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We start off with John Stossel’s weekly column.
Bill Clinton once declared, “The era of big government is over.” Both Republicans and Democrats applauded.
What a joke.
Government grew under Clinton, and grew even faster under his successor. Government is so big today that more than half the population gets a major part of its income from the state.
Michael Barone is having a week. Today he questions our priorities.
Sometimes politicians get things upside down. They ignore problems that are plainly staring them in the face, while they focus on dangers that are at best speculative.Consider two long-range issues that are not pressing matters this year but pose, or are said to pose, threats a generation or two away. One of them you don’t hear much about: Social Security. The other you hear about all the time: global warming. Yet this gets things upside down. We have an unusually precise knowledge of the problems that Social Security will cause in the future. But we don’t know with anything like precision what a continuation of the current mild increase in temperatures will mean.
Hugh Hewitt interviews Mr. Barone about the piece we started with yesterday.
WSJ editorial on the people behind the attacks on Wolfowitz.
George Will pays some attention to the World Bank.
The kerfuffle over whether Paul Wolfowitz, the World Bank’s president, behaved badly regarding the contract for his companion to facilitate her departure from the bank involves no large issue. The bank’s existence does. The bank’s rationale, never strong, has evaporated.
The Village Voice thinks NY Times is hypocritical.
May Month selection today is Kolyma: The Land of the White Death.
“As the isolation of the region made it difficult to transport prisoners by rail, the ocean began the preferred route of transport. A fleet of ships based in Vladivostok carried out the operations. In the late fall of 1941, one such slave ship – the Dzhurma – carrying 12,000 Polish prisoners became trapped in the frozen waters near Wrangle Island. The Soviets could not carry out a rescue and refused help from outsiders for fear of exposing their slave apparatus to the world. The entire contingent died due to cold and starvation.”
Instapundit posts on Anne Applebaum’s good bye to Chirac.
Walter Williams writes on the minimum wage.