Equality
November 24, 2018 — Steven Hayward
With all of the holiday commotion I have neglected to put up notice here of my final visit to Yale for this semester, this Tuesday at 4:30, in the same location as before (WLH 207, 100 Wall Street). Sponsored by the William F. Buckley Program, I’ll be giving a lecture on the topic of equality. I’m going to begin with the droll opening line from Peter deVries’s novel The Prick
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November 20, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Years ago a friend who signed on with a large prestigious law firm recounted how one of his first orientation sessions was “sensitivity training” (the precursor to “diversity” workshops today) with regard to ethnicity and sexual orientation. Back in those innocent days it consisted largely in an inventory of terms and phrases that you might not be aware are pejorative or insulting to minorities. To which my pal said, “I learned
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January 29, 2018 — Steven Hayward
This week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine offers up a long, sumptuous feature about high-end private jets. It’s great fun if you like to ogle the perks of the top 0.0001 percent. You almost expect to hear the theme song of that gaudy old TV show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous playing the background while you read along. It really is airplane porn. The story focuses on the premier
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September 12, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Ta-Nehesi Coates has a new essay out about Trump that is generating a lot of buzz, entitled “The First White President.” Here are a couple of excerpts about what he has to say about Trump: He is preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He is ready and willing at any time during the first year of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice
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March 10, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
I have argued that “social justice” is a nonsensical term. Justice has always been understood in our tradition as justice for the individual, qua individual. When a person goes to court, either in a criminal or a civil case, our system strives to provide him with a result that is fair given what he has done or failed to do. This is what we understand justice to be. Thus, when
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February 4, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
I’ve found that big corporations sometimes respond to sustained attacks and bad publicity by trying to establish their liberal bona fides. They might launch an aggressive affirmative action program for hiring and/or for the selection of vendors (such as outside legal counsel). Or they might embrace a big liberal agenda item such as criminal justice reform. The idea is to show that they’re really not bad guys after all. Or
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October 20, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
What happens when “women become men” at Wellesley College, which has always been, and purports to remain, an all women’s school? The New York Times Magazine took up the question this week in its Sunday magazine. It’s a question the Wellesley administration could reasonably be expected to have answered already. After all, the existence of transgendered students at women’s colleges is no secret. For those of you who haven’t been
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July 2, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post reports that the average male employed at President Obama’s White House earns significantly more than the average female. The average male makes $88,600 per year; the average female makes $78,400. According to the Post, the gap exists not just in low and mid-level jobs, but also among those who work at the highest echelons of the White House. The “pay gap” is, of course, a staple “war
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May 24, 2014 — John Hinderaker
French economist Thomas Piketty is the darling of the international Left. His book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, argues that in a free economy, wealth is inexorably concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. He credits (!) the two world wars and the Great Depression with temporarily interrupting this process and giving rise to more equality, but now, he says, concentration of wealth has resumed in both Europe and America. Piketty
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May 19, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
In Coconuts, the Marx Brothers’ first movie, the bellhops at Groucho’s Florida hotel demand their wages. Groucho asks them whether they want to be “wage slaves.” When they answer in the negative, Groucho replies: “No, of course not. But what makes wage slaves? Wages!” Wages make slaves out of many of us, and it’s reasonable for low earners to obsess over them. But high earners are a different story. For
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January 28, 2014 — Steven Hayward
Fred Barnes reminds us in the Wall Street Journal this morning that opposition party responses to State of the Union speeches typically fall flat, and gently chides Republicans for having little imagination to try anything different. One idea might be suggested by Bret Stephens’ column today, which extrapolates from Kurt Vonnegut’s famous short story “Harrison Bergeron.” If you don’t know the story, Stephens helpfully provides Vonnegut’s self-explanatory opening: The year
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