Today’s Digest

The Right Kind of Bright in Your Eyes

Doug Wilson gave the commencement speech to the graduating class of New Covenant Schools. Lots of good stuff, here is a sample:

Scripture teaches us that to the pure all things are pure. To the defiled, all things are defiled. The principle can and should be extended. To the dullard all things are dull. One of the central reasons why G.K. Chesterton is such a wonderful thinker and writer is that he had the gift of making us see how extraordinary all ordinary things are. He would cock his head sideways and describe the living room from that vantage, and all of us would learn new things about a place where we had lived for years. The simpleton thinks that ordinary things are ordinary. The faux-mystic drops some acid—a weird custom you may have heard about in your history classes—in order to find out that extraordinary visions are extraordinary. But only a healthy soul can see how remarkable every unremarkable thing actually is.

Listing the Best Places Lists: Perception Versus Reality

Joel Kotkin is the most perceptive liberal in existence. He consistently grasps the truth about why Texas is doing better than the rest of the nation in job creation, and generally is a fascinating read on culture. In this article, he reviews a list of lists put together by AreaDevelopment Online. The site takes ten lists rating the best cities to do business in or work, etc., and lists the cities that receive the most mentions. Kotkin then analyses AreaDevelpment Online’s list with some great insight:

Another strange result is that New York and Houston had the same number of mentions. Yet looking at numbers — from educated migration, job growth, population increase — Houston slaughters New York. People, from the college educated on down are flocking to Houston while fleeing, in rather large numbers, from New York. One has to wonder where the rankers live and where they are coming from. Houston triumphs on performance, while New York, to a large extent, wins on perception.

A Primer on the Never-Ending Bust

Robert P. Murphy explains why we are still suffering through a prolonged recovery from the Great Recession. The bottom line is that we continue to follow the same policies and practices that got us into this mess in the first place:

Now in the standard Austrian theory of the business cycle, the question is not “How do we get out of a recession?” Rather, the question is “How do we avoid the boom?” According to the Mises-Hayek theory, the preceding boom makes the corrective bust inevitable. The goal, therefore, is not to keep the boom going, but to avoid it in the first place, rendering the bust unnecessary.

What Is Money?

This is an old piece by Frederic Bastiat explaining the problems with fiat money. Long, but good. Understanding about how the government debases our currency helps us understand the importance of holding the line of spending. Because we can’t really starve the beast as long as the government controls currency. A similar phenomenon in going on here in Texas. We adopted a budget that on paper keeps doesn’t require increased taxes or the use of the rainy day fund. However, it could well be that accomplished this only because the Legislature shifted as much as $6.8 billion ($4.5 billion in Medicaid costs and $2.3 billion in school funding) to the next biennium. The number isn’t probably that high, but it illustrates the problems with trying to get government under control. It can always use smoke and mirrors to get around things like tax limitations, prohibitions on borrowing, etc. The only way for us to deal with this is to go directly after the spending by cutting government down to size. Now, back to Bastiat, who uses a dialogue to explain about money:

F. And, tell me, are not these custom-house officers, soldiers, and vessels, these oppressive taxes, this perpetual struggle toward an impossible result, this permanent state of open or secret war with the whole world, are they not the logical and inevitable consequence of the legislators having adopted an idea that you admit is acted upon by no man who is his own master, that “wealth is money; and to increase the amount of money is to increase wealth?”

B. I grant it. Either the axiom is true, and then the legislator ought to act as I have described, although universal war should be the consequence; or it is false; and in this case men, in destroying each other, only ruin themselves.

Incurable

Ramesh Ponnuru assesses Mitt Romney’s chances of receiving the nomination with RomneyCare hanging over his head:

The early results of the Massachusetts law are not especially helpful to Romney, either. Yes, the proportion of Massachusetts residents without insurance — already small before the law — has gone down a little bit. But wait times to see a doctor remain long and premiums are still rising faster than the national average. Emergency-room visits haven’t dropped as promised. The exchanges, instead of promoting free markets, are on the verge of connecting price controls to insurance policies. The law’s popularity in the state is falling. It will, in short, be extremely hard for Romney to win his party’s nomination without solving his health-care problem. So how does he solve it? He doesn’t.

Christie’s Carbon Awakening

Another good decision by one of the top two governors in the U.S:

Governor Chris Christie announced late last week that he’s pulling New Jersey out of the 10 state Northeast Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which was designed to create a trading auction for the right to emit carbon dioxide. … The state’s bill for cap and trade has already exceeded $100 million in costs—mostly imposed on power plants and largely passed on to families and businesses. One of those businesses is Ocean Spray, of cranberry product fame, which announced in early May that it will abandon its oldest plant in Bordentown, New Jersey and build a new $120 million facility in Pennsylvania’s eastern Lehigh Valley. The move will cost New Jersey 250 jobs.