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Ian Underwood 
Faced with a complicated task, we often turn to experts. We go to doctors, we go to lawyers, we hire electricians and plumbers and car mechanics. We turn our kids over to schools. (Which is usually a mistake, but we do it anyway.)
You know what else is complicated? Voting.
The Declaration of Independence asks and answers two fundamental questions about the nature of government, as understood by the people who founded America. First, what is government for? Second, from where does government derive its just powers?
I once heard Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller) say that he had learned from experience that if you enter into a contract with someone thinking that you’ll be able to use that contract to make him do something he doesn’t want to do, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
We frequently hear about how each of us should pay or receive ‘our fair share’ of taxes. Whether that’s the state Department of Labor claiming to ‘ensure the NH businesses pay their fair share’, or the federal Census Bureau arguing that it ‘helps each community get its fair share’ of tax funds, or some other example of lobbying of the government, by the government, for the government, we see this phrase again and again.
But I think it’s time to add an ‘s’ to it, and start talking about ‘our fair shares’ instead of ‘our fair share’.
Christopher Maidment recently began his post, A Republic, If You Can Keep It, by saying:
A Government Of The People, By The People, and For The People. That’s the whole foundation of this country.
I disagree. The foundation of the country begins with the Declaration of Independence. That document asks and answers two fundamental questions:
Long ago, I read an account about some factories in the Soviet Union that made cookware for soldiers. Of course, if you’re a soldier, you’d like your cookware to be as light as possible, because you’re going to be carrying it around. And you want it to heat as quickly as possible, because you have to either find or carry your fuel.
However, the managers of these factories were rewarded, not for producing lighter cookware, or better cookware, or more cookware. They were rewarded for using more raw materials. The more raw materials a factory consumed, the more highly its managers were rated.
Can you guess what happened?
In 2017, the University of California at Berkeley put a substantial portion of its courses online for free in the form of video and audio lectures. Remember what happened next?
Many of the lectures were not closed-captioned, which prevented some people who were hearing-impaired from being able to listen to them. The U.S. Department of Justice forced the university to take all the material down, on the grounds that if someone, somewhere wouldn’t be able to benefit from it, then no one should be able to benefit from it.
Last night, the State of Texas put to death a man convicted of rape and murder that many experts say he couldn’t have committed.
Conservatives often refuse to believe in evolution, because they don’t see how something as complex as nature could operate without someone in charge of it. At the same time, they are comfortable with the idea that something as complex as an economy could operate without guidance.
Progressives often take the opposite positions: that something as complex as an economy requires someone to be in charge, while nature can operate without guidance.
In the movie Idiocracy, people in the future experience massive crop failures. Why? Because the government has convinced farmers that ‘electrolytes are what plants crave’, so farmers start watering their fields with the sports drink Brawndo (which is basically Gatorade).
I couldn’t help thinking of this the other day when someone forwarded me the latest email blast from Comrade Volinsky, who is running something called the School Funding Fairness Project.
Speaking on the subject of Red Flag laws, Senator Rand Paul was recently quoted as saying: I’m not opposed to sort of an emergency order for 48 hours and then you get a hearing in a court where you get the full due-process protections.
In other words, on the basis of a mere accusation, you take someone’s guns away from him, and if you made a mistake, you let him try to get them back in court.
A day or two later, he was sending out emails asking for donations to help him support the Second Amendment.
With Learn Everywhere back in the news, discussions about the program tend to involve errors of fact (e.g., that costs for the program would be incurred by local districts) and errors of reasoning (e.g., that offering more alternatives to some students somehow means harming other students). But to me, the discussions are most notable for the way they seek to perpetuate the double standard that defenders of the status quo like to hide behind.
There are a lot of tragic aspects to our current health care system. No one seems to be happy with it, and no one agrees on how to fix it. But I think there’s at least one area where we could make progress, in a way that could avoid a lot of political fighting — mostly because it wouldn’t require any taxes or regulations, which are the things we’re usually fighting about.
A fiduciary is someone who has a legal obligation to place the interests of another party above his own interests.
We normally see this term used when talking about things like investment advice, retirement planning, and so on. For example, if selling you a security or policy or other product would be good for a fiduciary, but bad for you, then he can’t sell it to you. But it applies to other areas as well.
The protections in the original Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government. So, the federal government couldn’t set up an official religion, or punish you for saying something, or disarm you, or search your home without a warrant, and so on. But the states could do those things.
In response to Steve’s recent description of the Bladensburg Peace Cross case as a ‘great day in court’ for religious liberty, I’d like to point out once again that, with rare exceptions, there’s no such a thing as a great day in court — because even when you think you’ve won, what you’ve lost is going to be much more significant in the long run.
Remember when a student who needed to repeat a grade in school would be ‘held back’, rather than promoted with the rest of his cohort? Apparently there’s a new term for that: ‘Expert’.
With transgender athletes showing up in the headlines (and generating controversy) more frequently, this seems like a good opportunity for people to stop and reflect on why we have categories in sporting events in the first place. Why not get rid of weight classes in boxing, for example? Are those for the benefit of the competitors, or for the benefit of the fans of the sport, who want to have at least a chance of being surprised?
Recently, I sat listening to a speaker talk about how both Massachusetts and New Hampshire are among the best states in terms of student achievement as measured by the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) test. The thing is, although it’s difficult to attach any particular meaning to a NAEP score, it’s clear that every … Read more
Senator Lindsey Graham — nominally a Republican — is trying to put together federal legislation to give grants to states that pass Red Flag laws. The National Rifle Association — nominally a gun rights organization — has gone on record in support of these laws.
These have to be belated April Fool’s jokes, right? Unfortunately, they’re not. But there’s a joke that helps explain how situations like this come about: