Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Alain de Botton writes in the WSJ about how liberal arts education can help us live our lives.
…My own answer to what the humanities are for is simple: They should help us to live. We should look to culture as a storehouse of useful ideas about how to face our most pressing personal and professional issues. Novels and historical narratives can impart moral instruction and edification. Great paintings can suggest the requirements for happiness. Philosophy can probe our anxieties and offer consolation. It should be the job of a university education to tease out the therapeutic and illuminative aspects of culture, so that we emerge from a period of study as slightly less disturbed, selfish and blinkered human beings. Such a transformation benefits not only the economy but also our friends, children and spouses.
…The claim that culture can stand in for scripture—that “Middlemarch” or the essays of Schopenhauer can take up the responsibilities previously handled by the Psalms—still has a way of sounding eccentric or insane. But the ambition is not misplaced: Culture can and should change and save our lives. The problem is the way that culture is taught at our universities, which have a knack for killing its higher possibilities.
The modern university has achieved unparalleled expertise in imparting factual information about culture, but it remains wholly uninterested in training students to use culture as a repertoire of wisdom—that is, a kind of knowledge concerned with things that are not only true but also inwardly beneficial, providing comfort in the face of life’s infinite challenges, from a tyrannical employer to a fatal diagnosis. Our universities have never offered what churches invariably focus on: guidance.
…Because this situation cries out for a remedy, a few years ago I joined with a group of similarly disaffected academics, artists and writers and helped to start a new kind of university. We call it, plainly, the School of Life, and it operates from a modest space in central London. On the menu of our school, you won’t find subjects like philosophy, French and history. You’ll find courses in marriage, child-rearing, choosing a career, changing the world and death. Along the way, our students encounter many of the books and ideas that traditional universities serve up, but they seldom get bored—and often come away with a different take on the world. …
David Harsanyi comments on where the individual mandate leads.
…At some point in the next few years, the Supreme Court will decide whether coercing individuals to purchase a product is constitutional. That’s when we’ll find out if the document is worth anything at all anymore.
…Yet, if this mandate stands, any political group need only cobble together a majority of elected officials, find some open-minded judges dedicated to “doing the right thing” rather than upholding their oath, and government can be handed unlimited power to control not only what we can buy but what we must buy.
…As Federal District Court Judge Henry Hudson, who found the mandate unconstitutional recently, points out, “The same reasoning could apply to transportation, housing, or nutritional decisions. This broad definition of the economic activity subject to congressional regulation lacks logical limitation.”
Maybe that’s the point. Force someone to buy a gun? Awful. Force someone to buy insurance? A victory for fairness. The limits of this philosophy depend solely on the subjective ideals and imagination of powerful advocates. …
In Volokh Conspiracy, Randy Barnett highlights commentary from Glenn Reynolds on two more “eminent domain” thefts. Kelo v. New London continues to allow government and the well-connected to steal land from others. This time it is Columbia University stealing from small businesses near the school.
The takings clause reads “nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.” When Kelo v. City of New London upheld the power of takings for economic development, many used the political backlash to that decision as a vindication of “judicial restraint.” See, we were told, this sort of dispute should be left to the political sphere. Now, as Glenn Reynolds notes in his New York Post column, Columbia University has succeeded in its quest to take two businesses to incorporate their land into the university’s footprint:
[T]his week, . . . the last legal barrier (a possible US Supreme Court review) to Columbia University’s efforts to condemn and seize two businesses — Tuck-it-Away Self-Storage and a gas station owned by Gurnam Singh and Parminder Kaur in West Harlem — vanished.
Columbia said the condemnation was necessary to support the university’s “vision” for a new campus; school President Lee Bollinger called the victory “a very important moment in the history of the university.”
It was an important, if not especially proud, moment for Columbia — but it was surely a bigger moment in the lives of those West Harlem business owners, as their property gets taken away to promote the “vision” of what is, in fact, a multibillion-dollar corporation servicing the daughters and sons of the wealthy, the powerful and the connected.
Traditionally, the “public-domain” power was used to acquire property needed for things like roads and bridges. It’s still often defended in those terms, but the “public use” required for such takings has now been interpreted by courts to include pretty much anything the government wants to do with the property — including handing it over to someone else who just happens to be wealthier or better-connected than the original property holder…
Jennifer Rubin looks at the DC drama last week.
This past week was an extraordinary one for politics watchers. It had the feel of a national political convention week — all the pols, the pundits, the excitement of non-stop news. (START is dead! No it lives! The omnibus spending bill is monstrous! Oh my, that’s dead, too.) But unlike a political convention that simply chooses leaders and quickly fades into the atmosphere (Quick: who were the keynote speakers for the two parties in 2008?), the week had meat — constitutional law (wow, the Commerce Clause might have some bite left in it), ideological watersheds (we are all Bush tax cutters now), social breakthroughs (in a few years, will anyone care about any issue regarding gays?), and foreign policy intrigue (just how desperate is the administration to prostrate itself before the Russians?).
