Being a Democrat means never having to say you’re sorry. But everybody else does.

Here’s a Townhall Blog post by Greg Hengler, with a video clip of Harry Reid explaining, among other things, that it would be awful of the Republicans to do the same things Democrats have been doing to them for many years, and plan to do again next time they’re out of power.

It’s perfect Leftist logic—If you act like me, you’re an awful person.

(By the way, this is an argument every victim of abuse is extremely familiar with, which is probably one reason why I react so strongly to it.) Continue reading Don’t do as I say, or as I do →

Today is the birthday of Monty Python’s Michael Palin, born in 1943. At some point after his birth, he said, “I am not a great cook, I am not a great artist, but I love art, and I love food, so I am the perfect traveller. . . . I always wanted to be an explorer, but – it seemed I was doomed to be nothing more than a very silly person.”

Obit Magazine on Jack Kemp: “Kemp wasn’t one of a kind: The quirky and individualistic Barry Goldwater, for whom he volunteered in 1964, was his ideological forerunner. Ronald Reagan, in whose Sacramento office Kemp once worked when Reagan was California’s governor, shared his famous passion for supply-side economics: a stratagem for eternal American prosperity that involved a radical cut in taxes and – somehow or other – a government both flush with cash and raring to spend it. But Kemp was unusual in one special way: He never sacrificed any of his personal beliefs, however sound or loony, for either expediency or personal advancement.”

The article also says Kemp advocated returning to the gold standard. I wonder if that appeals to more people today with our current president’s attack on our economic stability.

What if government officials wrote novels as their primary work? If they followed the pattern they use when taxing the people and allocating that money to projects, how would they go about writing 300,000+ word fiction? They would copy-n-paste; they would plagiarize.

Our elected officials do not produce anything, not like we do. We earn money through our labor in the market. We the people produce raw materials, manufactured goods, and services in competition with each other in order to win each other’s dollars. We make our living by taking risks, developing our skills, and inviting each other to trust the quality of our work. Government officials don’t, generally speaking. Yes, the government does provide some essentials services, like a national military and the creation and enforcement of essential laws. But today’s politicians ask us to turn to them for more and more, and many of us seem to think it’s a right, noble, and virtuous for them to take what is produced from those we don’t like in order to give to us or at least those we do like.

Isn’t that the same as a writer taking from other novels to make up his own? Isn’t it close to a hack copying another work, changing the names, and altering the ending by copying the last chapter from third novel, then claiming it all as his own? That’s what government subsidies do. That what many government programs are. They take what our neighbors have produced (by force of law through taxes) and give it other neighbors and themselves. I suppose many artists support this because they believe they are entitled to their neighbor’s money. They are jealous of millionaire athletes and want the government to make them millionaires too. Perhaps if they would think of taxation as plagiarism, they would resist calling for more of it.

Ryan Sayre Patrico at First Things Blog channels a Bobbie Johnson column at The Guardian, about the secret technology Google is using to digitalize all the books in the world.