With the impeachment raging, Democrats seem unaware of just how damaging the entire show is going to be for their most likely candidate going head-to-head against Trump.

In 2020, Trump’s record of accomplishments is far more impressive than most undecided and moderate voters could have imagined; candidate Trump in 2016 didn’t seem capable of moving the embassy to Jerusalem while maintaining peace, of enacting massive tax-cuts, or of passing bipartisan criminal justice reform.

Human capital is the most valuable form: money is a stand-in for real wealth, and all other forms of assets (real estate, securities, gold, etc.) need to be managed to even retain value. But human capital is what creates all other wealth, and best of all, if we leave it alone in a big petri dish, then it requires virtually no management to do its thing.

The most productive people in the world have a lot of practice creating wealth because they live in entrepreneurial places: the US, the UK, Singapore, the Netherlands, Israel, and Hong Kong. It is a big win when you can attract highly-productive resources. Which tells me that the United States should offer immigration/citizenship to every Hong Kong citizen who can pass a good English test, pledge to uphold American principles and not rely on public funds. Such a move would simultaneously bolster the United States and deeply wound China.

No, it didn’t make the nightly news, but here’s an incredible blessing for President Trump from a few days ago. “Blessed are You, our Lord, King of the universe, that You have shared part of Your glory and love and compassion with a human being who maintains the honor of every innocent person and every Jew, forever.”

When I was a young high school teacher, I had the privilege of being mentored by some truly great teachers.  One profound lesson that I probably would never have learned on my own is that no matter how engaging, clever or entertaining your presentation, students will not really take away something of value unless and until the teacher has managed to inspire them to ask the question the answer for which is what the teacher is trying to convey. The trick is to make them want to know it before you present it.  Teaching is less about the quality, truth, and beauty of the subject matter so much as creating an appetite for that truth.

If politics were simply about empirical results and quality of logic, the left would have already dried up and blown away by now.  Centrally planned economies, the destruction of institutions such as family, apocalyptic climate myths, and pretty much anything Liz Warren has concocted is utter crapola, analytically speaking. And yet, the market for demonstrably stupid ideas has never been stronger.

You can read Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman’s opening statement for his 29 October Congressional testimony here. First on Vindman, then the Interagency, then more on Vindman.

Full disclosure: I hate the fact that Vindman is in my cohort. He has to be junior to me, but he’s a Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) in the United States Army. Way to go, pogue, you just put all your LTC brethren in the position of no trust from POTUS.

Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and other progressives of that era envisioned a government of professionals. Vaguely like Plato’s philosopher kings, they would be highly educated and would spend their lives selflessly serving society, using their expertise to help the common citizens with the complexities of the modern world. A bureaucracy should be a centralized repository of knowledge, designed to help commoners with all sorts of things. And all sorts of things would have their own bureaucracies. After all, who wouldn’t benefit from some expert guidance, from time to time?

Like many progressive ideas, this sort of makes sense if you don’t think about it too much. But when this concept was actually applied in governments around the world throughout the 1900s, one catastrophe after another demonstrated the flaws inherent in such systems. It became painfully obvious to everyone except bureaucrats and academics that the world is too complex to understand and certainly too complex to manage. It also became obvious that you cannot control a creative process without destroying it, and that any organization (including government) will consider its own interests above those of its clients as it becomes more powerful. You might think that all this would create problems for today’s Democrat party. And I suppose it probably does. But I think there’s something else which has more impact. And it’s their own fault.

The study of literature and philosophy has always been an effort to understand the thinking of the greatest minds in history. But in the ’60s and ’70s, academia became more interested in clever interpretations of Plato and Shakespeare than they were in the actual thinking of Plato and Shakespeare themselves. This gradually diminished the perceived authority of the wisdom of the ancients, and elevated clever interpreters of their work, like modern academics. Academics probably thought this was a good thing, at the time.