Wow, James, have you been working out?

Weirdly, this ad cheered me up.

Why did it hurt so much when I laughed?

There are so many ways in which the Federal government unconstitutionally violates the prerogatives of the states.  Couldn't they spare a bit of time and attention on those issues?

Strictly speaking, the choice is between socialism and managerialism. Neither of these ideologies finds anything objectionable in the administrative state, but thy are not the same.  Socialism is about redistribution, while managerialism is about efficiency. 

If I am going to live under the tyranny of the administrative state, I would rather be more prosperous than less.  Managerialists are also to a certain extent persuadable with arguments about effectiveness, while no socialist can change his mind without undergoing a religious conversion.

We have only these two choices because the great mass of Americans are not libertarian.  This is nothing new; Toqueville brilliantly identified the peril posed by the atomized citizen in Democracy in America, and predicted the ratchet of increasing regulations and entitlements we have witnessed. Only the Constitution stood in the way, but the Progressives deliberately undermined it, and FDR and the New Deal Supreme Court set off the charges they laid beneath its foundations. No American living today can recall life without the income tax and direct election of senators, and few lived under a breathing and robust Commerce Clause. To today's Americans, liberty is an alarming and subversive notion. We're lucky they may elect Romney.

Thanks, Bienveillant, for your thoughtful comments. If I may draw upon your experience: Do you know if the humanitarian stuff is spread evenly across the branches?  I've always thought of the Marines as particularly martial, with the Army and Navy taking on more of the "sys admin" function.  Had this been an Army commercial, I might have been less surprised.  It just somehow seemed a violation of the Marine "brand", not to mention the English language.

I'm also wondering if young people who want to alleviate suffering shouldn't be in the Peace Corps or some other humanitarian agency or NGO.  Maybe I'm old fashioned (make that "definitely" old fashioned), but I always thought the purpose of the military was to cause suffering among our enemies.  I understand that the military is apparently the only logistically competent part of the US government -- imagine the State Department trying to deliver aid, or for that matter FEMA -- but I worry about precisely the unclarity of mission that seems on display in this video.

Actually, I want to change my #5 (and Edit doesn't work on an iPad, Webmaster please note!)5. Amend the constitution to forbid all transfer payments from the Federal Government to any State, County, or City government.My previous suggestion regarding closing down cabinet departments was too tactical, and would happen anyway as a side effect of the structural changes I suggested.

1. Amend the Constitution to require that if there is to be an income tax, it be a uniform flat tax, i.e. everyone pays, and everyone pays the same percentage
2. Repeal the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, which provides for direct election of Senators
3. Restore the force of the Commerce Clause to its status as of, say, 1900
4. Amend the Constitution to eliminate administrative law by requiring that all Executive Branch regulations be approved, each on an individual vote, by Congress.  (Otherwise Congress will just vote in all regulations for a give year in one omnibus approval bill.) And yes, this is utterly unwieldy. (grins) The gap, such as it is, will be filled by the states and by private action, e.g., Underwriters Labs-style entities.
5. Eliminate the Departments of Energy, Labor, Education, and HHS, and the EPA.

Note that many of these are structural reforms, as opposed to specific policies.  I believe that many of our current difficulties arise from Progressive vandalism of the structure built by our Founders, and that positive results will and only can flow from restoration of that edifice.

@claire: Shhh!

The other side of this coin is that it trivializes the behavior of the Islamists, and makes it impossible for liberals to muster any genuine moral outrage at their behavior.  

Liberals know perfectly well that Rick Santorum is not an Islamist cleric. The accusation of "issuing fatwas" is interchangeable for them with calling him a yahoo, an idiot, not their sort of person.  Cognitively, these are all the same thing for them, so when it comes time to decide what to do about the severed fingertips and honor killings, they can't make the necessary distinctions.

This rhetoric is deeply corrosive of judgment.  When everyone is Hitler, Hitler's just a guy, you know?

Repeat after me: Vice President Santorum.

What is the point of Death in Venice? Older man develops romantic interest in adolescent boy, obsesses, fantasizes from afar, dies of cholera.  (Oops! Post-spoiler alert!) Just a novella about an old pervert, right?

The thing that most struck me about Lolita is how at the end Nabokov pulls aside the veil of Humbert's self-deception. Lolita has been so damaged by his "attentions", deeply and irrevocably, that nothing can be redeemed from this. All of his romantic obsessions are revealed as mere destructive self-indulgence. I think Nabokov plays with our doubts about this through the book, creates a certain sympathy with his "hero", until at the end he reveals that his behavior has been simply and thoroughly monstrous.  To me this is a moral point, the moral point of the novel.

It's not a great novel, but it's not decadent.

Head east on Interstate 580 from the East Bay. Smooth sailing until past Pleasanton, at which point the road turns into a potholed nightmare like something out of a post-apocalyptic scifi film. The transition is abrupt and shocking, evidence that what VDH says is true: Coastal elites are allowing the state to be hollowed out, preserving their coastal enclaves at the expense of a collapsing interior.

I imagine this is how things looked from Rome. Haven't had mail from my cousin in Gaul for a while, but it's sure dandy here!

I know that's the distinction most people have been making, but I wonder.   It is one thing to say, "If you are going to run a restaurant, it must be clean and the kitchen free of vermin."  It is another entirely to say, "If you are going to have a restaurant, you must give meals away for free if someone cannot pay." In the second case, you are being conscripted as an agent of the welfare state.

How about if the state tells you, "If you, as an individual, cook dinner, you must share it with the poor person who comes to your door"?  Not OK?  But you are doing X, where X is cooking dinner! Why can't you be forced to share?

In reading once again Professor Rahe's distinction between taxing citizens and forcing them to spend their own money at the whim of the state, which I agree is an important distinction, I wonder whether this same distinction should apply to legal persons, not just natural persons.

By its nature, the administrative state imposes thousands of mandates upon private businesses, many of which direct those entities in expending resources that are their private property.  If it is unconstitutional for the state to direct private individuals in the disposition of their money, wouldn't it also be unconstitutional to do so to any legal person?  Why should businesses be treated any differently?  For example, how can the Federal government be allowed to direct a private hospital to spend its own funds providing emergency medical care to an illegal alien who appears in its emergency room? Isn't that precisely the same sort of mandate that Obamacare imposes on natural persons?

Regulation makes private businesses the agents of the state in the same way that Obamacare conscripts individuals to serve the public good by purchasing insurance.  If the individual mandate is unconstitutional, isn't rampant progressive corporatism as well?

"Incentiviting"?