Public policies are rarely judged by the effects they produce. They are far more often evaluated by the intentions they declare. In The Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell identifies this habit, not as a mere analytical error, but as a moral failure. Intentions have no causal power, results do.
Since the 1960s, when racial turmoil exploded in the United States, there have been reparations demands, with groups representing black Americans calling for massive wealth transfers from whites and other economically successful ethnic groups to account for black chattel slavery in the US and the policies of Jim Crow. For example, during their heyday in the 1960s, the Black Panthers in 1966 called for a number of measures, including reparations, to bring about what they saw as justice.
“There is no censorship here in Germany,” according to Steffen Meyer, a top spokesman for the German government. In reality, Germans have freedom of speech except for ideas that politicians and government contractors and nonprofit activists don’t like. Germany is providing a road map for freedom can be squashed throughout the western world.
The world would not read a takeover of Greenland as bold. It would read it as a country that has run out of better ideas.
If you happened to be a fly on the wall at a Libertarian National Convention, you might see this happen: Someone will take a microphone and ask for a point of information. Then, he will ask, “Is taxation theft?” The Chair will then answer, “Yes.” Then the convention-goers will laugh, and clap, and pass over this momentary interruption, and get back to deciding who they want to run for the positions at the head of this gang of thieves.
In recent weeks, President Trump has been getting more vocal about his intention to bring the semiautonomous Danish territory of Greenland under the control of the American federal government. A meeting was held last Wednesday between officials from the US, Greenland, and Denmark that, according to the Danish foreign minister, didn’t move the dispute any closer to a resolution.
The Supreme Court will deliberate on the legality of Trump’s effort to dismiss Fed Governor Lisa Cook.
