The prevalence and power of a vision is shown, not by what its evidence or logic can prove, but precisely by its exemption from any need to provide evidence or logic – by the number of things that can be successfully asserted because they fit the vision, without having to meet the test of fitting the facts.
Among the precepts that Andrew Jackson’s mother taught him were never to sue anybody for slander or for assault and battery: “Always settle them cases yourself.
24 percent of something is larger than 73 percent of nothing.
In short, the anointed are helped to make yet another group feel like victims and to regard the anointed as their rescuers.
Evidence is often particularly abundant when it comes to statements about history, yet the anointed have repeatedly been as demonstrably wrong about the past as about the present or the future – and as supremely confident.
Because the common law was not simply the creature of political power-holders, it became another of the forces for separation of powers and of rights limiting the scope of officials.
The highly moralistic and uncompromising outlook of the Puritans eventually put them and their descendants on a collision course with the institution of slavery and produced. among others, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was called by Abraham Lincoln the little lady who started the Civil War” because of her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Alternative explanations for these changing patterns of racial differences – such as racism, poverty or inferior education among blacks – cannot establish even correlation with changing employment outcomes over the years, because all those things were worse in the first half of the twentieth century, when the unemployment rate among black teenagers in 1948 was far lower and not significantly different from the unemployment rate among white teenagers.
The civil rights vision relies heavily on statistical “disparities” in income and employment between members of different groups to support its sweeping claims of rampant discrimination.
Most notable achievements involve multiple factors – beginning with a desire to succeed in the particular endeavor, and a willingness to do what it takes, without which all the native ability in an individual and all the opportunity in a society mean nothing, just as the desire and the opportunity mean nothing without the ability.
Women’s rise in higher-level occupations in the second half of the twentieth century continued to follow the rise in their age of marriage, which rose sharply and finished the century significantly higher than it was at the beginning,14 while the birth rate fell sharply and was much lower at the end of the century than it was at the beginning.15 As the age of first marriage climbed to record high levels, women rose to record high levels in higher education and higher occupations.
The rise of a British iron and steel industry was intertwined with the development of coal mining.
But, although Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are officially private, profit-making enterprises, their size and the federal government’s involvement in both their creation and their on-going operations led many investors to assume that the federal government would never allow them to fail – which is to say, the increasing riskiness of the assets of these two mortgage market giants was an increasing riskiness for the taxpayers, whether the taxpayers knew it or not.
When John Rawls, in his A Theory of Justice repeatedly referred to outcomes that ‘society’ can ‘arrange,’ these euphemisms finessed aside the plain fact that only government has the power to override millions of people’s mutually agreed transactions terms. Interior decorators arrange. Governments compel. It is not a subtle distinctions.
At various times and places, particular individuals have argued that existing tax rates are so high that the government could collect more tax revenues if it lowered those tax rates, because the changed incentives would lead to more economic activity, resulting in more tax revenues out of rising incomes, even though the tax rate was lowered.
Engineers and mechanics were as much products of the industrialization process as the material goods and the machinery by which those goods were produced.
British mechanics and engineers were in demand around the world.
That decades had to pass before a mistake with obvious negative consequences began to be corrected is one sign of the problems of decisions by third parties who pay no price for being wrong.
As late as 1876, there were more than a hundred foreign industrial workers in the Japanese railroad industry alone and, of these, 94 were British.
Using machines to make other machines allowed finer tolerances to be maintained-sometimes down to a thousandth of an inch”-and this in turn meant that parts could be made interchangeable.