redefine the traditional moral code—“
George: “Those are fair statements.”
Jerry: “On the other hand, you are, I think, creating a new intellectual structure in which those divergent elements can be reunited, almost reuniting the Reagan coalition on information theory.”
George: “Yeah, I think so. That’s really the purpose of it; it’s to show that both sides are right, it’s to put freedom on a more secure foundation and to put constitutional government and political leadership on a better foundation. I mean, all the heroic inventions of entrepreneurs on the frontiers of science are ultimately dependent on the discipline, moral codes, and leadership by politicians and leaders and ministers and priests, and the whole body of people defending the low-entropy carriers are also indispensable to the high-entropy creators.”
Jerry: “So, we await a new political entrepreneur not to wait for the public to understand this on his own, but to take this message that reunites the Reagan coalition and go out and actively teach it and create a demand for the supply of these answers in the political sphere.”
George: “I think that’s right. And I’m very optimistic. You know, the good thing about a knowledge economy, an economy of mind, is that it can change as quickly as people’s minds can change. In my book, Knowledge and Power, there’s a whole chapter full of examples of countries that have radically transformed their economies in weeks once policies have been changed. From the United States, we’ve reduced government spending 61% in two years after the second world war, with the Republican Congress of 1946. We cut tax rates all over the place through the joint tax return. We dismantled all the regulatory apparatus of the wartime, and much of the new deal. All Keynesian economists thought that the result would be a catastrophe, Paul Samuelson said it would be the worst disruption and disaster and depression in the history of economics. Instead, we launched what’s now looked back on as a golden age of American economic progress.”
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Slade Gorton: A Half Century in Politics
Slade Gorton’s half century in politics began in 1956. Together with Dan Evans and Joel Pritchard, he was a key player in generating a new wave of progressive Republican politics in Washington State. He helped elect the youngest governor in state history; argued 14 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court as attorney general; upset a legend to win a seat Read More ›