In 2021 the United States Postal Service booked a $4.9 billion net loss. The USPS also reports that it has more than $120 billion in unfunded liabilities in pensions, retiree health benefits and other debts. To conserve cash, the agency has quit making payments on some of these obligations, and its perennial deficits likely portend […]
Review: Dan Briody, The Iron Triangle: I...
I got this book (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2003) from a friend many years ago, but it sat on my shelf unread. Recently, I was thinking about this late friend and decided it was past time to crack The Iron Triangle. I study governance for a living, and I like investigative journalism and efforts […]
The perils of “doing something”
Fifty years ago, Edward C. Banfield published The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis at a time much like our own, with poverty, crime, and racial unrest seemingly ascendant. It was also a time in which both Left and Right engaged in a great deal of hyperbolic commentary about these problems—a tendency Banfield’s […]
A Book You Cannot Trust: Robert N. Winte...
On June 8, 1960, the New York State attorney general Louis J. Lefkowitz enjoined Winter-Berger from the securities market. Why? Because Winter-Berger had defrauded folks by peddling non-existent stock to rich folks, to whom he passed himself off as a “prominent socialite.” The corporation and the miracle product he described did not exist. He made […]
First Among Equals: How George Washingto...
George Washington was born to middling stock in Virginia in 1732. He was a “conventional Virginia provincial” whose world had a stable social order and agrarian political economy. A planter class led this stratified society. These gentlemen dressed, spoke, and behaved differently from others, and their mores owed much to the English motherland and to […]
Lefties Who Moved Right
I very much enjoyed reading the Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century (Simon & Schuster, 2016), which details the movement of six very different individuals from the political left to the political right. The book’s subjects are Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Ronald Reagan, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and […]
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