Get the Ricochet app
Ricochet will work fine in a browser on your mobile devices, but for the best experience please download our app.
The whole gang is finally back together behind the bar this week, with John Yoo in the host chair skillfully leading our unruly gang in a round-robin three-subject format that we're alternating this year.
Steve leads off wondering if Gavin Newsom, and Senate Democrats, are at last having their "Sister Souljah" moment about the transgender millstone around their neck, though Steve points out that Democrats will have great difficulty pulling this off, and lays down two additional markers to judge whether Democrats will really make a serious move to the center. The underlying thesis is that the success of a political realignment is not merely changing your own party and assembling a new majority coalition, as Trump has largely accomplished, but the extent to which it compels the opposition party to change some of its core positions, as Democrats had to do after three landslide losses to Reagan and Bush in the 1980s, and the Labour Party had to do after Thatcher kept crushing them in England at the same time.
Lucretia then flags for us James Piereson's New Criterion article out Friday, "Too Many Democrats," and discuss whether faithfulness to the original intent of the Pendleton Act that set up a supposedly "neutral" civil service requires mass firings of Democrats in the bureaucracy, as well as voters waking up to the destructive incompetence of Democrat-run cities.
And this leads to John's closing segment, drawing on his Fox News article up this morning, "Supreme Court's USAID move has a surprise benefit for Trump," in which ahe argues the Supreme Court's ruling mid-week on disbursement of AID funds was not the defeat people first thought. And we also debate just how to think about Justice Amy Coney Barrett's concurrence in this decision, about which our gang is divided.
John Yoo
'Lucretia'
Steve Hayward
Discussion (5)
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
The Newsom scam exposed on the interview with Charlie Kirk, was that he claimed it was an issue of "fairness." But that allows him to twist it any way he likes. Yes, it's not "fair" for girls to compete with males, but he can claim it's MORE unfair to NOT ALLOW the males to compete with girls.
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
We've always known that the left destroys cities and education, but Lucretia's was the best explanation I have heard as to why that is. The next question is why can't more people see it? Why do they keep getting elected?
CHARTER MEMBER
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
Loved the most recent episode & the strange discussion of lobotomy. It reminded me of a favorite old joke that could be a great ongoing tag line for the Three Whiskey Happy Hour. Please feel free to use it! It goes like this:
"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."
Cheers!
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
Intros to Lucretia's favorite philosopher:
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
Municipal governments organized around democratic or technocratic forms of governance do not explicitly acknowledge the high costs of coordination. And so effective local governments are formed around patronage systems substantially dependent on corruption. The public will accept a certain amount of corruption so long as the government provides public services with an acceptable overall cost. If a political machine cannot provide effective public services at a reasonable price, then it will be supplanted by a different patronage network. The cost to fill a pothole is not the cost of the asphalt and labor of a guy with a shovel. The cost is what the public is willing to collectively pay with the difference being skimmed by the political machine in charge. If your political machine can't fill potholes, it will be replaced by one that can. The main thing is that the potholes get filled. Big city governments in the US are Dem patronage machines that disguise what they are with the rationale of leftist hyper-egalitarianism to avoid accountability. The potholes don't get filled and you're racist for believing they should be filled. Occasionally, conditions deteriorate to the point that a Republican can ascend to power through explicit democratic pathways and achieve real reform. When that happens it's surprising how simple it is to improve public services. The asphalt and labor to fill a pothole is actually pretty cheap. But contemporary Republicans don't have comparable patronage networks so it's never politically sustainable.