Remember, we’re supposed to be worrying about skyrocketing health-care expenses. Doubling the number of wellness visits and free pills sounds great, but who’s going to pay for it? There is a liberal dream that by mandating coverage the government can make something free. Here’s a good mandate: Let’s mandate that every time a government official says that the government is going to “help” some category of voter, he or she has to say who they are going to hurt in the same sentence. Because it has to be someone. — John Cochrane, “The Real Trouble With the Birth-Control Mandate” Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Liberals
We Need Better Parents
Kids can’t do well in school unless their family has a lot of money, according to an op-ed in the New York Times, which goes on to argue that massive intervention by “policy makers” is needed to confront this issue head-on. The authors, Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske, are a husband-and-wife team of academic researchers. Education reform in a nutshell: First thing, let’s kill all the academic researchers. Helen and Ed cherry-picked the results of a Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study to show that students with lower economic and social status had far lower test scores than their more advantaged counterparts. But they didn’t actually link to the PISA results, because if they had, people would see that Helen and Ed just ignored the three main findings, which are: Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher… Read more →
Liberals and Conservatives
If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative. What could be simpler? — Kurt Vonnegut Read more →
A Couple of Schillers
A couple of Schillers resigned from NPR after one of them said (among other things): Tea Party people aren’t just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic, I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people. Well really . . . I haven’t been this shocked since Claude Rains discovered gambling at Rick’s Cafe. It shakes my belief system to the core to think that someone who works at NPR believes that Tea Party members are scary white gun-toting racists. Although come to think of it, everyone I know who listens to NPR believes that Tea Party members are scary white gun-toting racists. These guys really need to give up the federal funding. They could go full bore in promoting their mission and stop pretending to respect the common folk, who in turn would be relieved of the burden of… Read more →
Completely Missing the Cause and Effect
It’s a sign of how poorly liberals market themselves and their ideas that the word “liberal” is still in disrepute despite the election of the most genuinely liberal president that the political culture of this country will probably allow. — Jonathan Alter “Despite”? Read more →