Fred L. Smith on the anti-business policy agenda of the left:

Ignored (in the storm about the Heartland documents), however, (is) a larger and even more serious issue – the growing effort to drive the market (and market-friendly voices) from the marketplace of ideas. The left has found that their statist alliances – trial lawyers and environmentalists, unionists and consumer groups – have been powerful in advancing their agenda. They’re not eager to see economic liberals do the same.
Note their systematic ideological-cleansing program: no one with any business links serving on a government policy advisory group; no one with a business background to serving in government; pejorative labeling in academic journals of any business-funded research; banning academics funding by business; passing stockholder resolutions against companies assisting pro-market policy allies..
If these efforts succeed, then the only legitimate voices in the policy debates will be crony capitalists and statist intellectuals. A serious threat and one that the Heartland incident should alert us to.

h/t

In a column at Time Magazine’s website, college administrator and early childhood educator Erika Christakis argues that Christians who oppose the Obama administration’s decision to force them to pay for abortifacients are imposing their will on everybody else:

“Let’s see what our society would look like if we all had the luxury of imposing our unfettered will.”

This vaguely dystopian inversion of the truth – that it is progressive, secular champions of central-planning such as herself, and not Christians, who are imposing their “unfettered will” – informs her entire column. Her will, she will have you understand, isn’t unfettered or selfish, but an expression of rights: those who don’t want to pay for other people’s abortifacients, she says, are “unwilling to concede that the exercise of their deeply held convictions might infringe on the rights of millions of people who are burdened by unplanned pregnancy.”
You read that right: being disinclined to pay for the nominal – and presumably infrequent – expense of your neighbour’s abortifacients is an infringement upon your neighbour’s rights.
As for those recalcitrant Christians who are just too thick to understand that the beliefs of the proponents of big-state, enforced-secular leftism trump their own deeply-held spiritual belief that abortion is murder,

“At a minimum, the Catholic bishops and employers resisting contraceptive coverage should be willing to pay for the care of all those unwanted children. Or perhaps they’d be willing to spend some time in jail in protest. At my taxpaying expense, of course…”

“Luxury of imposing their unfettered will” indeed.

US Supreme Court to revisit 2003 decision that race-based discrimination is legal.
Should be interesting.

In the post “Hoffer on Scribes and Bureaucrats“, David Foster of Chicago Boyz excerpts a couple of timely passages from Eric Hoffer’s essay The Ordeal of Change, published about fifty years ago:

The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated. They hanker for the scribe’s golden age, for a return to something like the scribe-dominated societies of ancient Egypt, China, and the Europe of the Middle Ages. There is little doubt that the present trend in the new and renovated countries toward social regimentation stems partly from the need to create adequate employment for a large number of scribes…

Hoffer was referring at the time, Foster notes, to “underdeveloped countries” and not to the modern west, but his description is an apt portrayal of our modern-day would-be central planners: bureaucrats, politicians, big-picture leftist pundits, and the chattering class of so-called progressive voters:

…there is a tendency in the untalented to divert their energies from their own development into the management, manipulation, and probably frustration of others. They want to police, instruct, guide, and meddle. In an adequate society, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them.

There is a cliché in Washington. There are two things you do not want to see made: sausage and laws. To those we may add a third: Barack Obama’s decisions.
Ron Suskind’s book Confidence Men portrays Barack Obama as being confounded by his duties as president. Some of the scenes depicted by Suskind would be comical if they were not so tragic for America. For example, when Obama’s experts assembled to discuss the scope and intricacies of the stimulus bill, Barack Obama was out of his depth. He was “surprisingly aloof in the conversation” and seemed “disconnected and less in control.” His contributions were rare and consisted of blurting out such gems of wisdom as “There needs to be more inspiration here!” and “What about more smart grids” and — one more that Newt Gingrich would appreciate — “we need more moon shot”.
Even “Pelosi and her staff visibly rolled their eyes.”
Suskind writes:
Members of the team were perplexed…for the first time in the transition, people started to wonder just how prepared the man at the helm was.

Warnings though, are meant to be ignored:

I used to mention that even a marginal increase in summer frosts, or shortening of growing seasons could spell disaster … but no, these guano-for-brains bots of the “green” movement were more concerned about propagating the mythical phenomenon of rising sea levels or increased hurricanes.

Rising sea levels? You mean that people still believe that?

Word was just issued this week in Vancouver that, as an interim guideline, all builders are being told they should raise the level of their land by a metre.

Update: Myths so desperately clung to that trade war may be around the corner.