I believe Clarence Thomas said that using the commerce clause to prevent a private individual from growing marijuana for personal use would open the door to federal regulation of pot-luck dinners and sewing bees. I'm not a lawyer, so maybe that's why I find it such and fitting analogy. If he's right, then in what way has Hamilton's dire prediction not come true?  Surely the nightmare has largely come to pass, even if we haven't lost every right not guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

So if we build a plane, which is destroyed the first day it sees action, what is the effect on the GDP? My guess is that it is considered a net gain, that is, its creation is added to the GDP, and its destruction is never subtracted. Which, I think, speaks to the general usefulness, or lack thereof, of GDP numbers. During the Clinton/Bush/Greenspan/Bernanke housing bubble hundreds of billions of dollars of houses were added to the GDP, but now that those houses are worth half as much as their GDP-boosting sale price, many are rotting away unoccupied, and some are even being bulldozed, we don't go back and say, "actually the GDP numbers for 2006 were wildly inaccurate." By treating GDP numbers as meaningful regardless of what is actually created, or not created, we enable ourselves to be endlessly manipulated by the state.

In any event, Democrats have become much more liberal, and pundits define whatever happens to be the current Dem position as moderately liberal. Take the global warming scam--is the aggregate Republican position on greenhouse-gasses more conservative than it was 20 years ago? Certainly not: since many GOP have been suckered, they can only have moved left overall on the issue. It's just that now expressing cautious concern over greenhouse gasses, but not wanted to eviscerate the economy to solve it, is "conservative," and going completely nuts with a massive government power grab is the sensible, "liberal" solution. Twenty years ago "conservative" was not believing in it at all, and "liberal" was expressing concern.

It sounds like it just measures polarization. I guess it's possible that Republican legislators are more conservative now than they were 10 years ago...but it's not like they're now saying they want to, say, rollback the prescription drug benefit, or Sarbanes-Oxley, or McCain-Feingold, or any other of the liberal, big-government legislation they passed when they were dominant during the Bush years. I'm not saying there are no such issues--but none spring to mind.

I wonder how beautiful the actual hires are? Maybe there is a compensating tendency for male managers to hire the better looking female candidates from the pool presented to them, and naturally to keep potential male competitors out of the corporate tribe. Man, if we all didn't know better, you almost think that this male/female thing had something to do with mating and reproduction.

Drug usage rates:

http://www.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2k10NSDUH/2k10Results.htm#2.7

10.7% of blacks and 9.1% of whites over 12 use illegal drugs.

Arrest rates for drug offences:

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/table-43/10tbl43a.xls

66% of drug arrests are of whites. 33% are of blacks.

Whites constitute 72% of the US population, black 13%.

It's hard to see that the war on drugs is being prosecuted fairly.

Not handy. I'll post something later.

I'm not debating the goodness or badness or illegal drugs, but it seems to me that it's  a problem if two communities have the same drug usage rates, but only one suffers from constant, invasive policing as a result. Maybe it's bad that lots of white suburban kids use drugs, but if so, why don't we constantly frisk them and throw them in jail for it?

Who needs AIDS when you've got the War on Drugs, the Great Society, the Community Reinvestment Act etc? That's big government doing more harm than good. Conservatives should be for leaving well-enough alone.

No sooner had blacks rid themselves of segregation than America dreamed up "the War on Drugs" and used it as an excuse to constantly harass and incarcerate young black men for victimless crimes--this even though illegal drug usage rates are essentially the same in white and black communities. Maybe we should just leave them alone for a while and let them work out their own problems--you know, local control. We might be surprised at the results.

I guess what bothers me about Derbyshire's piece is that it seems to suggest, perhaps not intentionally, that the high crime rates among blacks and the seemingly genetic differences in intelligence between blacks and whites are related; even perhaps that blacks are genetically predisposed to criminality (I know he doesn't say that explicitly, and may not believe it.)

I'm reading a book called "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." It discusses the huge migration of blacks from the deep south to the northeast and mid-west during the twentieth century.  It points out that in the time and culture from which they came the amount of black-on-black crime was much smaller than it is now in the cities to which they moved. So that would strongly suggest that the contemporary violence in many black communities does not result from a genetic trait--a point worth emphasizing.

I think conservatives can do a lot of good exploring the evidently social factors involved in creating this high crime rate among blacks. Derbyshire's article neither illuminates nor helps to resolve that fundamental problem.

Forgive me if I've mistaken humor for an insult, but saying that the vocabulary of Shakespeare should be allowed on Ricochet is not the same as "confusing our talents with Shakespeare's."

No harm done!

Ouch! That stings! But you have a point.

I don't know personally, but if I had to guess it's because our soldiers have the sense to see that our military power is going away, soon. You all know the stats: we borrow 40% of our federal budget just to sink a little slower than we would otherwise; the baby-boomer entitlement tidal wave is coming ashore; if interest rates rise to historical norms our federal debt service payments will consume most of the federal budget; if the Fed just monetizes the debt we'll literally have hyperinflation. In twenty years our military will be a shell of what it is now. Ironically, only Ron Paul's policies would allow the nation to be economically strong enough to allow us to continue to have a global military reach (which he despises.)

Edit: ha ha--our soldiers must thing exactly like I do! Anyway, that's what I think, for what it's worth.

This is how I'm beginning to think about it:

For a long time now we've been sacrificing small government to get a robust foreign policy. I think during the eighties, with a still aggressive Soviet Union, this was the right choice. Over the years the external dangers have lessened, and the peril of large government has grown. Now the biggest threat to the United States is the federal government.  It doesn't make sense to sacrifice limited, constitutional government yet again for foreign policy. Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich don't appreciate that we are teetering on the abyss. Of course there is no hope: we are going to fall, and nothing will stop us; but at least Paul knows why.  One day he will be considered prescient.