Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.
Football brings out the sociologist that lurks in some otherwise respectable citizens. They say football is a metaphor for America’s sinfulness.
She is so totally absorbed in a vocation – both a gift and a mastering passion – that she has no time to be absorbed with the self’s worries about itself. And that is the moral of the story: You can pursue happiness by wearing a torn jersey. You can catch it by being good at something you love.
I say statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, most legislation is moral legislations because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres in life.
Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?
Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes.
Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.
Today it would be progress if everyone would stop talking about values. Instead, let us talk, as the Founders did, about virtues.
We know next to nothing about virtually everything. It is not necessary to know the origin of the universe; it is necessary to want to know. Civilization depends not on any particular knowledge, but on the disposition to crave knowledge.
There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.
All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.
I’ve lived in Washington now for 44 years, and that’s a lot of folly to witness up close. Whatever confidence and optimism I felt towards the central government when I got here on January 1, 1970 has pretty much dissipated at the hands of the government.
Night baseball isn’t an aberration. What’s an aberration is a team that hasn’t won a World Series since 1908. They tend to think of themselves as a little Williamsburg, a cute little replica of a major league franchise. Give me the Oakland A’s, thank you very much. People who do it right.
It has made mincemeat of Barack Obama’s pose of thoughtfulness. It has demonstrated that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the most basic economic realities. It has dramatized environmentalism’s descent into infantilism.
As has been said, standards are always out of date – that is why we call them standards.
They are supposed to be dispassionate dispensers of Pure Justice, icy islands of emotionless calculation. In short, umpires should be acute Republicans.
Baseball is Heaven’s gift to mortals.
The liberal agenda: Being good to liberals.
Obama, startled that components of government behave as interest groups, seems utterly unfamiliar with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis – how incentives influence behavior – to government.
Money is time made tangible – the time invested in the earning of it. Taxation is the confiscation of the earner’s time. Although some taxation is necessary, all taxation diminishes freedom.