The Young Guns #12: Legally Armed
Blue Yeti ·
April 20, 2012 at 2:34am
Ben Domenech and Emily Esfahani Smith sit in this week and it's guns, politics, sex, religion, and more sex. Also, the worst cake ever. Seriously. And we answer questions from Ricochet members. Trust us, this isn't your father's podcast.
Already a Ricochet member? You can subscribe to The Young Guns or get it on Stitcher. Everyone else, listen in below.
- Comment (14)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (3)













Comments:
Jul '11
Re: The Young Guns #12: Legally Armed
Does Eric Holder ever make villain of week?
Aug '10
Re: The Young Guns #12: Legally Armed
Given Gretchen Wilson is headlining the Otter Creek Event Center at the Black Bear Casino Resort this weekend- I find Meghan's absence from the podcast no mere coincidence.
Edited on April 20, 2012 at 5:21amRe: The Young Guns #12: Legally Armed
Love the comments on marathons, my feelings exactly.
Jan '11
Re: The Young Guns #12: Legally Armed
Nice podcast.
Dec '10
Re: The Young Guns #12: Legally Armed
I've always enjoyed the Young Guns podcast, and I think today I started getting an inkling of why. I'm well beyond the age of the "kids" on here, but my actual kids are just arriving there - my son turns 22 in a few weeks and my daughter is 18. Both of them are more conservative than me (how that happened I have no clue), but it really helps me to hear perspectives on politics and the culture from people closer to their age so that I can carry on relevant conversations with them. Thanx guys!
Oct '10
Re: The Young Guns #12: Legally Armed
I enjoyed the podcast, but was surprised that you didn’t mention the environmental lobby and the size and intrusiveness of the Sacramento bureaucracy in addition to the referendum process and the public sector unions as reasons for the decline of California. I grew up in Southern California, and worked most of my life in Silicon Valley. I am extremely sad with what has happened to the state I love. Isn’t California an example to the rest of the country of what will happen to it with the implementation of the progressive agenda? It’s a perfect illustration of a majority voting for additional benefits convinced there will always be enough “other people” to pay for them. But as Margaret Thatcher famously said, at some point you run out of rich people. Unfortunately, California is close to that point.
Nov '11
Re: The Young Guns #12: Legally Armed
Squishy Blue RINO: Given Gretchen Wilson is headlining the Otter Creek Event Center at the Black Bear Casino Resort this weekend- I find Meghan's absence from the podcast no mere coincidence. · 12 hours ago
Edited 11 hours ago
Hey, I actually live near there...how about a meet up?/
Re: The Young Guns #12: Legally Armed
A function of time only, I assure you (although I did mention the fact that we're about to implement a statewide version of cap and trade, right?). The bureaucracy is so out of control that the state government itself can't even identify how many unelected boards and commissions there are. As for the environmental lobby, one of the worst offenders is the California Coastal Commission, which may be the most anti-growth public institution in America. See this piece I wrote for City Journal for some context.
Feb '11
Re: The Young Guns #12: Legally Armed
I respectfully disagree with the Young Guns - specifically Ben (or it might have been Keith) - about our generation. I see (1) a more liberal attitude by most of my peers on social issues; and what I call a form of fiscal conservatism (2) increased skepticism of regulation.
Edited on April 21, 2012 at 2:33amMay '11
Re: The Young Guns #12: Legally Armed
Question on the Great California Exodus (the title of a recent WSJ online article seems apt): Is it not possible that many of these migrants leaving the state for economic reasons are unreformed leftists, who will simply bring their support of failed policies to other states that are less out of touch with fiscal reality? It reminds me of several news stories I've read on black Americans migrating to the south from northern states. Of course I'd like to believe that all those persons were fiscal conservatives fleeing the insanity of an overweening urban political structure that strangles growth, but election results don't bear that out. I guess I'm wondering if a state's economic policies have failed/are failing, but the citizens don't connect that failure with its root causes (Democratic party policies), can we make any progress as a conservative movement in the deep blue states? Or am I going to be stuck listening to my contemporaries field inane 99%/1%-er Occupy type arguments for the state of the economy?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304444604577340531861056966.html
http://www.wnyc.org/articles/its-free-country/2011/mar/25/african-american-migration-south/
Mar '11
Re: The Young Guns #12: Legally Armed
Precisely. Look at Colorado. Colorado will be California in 20 years, because the very same people that ruined California are moving there and demanding the same idiotic policies. This sounds nasty, but we have real proof that liberals really are like locusts out west. They've destroyed their current habitat, and are now moving on to surrounding areas. And every time, they look at their new surroundings and go "How beautiful! Now lets improve it with higher taxes, regulation, and libertine culture!"
Mar '11
Re: The Young Guns #12: Legally Armed
BTW, regarding the comment "What about Silicon Valley?"... what about it? We're moving to a distributed-talent economy anyway. You'll always have centers of industry, but they'll be smaller and less important in the future.
Look at anything Apple makes now. It has "Designed in California" on it somewhere. Well, La Dee Da. Who cares? They don't actually make anything in California now, and knowledge work can be done anywhere. This is just trying to cash in on the last vestiges of the California mystique.
Look at the open source software revolution. The code is written across the world, and the final product "assembled" on a website. Silicon Valley? The Internet is Silicon Valley now. A friend of mine works for a software startup based in Seattle, but he tells me that most of the talent lives across the country. He works, collaborates, and gets paid via remote means. He flies out to the HQ every couple of months to finalize projects, but does the vast majority of work in his home office near the campus of Auburn University in Alabama.
Unless you're building physical products, increasingly you just don't need Silicon Valleys anymore.
Mar '11
Re: The Young Guns #12: Legally Armed
Thanks Troy for the shout-out to my Members Feed post, 'The Wrong End of the Laffer Curve'
Aug '10
Re: The Young Guns #12: Legally Armed
The statistic that Mr. Domenech quoted from The Atlantic is wrong. The journal that published the underlying research article later published a follow-up showing that the finding was based on bad data.