Equality
September 19, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Steve has written about an important essay in the Atlantic by George Packer called “When the Culture War Comes for the Kids.” Packer is a liberal who first came to my attention as a fierce critic of President George W. Bush. His latest essay is, in part, an expression of dismay at the identity politics/standards-shredding orthodoxy that has overtaken New York’s public schools under Bill de Blasio. Some conservatives are
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September 17, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Last week I gave a talk at the California Club in Los Angeles that I’ll post as a podcast this week if the recording turned out decently (I haven’t had a chance to listen yet), but I opened with the old line attributed to Edna St. Vincent-Millay that “history isn’t one damn thing after another—it’s the same damn thing over and over again.” It is not a new theme here
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March 17, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Just in time for your Sunday afternoon walk in the woods or your Monday morning commute, the latest podcast! By popular demand (with some listeners anyway), this episode features another lecture from my periodic series for the William F. Buckley Program at Yale, this time on the topic of “The Endless Quest for Social Equality.” This talk ranges widely from the contentions over income inequality that Thomas Piketty’s book ignited
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March 9, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
The 1996 Olympic Games were held in Atlanta, but some of the soccer matches took place at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. I took our family to see a doubleheader — a women’s match between Brazil and Norway and a men’s match between Ghana and South Korea. The two women’s teams were among the five best in the world at that time. The two men’s teams probably would have been
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February 26, 2019 — Steven Hayward
There are days when I note that I was way ahead of the Progressive curve. For example, six years ago I mused here twice about why liberals should advocate for a wealth tax ( here and here), noting in the first post: An excise tax of 1 percent on Buffett’s assets would yield something like $350 million a year. Throw in Gates, the founders of Google, Apple, and Facebook, and the
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February 21, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Well now this is curious, and an inconvenient fact for the “abolish billionaires” movement that thrives currently in the Democratic Party. (Keep in mind that besides Robert Reich saying all billionaires cheated, AOC’s chief of staff Tweets under the handle “Every billionaire is a policy failure.”) It turns out that of the top 20 nations on the UN’s Human Development Index, nine have more billionaires per capita than the United
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January 22, 2019 — Steven Hayward
For those of you in the New Haven area, I’ll be returning to Yale on Thursday afternoon (if the airlines and weather cooperate!) for the next in my series of lectures for the William F. Buckley Program at Yale, this time on the subject “The Endless Quest for Social Equality.” The actual lecture has taken a different—and I guarantee more provocative!—direction since the description written for the early announcement below,
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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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