Government employees and their apologists like to lecture Americans about how “freedom isn’t free.” And indeed it isn’t. In recent years, the US military establishment has cost the American taxpayer around $700 billion per year. Thanks to the hard work of the American taxpayer, the US military — and other “defense” agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security — the US government is the most well-funded in the world.
The cliché is true: September 11, 2001, represents a defining American moment. Generation X and Millennials suddenly had their own day of infamy, just as their parents and grandparents had Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination. 9/11 marked the end of a relatively untroubled time in the US following the 1980 and 90s, and the beginning of a dark turn that continues to this day. Optimism, an enduring feature of the American psyche (rightly or wrongly identified as buncombe by Mencken) suddenly was in short supply.
Policing in America has been a contentious issue, especially since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Many different explanations have been extended as to why confrontations between the police and citizens so often become lethal: racism, poor training, availability of firearms to civilians, etc. As such, “solutions” to the problem target these issues.
Liberalism has become one of the most widely misused and abused words in the American political lexicon. It represents, some say, politically “progressive thought,” based on the goal of “social justice” through greater “distributive justice” for all.
In the wake of Sputnik I’s success on October 4, 1957, in which the USSR could stake claim to having built the first artificial earth satellite, a cosmic shift in perception took hold. Whatever advantages US society might have as measured by individual freedom, it came up short when stacked against Soviet science and technology.
Former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously counseled politicians to never let a crisis go to waste. Sadly, this week President Trump and congressional leaders of both parties showed that they have taken this advice to heart when they attached a debt ceiling increase and an extension of government spending to the over 15 billion dollars Hurricane Harvey relief bill.
The populist sentiment behind the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump, increasing skepticism of the mainstream media, distrust of higher education institutions, and similar phenomena has given rise to a worry among experts that society no longer values expertise.
In a tale of questionable historical validity, the British colonial government in early 20th century India found itself confronting a fearsome pest: cobras. Though natives had long since adjusted to uneasy coexistence with the snakes, the occupying force did not take kindly to their ubiquitous presence. Seeking their eradication, authorities devised a bounty program to financially reward anyone presenting a severed cobra tail.
On 18 August 2017, the mayor of Boston Marty Walsh announced that the city should avoid the Commons on 19 August 2017 because of white supremacists and the chances of violence at a planned free speech rally. Predictably, thousands of people showed up to protest this group based on the words of the mayor. The mayor was rather unambiguous, “The courts have made it abundantly clear. They have the right to gather, no matter how repugnant their views are.
