Tag: Political Economy

Why Is the World Becoming Such a Nasty Place?

victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia

Photo via PJMedia
Photo via PJMedia

Border Disorders

Central American parents send their unescorted children northward in hopes of remittances and eventual anchor amnesty for themselves. Our friend Mexico facilitates the exodus through its own sovereign territory (hoping that no one stops along the transit, and happy that the border is further shredded). Central American governments seem happy too. More money will be sent back home. Fewer mouths will be left to feed. Possible dissidents will emigrate. A new generation of expatriates in the U.S. will grow fonder of and lobby for Central America the longer they don’t have to live there.

Continue reading “Why Is the World Becoming Such a Nasty Place?” →

The Valley of the Shadow

victorhanson

How mansion-dwelling, carbon-spewing cutthroat capitalists can still be politically correct.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Photo via NRO
Photo via NRO

Silicon Valley is an American success story. At a time of supposed American decline, a gifted group of young entrepreneurs invented, merchandized, and institutionalized everything from smartphones and eBay to Google and Facebook. The collective genius within a small corridor from San Francisco to Stanford University somehow put hand-held electronics into over a billion households worldwide — and hundreds of billions of dollars in profits rolled into Northern California, and America at large.

Stranger yet, Silicon Valley excelled at 1950s-style profit-driven capitalism while projecting the image of hip and cool. The result is a bizarre 21st-century 1-percenter culture of $1,000-a-square-foot homes, $100,000 BMWs, and $500 loafers coexisting with left-wing politics and trendy pop culture. Silicon Valley valiantly tries to square the circle of driving a Mercedes or flying in a Gulfstream while lambasting those who produce its fuel.

Continue reading “The Valley of the Shadow” →

Wards of the State

victorhanson

by Bruce Thornton

Defining Ideas

The biggest political problem the United States faces — runaway entitlement costs on track to bankrupt the treasury — is like the weather. Everybody talks about it, but no one does anything about it. Even talking about it can be politically dangerous, as the Republicans learned in November and during the “fiscal cliff” negotiations. They chastised Mitt Romney’s post-election comments about the entitlement “gifts” President Obama promised voters. And the Republican demand that tax-hikes be linked to spending cuts to avoid the “fiscal cliff” was demonized as “holding the middle class hostage.”
Continue reading “Wards of the State” →

Dr. Barack and Mr. Obama on the Debt Ceiling

victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson

NRO’s The Corner

Barack Obama once had a lot of insightful things to say about the debt ceiling that transcended the usual political game of voting for debt-ceiling increases when your guy was president and against when he was not — and even some things that were quite blunt if not harsh about anyone who would be so reckless as not to address balancing the budget. According to Obama, raising the debt ceiling was a sign of leadership failure (“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure”), and a clear indication that the US was simply incapable of paying what it already owes (“It is a sign that the US government can’t pay its own bills”) — a fact that made us vulnerable to foreign pressures (“It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies”).
Continue reading “Dr. Barack and Mr. Obama on the Debt Ceiling” →