Big things happened. President Obama and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (I typed “majority leader” and had to correct, but he surely seems like the one running the place) may be the next Ronald Reagan-Tip O’Neill political odd couple. ObamaCare, by a combination of judicial surgery (a mandate-ectomy) and a starvation diet (not the Zone Diet, but the DeMint-McConnell-Boehner-Ryan Squeeze), suddenly seemed in peril.
The week’s events also confirmed that Congress, not the preliminary 2012 Republican primary scramble, will be where the action is for conservatives over the next few months. None of the often-mentioned contenders are anxious to get into the race, although preening for the base is very much underway (Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin and Rep. Mike Pence, unlike Rep. Dennis Kucinich, opposed the tax agreement because you can never say “yes” and impress the hardest of the hardliners.) …
Bill Kristol entertains us with the Beltway version of the Night Before Christmas.
’Twas the week before Christmas, and all through
the HouseThe liberals were stirring, and boy did they grouse!
While earmarks were hung on the Reid bill with care
In hopes that the public would not see them there,
The “rich folks” were nestled all snug in their bed—
In hopes they’d be spared, like the president said—
While Nancy in kerchief and Bernie in cap
Were hunting for corpses that Congress could tap. …
Michael Goodwin, in the NYPost, looks at all the Christmas presents the country has been receiving.
…From the federal courts to the halls of Congress, the counterattack against Big Government claimed its first victories just in time for Christmas. Casualties were suffered only by those who forgot that majorities still count in a democracy.
Themes don’t get any more American than that.
The bipartisan support for extending the Bush tax cuts was the first big shock wave of the November election, but not the only one.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was forced to withdraw his earmark-larded $1.2 trillion spending bill because he didn’t have the votes.
That will give the new Congress, under public marching orders to trim spending and ban earmarks, its chance to whack away. …
In the WSJ, Kimberley Strassel says that we have Mitch McConnell to thank for the defeat of the omnibus monstrosity, and for keeping nine Republican senators from succumbing to temptation.
…This week Democrats unveiled a $1.2 trillion omnibus, legislation as pure an insult to the electorate as it gets. It was a 1,924-page monstrosity that nobody had time to read. It took 11 spending bills that Democrats couldn’t be bothered to pass individually and crammed them into one oozing ball of pork and bad policy, going beyond even the obscene budget of 2010.
Yet to this legislative Frankenstein Democrats carefully attached the spenders’ equivalent of crack cocaine. To wit, omnibus author and Hawaii Democrat Daniel Inouye dug up earmark requests that Senate Republicans had made in the past year (prior to their self-imposed ban) and, unasked, included them in the bill. He lavished special, generous attention—$1 billion worth of it—on some reliable GOP earmark junkies: Mississippi’s Thad Cochran got $512 million; Utah’s Bob Bennett, $226 million; Maine’s Susan Collins, $114 million; Missouri’s Kit Bond, $102 million; Ohio’s George Voinovich, $98 million; and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, $80 million.
The effect of this dope—just sitting there, begging for a quick inhale—on earmarkers was immediate. Two seconds into the sweats and shaking hands, nine Republicans let Mr. Reid know they’d be open to this bill.
…Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell accomplished a mini Christmas miracle. The Kentuckian devoted yesterday to making the arguments—both principled and political—to the Spending Nine. He was ultimately persuasive enough, and the earmarkers wise enough, to pull back their support. A very unhappy Mr. Reid was forced to yank the omnibus last night. He will now work with Republicans on a short-term funding bill, a process that should give the incoming GOP House far more influence over upcoming spending decisions. …
Michael Barone also comments on the good news from Washington.
…At the south end of the Capitol Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forced to watch gloomily as her Democrats failed to rally majorities to alter — and probably sidetrack — the deal reached between Barack Obama and Republican congressional leaders extending the Bush tax cuts for two years.
Instead, the House voted 277-148 for a measure that the Senate had passed 81-19 earlier in the week. “If someone had told me, the day after election day 2008, that the tax rates on income and capital would not increase for the next four years,” wrote Bush White House staffer Keith Hennessey in his blog, “I would have laughed.”
…Republicans, having succeeded in holding down tax rates, clearly have a mandate to hack away at spending and to defund and derail Obamacare, which is at or near new lows in the ABC/Washington Post and Rasmussen polls. And there does seem an opening, as Clinton White House staffer William Galston argues, for a 1986-style tax reform that eliminates tax preferences and cuts tax rates. …