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Kevin Williamson writes on the children’s free libraries in the Kansas City suburbs and the reaction from government creeps on the zoning board.
Funny how words change over time: “To be attached to the subdivision,” Edmund Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, “to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.” The phrase “little platoon” remains current among conservatives, who are mindful that the small, local, voluntary associations of civil society — and not Leviathan — are the real building blocks of our common life. But “subdivision” now means something entirely different, calling to mind the petty dictatorships of local zoning boards and the like. Nine-year-old Spencer Collins of Leawood, Kan., was trying to make his contribution to his little platoon when he ran up against the ham-fisted tyranny of the subdivision.
There is a charming phenomenon known as the “little free library,” in which private citizens, very often children, build modest little birdhouse-like structures, fill them with books, and offer them to their neighbors on a take-a-book/leave-a-book honor system. The practice is popular in the Kansas City suburbs where the Collinses reside, but they have been built from coast to coast. The business of America being business, there are even entrepreneurs who build ready-made little free libraries for those insufficiently handy or not inclined to build their own. Children engaging their communities in a generous, civic-minded activity dedicated to books: You could hardly improve on that.
Unless you are the local zoning board. And then you might have some ideas. …
… From the suburbs to the capital, we are governed by fools.
Kevin Williamson reminds us how delicate our democratic government is.
… freedom, self-rule, and prosperity are extraordinarily delicate things. The natural state of the human animal is not security and plenty, but terror and privation. When the Romans overthrew Tarquin, they swore they’d never have another king. Soon enough, they had an emperor, a word deriving from the Latin imperator, which, some of my conservative friends would do well to remember, means “commander-in-chief.”
We Americans venerate our Constitution as the English venerate their Magna Carta (which is our Magna Carta, too), but it isn’t our laws or our documents that keep us free. The United States and the United Kingdom have very different forms of government, and there are many contradictory and incompatible laws, institutions, health-care arrangements, etc., across the countries of the Anglosphere. What keeps us free is our civilization and our culture, and our tenacity in defending the best aspects of them.
As John Fund points out, 13 times since 2012 the Supreme Court has felt itself obliged to unanimously stop Barack Obama from doing violence to the Constitution and the law in the service of aggrandizing his own power. The president’s most recent defeat, in the matter of his attempting to make recess appointments when the Senate is not in recess, was a naked power grab, ugly and vicious enough that even Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, whom President Obama named to the Court, both felt obliged by duty to blow the whistle on his transgression. But even the mighty Supreme Court can be overcome: …
Kevin Williamson posts on the unfortunate series of events that have overcome the IRS. Says it must be “the unluckiest agency in the history of the federal government.”
You may recall that when the IRS political-persecution scandal first started to become public, the agency’s story was that the trouble was the result of the misguided, overly enthusiastic actions of a few obscure yokels in Cincinnati. That turned out to be a lie, as we all know. But the IRS made a similar case successfully in the matter of its criminal disclosure of the confidential tax records of the National Organization for Marriage, whose donor lists were leaked to left-wing activists in order to use them against the Romney campaign. The IRS admitted that an employee leaked the information, but said it was an accident, that it involved only a single employee making a single error, etc., and the court agreed that NOM could not show that the leak was the result of malice or gross negligence.
Truly, the IRS must be the unluckiest agency in the history of the federal government. Oops! It’s leaking confidential taxpayer information to political activists. D’oh! It’s improperly and illegally targeting conservative organizations for harassment and investigation and misleading Congress, investigators, and the public about the scope and scale of that wrongdoing. Dang! It cannot produce the emails that investigators have demanded as part of the inquiry into its actions. Rats! Its employees are openly campaigning for Barack Obama’s reelection while on the IRS’s clock, using IRS resources, and holding taxpayers hostage. And, who could have seen it coming? The IRS violated the Federal Records Act by refusing to archive relevant documents. With a string of bad luck like that, sure, accidentally releasing NOM’s confidential taxpayer information to left-wing activists seems right at home. …
… The alternative and much more likely — undeniable, to my mind — explanation is that the Internal Revenue Service is engaged in an active and ongoing criminal conspiracy to misappropriate federal resources for political purposes, to use its investigatory powers, including the threat of criminal prosecution, for purposes of political repression, and to actively mislead Congress and the public about the issue; that the Justice Department is turning a blind eye to these very serious crimes for political purposes and is therefore complicit in the cover-up; that these crimes were encouraged if not outright suborned by Senate Democrats; and that the White House is at the very least passively complicit, refusing to lift so much as a presidential pinkie as the IRS runs amok.
And, apparently, there’s nobody in Washington with the power and the inclination to do anything about it.
Kevin Williamson thinks we need a boring president.
As I was lunching with a few conservative political types earlier this week, the subject turned, as it does, to the 2016 field. When the name of a highly regarded former governor came up, the judgment was unequivocal: “He’s just so . . . boring.” That was not intended as an endorsement.
It should be.
Barack Obama has been anything but boring. “May you live in exciting times” may be a fake Chinese curse, but the wisdom communicated therein is real. …
… The most boring president of the modern era probably was Dwight Eisenhower, whose administration was marked by relative peace, prosperity, and confidence in the effectiveness and integrity of our institutions. The most boring president ever surely was Calvin Coolidge, who pinched pennies and kept at his plow, more or less leaving the country free to go about its own business, which turned out to be an excellent economic program. Our most exciting recent presidents? John Kennedy, who was privately corrupt and publicly inept; Richard Nixon, who was privately corrupt and publicly corrupt; Bill Clinton, who combined the worst features of Kennedy and Nixon, adding a distasteful dose of sanctimony to the mix.
What greeted Barack Obama during his ascent was excitement that bled into reverence — it is easy to forget, with the demigod in his now diminished state, that his admirers were literally singing hymns to him. Exciting, in the same way that a head-on collision in a speeding Cadillac is exciting — it’s a shame J. G. Ballard, the poet laureate of car crashes, was not around to write about this wreck. …
One of the most disturbing trends in contemporary life is the animus towards free markets coming from parts of the Catholic Church and other organized religions. Guess who has comments? That’s right; Kevin Williamson once again.
Something strange happened in Washington last week: A panel of Catholic intellectuals and clergy, led by His Eminence Oscar Andrés Maradiaga, was convened to denounce a political philosophy under the headline “Erroneous Autonomy: The Catholic Case against Libertarianism.” The conference was mainly about free-market economics rather than libertarianism per se, and it was an excellent reminder that the hierarchy of the Church has no special grace to pronounce upon matters of specific economic organization. The best that can be said of the clergy’s corporate approach to economic thinking is that it is intellectually incoherent, which is lucky inasmuch as the depths of its illiteracy become more dramatic and destructive as it approaches coherence.
The Catholic clergy is hardly alone in this. There is something about the intellectually cloistered lives of religious professionals that prevents them from engaging in anything but the most superficial way with the 21st-century economy. Consider Tricycle, the American Buddhist review, which periodically publishes hilariously insipid economic observations — e.g., the bracingly uninformed writing of Professor Stuart Smithers of the University of Puget Sound religion department, whose review of Conscious Capitalism by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and Raj Sisodia contains within it a perfect distillation of fashionable economic antithought. Like Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga, he writes about the “structural” problems of capitalism, but gives no evidence at all that he even understands what that structure is. Unfortunately, relatively few do. …