‘Republicans Didn’t Read the Bill’, and Other Possible Common Ground between Progressives and Conservatives

To our left-leaning friends currently criticizing Republicans in the House for apparently not having read the bill they just passed, a few thoughts:

1.  I agree with you!  Seriously, to that extent, shame on Republicans in Congress.  “‘I don’t think any individual has read the whole bill,’ Representative Tom Garrett of Virginia said.”  This is no way to run a republic.  We elect these men to represent us; the parliamentary work of crafting and considering bills is literally their job.  Bothering to read the thing is almost literally the least they could do.

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Even NPR Agrees: Former New Orleans Residents Better Off in Deep Red States

NPR is running stories on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.  In this story, they interviewed three people who fled New Orleans and aren’t going back.  Two out of the three have moved to among the reddest of red cities—one to Houston, Texas, the other to Salt Lake City, Utah—and couldn’t be happier.  (The third has moved to a small town in Louisiana.)

In Texas, new opportunities, and a new home:

More of the Same

Didn’t President Obama and other Democrats use to criticize the Failed Policies of the Past Eight Years?  (See, e.g., here and here.)  The more things change, the more they stay the same:  Apparently sticking with the failed policies of the past two years, by contrast, is a great idea.

The Uncolonialism

In Mark Steyn’s America Alone, he notes that relatively child-unfriendly Western nations prop themselves up to some extent through what is sometimes called “brain drain”—that is, by attracting some of the best and brightest from poorer countries to fill out the ranks of those Western nations’ doctors.  Thus the Western nations postpone the problems caused by poor birthrates and by policies that make it unattractive to go into medicine, but in so doing, they presumably further impoverish the source countries.