Sullivan on the Right

I'd rather see a sermon than hear one any day;
I'd rather one should walk with me than merely tell the way.
 -Edgar Guest, poet (20 Aug 1881-1959)


I thought the Steelers looked pretty good last night. Dupree made two plays.
Ned should be back, Liz should be leaving, today.
Chris spent most of Sunday on a work project.
I'm enjoying my course, as opposed to the first one.

From Phil Gramm and John F. Early’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal “Americans Are Richer Than We Think“:

When corrected for documented price overstatements, real average hourly earnings from 1975 to 2017 are shown to have risen some 52%, not 6%—an additional $6.77 an hour. Real median household income increased 68%, not 21%—$17,060 more annually. Gross domestic product grew 253% rather than 216%—$6,312 of additional output per capita. Productivity expanded 142% rather than 117%—$10 of additional value for every hour worked. And published poverty incidence fell by almost half. Combined with the 67% drop in poverty that comes from accounting for all government transfers, poverty incidence sank from 12.3% to about 2%.

The old American fear of Russia stemmed from a basic insecurity about the American economic philosophy: There has always been the fear that competitive, random markets were vulnerable to managed ones. At the creation of every new centralized government structure, the Americans fret and wait for the hammer to fall.

But to favor government planning over innovation and markets fundamentally misunderstanding how an economy functions and improves.

The Trump administration is vastly expanding the scope of condominium purchases eligible for lower-down-payment loans.

On this day in 1346, during the Hundred Years War, King Edward III’s English army annihilated a French force under King Philip VI at the Battle of Crecy in Normandy. The battle, which saw an early use of the deadly longbow by the English, is regarded as one of the most decisive in history.



                   Sullivan on the Right

Subject young white boys to critical race and gender theory, tell them that women can have penises, that genetics are irrelevant in understanding human behavior, that borders are racist, or that men are inherently toxic, and you will get a bunch of Jordan Peterson fans by their 20s. Actually, scratch that future tense — they’re here and growing in number.

Many leftists somehow believe that sustained indoctrination will work in abolishing human nature, and when it doesn’t, because it can’t, they demonize those who have failed the various tests of PC purity as inherently wicked. In the end, the alienated and despised see no reason not to gravitate to ever-more extreme positions. They support people and ideas simply because they piss off their indoctrinators. And, in the end, they reelect Trump. None of this is necessary. You can be in favor of women’s equality without buying into the toxicity of men; you can support legal immigration if the government gets serious about stopping illegal immigration; you can be inclusive of trans people without abolishing the bimodality of human sex and gender; you can support criminal-justice reform without believing — as the New York Times now apparently does — that America is an inherently racist invention, founded in 1619 and not 1775.

The whole article is here: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/andrew-sullivan-the-limits-of-my-conservatism.html?utm_source=tw