Why Mark Steyn Is No Longer with National Review

Mark Steyn remarked this week en passant,

In 2013 I bust up with National Review, for various reasons, some of which I’m not at liberty to disclose but all of which fall broadly under the banner of free speech. I’m very big on that. It’s my core issue.

It’s as perhaps as explicit an acknowledgement as we’re likely to get (from any of the parties involved) that the split was partly over litigation strategy, and partly over the fruit cordial.

Why the Welfare State Seems like a Good Idea; Trump; Roosevelt; Gingrich

Robert Tracinski explains a structural problem with (and leading to) Obamacare, and the welfare state generally:

. . . when the government bestows its largess, we tend [to] see only the benefits coming down from above: there are press releases and newspaper articles and a lady writes an op-ed in the LA Times. What we don’t see is where that money came from and who it came from, and what else we might have done with that money.  

Not Inevitable

In the July 4th issue of National Review (page 18), Kevin D. Williamson has a piece that’s informative and also pretty funny (perhaps he hopes to be the next Mark Steyn?), describing how Canada overindulged in deficit spending for decades, but then sobered up in response to fiscal crisis in the ’90s, and has kept deficit spending under control ever since. 

More on Texas’s New Loser-pays Law

A couple of weeks ago, I was surprised and pleased to learn that Texas had adopted a “loser pays” reform of their legal system—surprised because such a reform is basically good for everyone else but bad for lawyers, and I figured that lawyers would never let it happen.  In the comments on that entry, we discussed the pros and cons of different possible variations on loser-pays laws.

National Review (July 4th, page 10) now gives us some details about the particular law Texas has passed; it’s a modest change to the system, impeccably sensible: 

Contraceptives

Apparently the Pill makes men and women like each other less.  Also, apparently, condoms make women more depressed.

Sometimes I wonder whether the Catholic Church hasn’t been right about contraceptives all along.

Incidentally, political correctness makes it difficult even to talk about such questions.  The Wall Street Journal writer, at that first link, feels compelled to assure readers,

Starting to Paddle Back from the Cliff

Republican House speaker John Boehner and Democrat Senate majority leader Harry Reid appear to have reached a final deal on this year’s budget.

If you’re just joining us, the Democrats didn’t pass a budget last year for this fiscal year (October 2010 to September 2011), possibly because they could already see the rising tide of public sentiment against government spending and thought passing any kind of Democrat budget would only hurt them even further in last November’s elections. 

Postscript on Civility

Two months ago, someone shot a lot of people at an event in Tucson, Arizona, including Congressman Gabrielle Giffords.  Six of those people died; many others were injured.  Liberals argued that conservatives (e.g., radio-talk-show hosts) participate in the great national debate a little bit too boisterously, and that eruptions of such violence are a natural result of that debate (i.e., a natural result of what I think Mark Steyn has called the rough and tumble of a free society).  Liberals talked about the need for “civility” in the national discourse, ambiguously attempting to deligitimize debate.

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.

Great Minds Think Alike?

(Well, no, that doesn’t actually seem appropriate.)

I got the current issue of National Review in the mail yesterday, and I was surprised to learn that someone else had also been writing about repealing the Seventeenth Amendment (requires subscription). 

To the Death

I recently read a very interesting article in National Review: “Ban the Burqa”, by Claire Berlinski.  Don’t assume that you’ll disagree just based on the title; in the print magazine, the piece bore the arresting subtitle “To do so is an offense to liberty; not to do so is a greater one”.  I recommend it.  It’s food for thought.