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American corporations are increasingly taking sides on political issues—and it seems they’re often embracing socialist ideas rather than the free market. That’s led former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad and others to create the American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce. The group launched earlier this year to put the focus back on pro-business policies and limited […]
Why is there so much division in America, and how is our society breaking down? R.R. Reno, editor of First Things and author of “Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West,” joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the obligations of the elites, marijuana, and the future of religion […]
Conservatism has existed as a philosophy since the founding of the republic. As the country has evolved and grown, so too has the political ideology that has guided America through its toughest trials. Conservatism again stands at a possible point of evolution. Much has been said about national conservatism, both for and against. Nate Hochman, […]
Woke corporations are increasingly embracing the left’s political agenda and taking aim at the values we as conservatives cherish. So what can we do about it? Matt Peterson is cofounder of New Founding, president of New Founding Media, and host of “The Matthew Peterson Show.” He’s fighting back against woke corporations and joins “The Daily […]
If you know anything about me, you know that I will defend my conservative and constitutional principles to my last breath. Not to mindlessly advance some “right wing” agenda. But, because of history and my honest personal belief system, I am completely convinced that a society based on our great American founding principles of liberty, […]
Much has been made of grabbing the coveted youth vote. America’s future lies in her young people, so theoretically, whoever influences the young now will be in a much better position to steer the country. But politicians often seem to look at young Americans as some sort of alien species. What do they like? What […]
President Joe Biden announced Monday that the United States had killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahri in a drone strike over the weekend. Zawahri, who was an Egyptian doctor, replaced Osama bin Laden after he was killed by U.S. Navy SEALS in May 2011. He was listed as the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorist” and helped to […]
Joe Biden campaigned for president in 2020 as a practical politician with a moderate record. He promised to unite America under a Biden presidency. The former senator and vice president even said: “There will be no blue states and red states with me.” More than 18 months into the Biden administration, America is witnessing a […]
Shinzo Abe, a former prime minister of Japan, was slain Friday by an assassin at a campaign event. Abe, who was 67, served two stints as the Asian island nation’s leader, leaving office in 2020, and his legacy loomed large over Japan. The longest-serving Japanese leader’s killing sent shock waves throughout the country and across […]
In the wake of the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade and returning the issue of abortion to the American people and their local elected representatives, a gaggle of leftist district attorneys said they won’t enforce laws enacted to protect the unborn. Some of those rogue district attorneys are from pro-life states and might […]
While gas prices remain at an average of $4.80 a gallon, the Biden administration continues to promote “environmental justice” policies that Donna Jackson says are harming black Americans. “When you have someone that’s spending more than 30% of their income for gasoline and they’re making choices between whether their kids can have … food to […]
President Joe Biden’s infrastructure legislation, passed in November, 2021, undercuts consumer privacy. Buried in the legislation is a requirement that car manufacturers create a new monitoring system for cars by the year 2026. The bill requires new systems to “passively monitor” a driver’s performance to identify whether a driver is impaired.
The school year is ending. Parents who have children in the failing Providence Public School System are turning to the official school sponsored summer reading list to supplement their child’s education during the break. For many, their hope may be to find educational materials that can make up for the time lost during the pandemic, instead they will find a list of books that promotes Critical Race Theory (CRT), graphic descriptions of both giving and receiving sodomy, and abortion of the unborn… all promoted to children fourteen and up.
As we reach September 11, 2020, it seems as if the answer to the question seems to be, “As soon as you meet our demands.”
With an unusually large COVID-19 budget hit in Tiverton, the big spenders are looking for people to blame for not stopping their spending.
The toppling of statues won’t complete the neo-communist objectives, the radical restructuring of American life. But it’s not without purpose. And this is only the beginning.
The list of scandals against which left-wing insiders should have to defend themselves continues to grow, according to James Mageau.
A Tale of Two Cities at Trinity Rep achieves the status of true art such that it delivers the message we need in our times whether or not that message was intentional.
If some evil force were determined to break apart our society and increase the world’s share of misery, it might invent a concept like “non-judgmentalism.”
Senator Whitehouse’s attack on the Supreme Court shows his cynicism and malleable legal principles.
My post this morning, about the incentive for those who rely on Minnesota trees to ensure the long-term health of Minnesota forests, came right up to the edge of a much bigger topic. The most-important factor guarding humanity against the tragedy of the commons — wherein individuals use up natural resources because the incentive to preserve never outweighs the incentive to profit for any one person — is that the human beings involved think forward to the future beyond their own personal needs and desires.
As I wrote earlier, we can expect people not to poison their own well, so to speak, by destroying the resources on which they rely, but only within a certain range. If the activity (like cutting down trees) is relatively difficult and the people able or willing to do it are relatively few, it is more likely they’ll collectively recognize their long-term incentives. If something is easy to do and many people are doing it, then it is less likely that they’ll delay immediate profit for longer-term stability, because somebody else can come along and edge in.
Obviously, it also matters how far into the future the players are looking. If people are desperate to have a meal today, they’ll be more careless about the resources. The selfish, childless businessman of progressive fantasy need only preserve the resource to the extent that he can capitalize on it.
This is where the topic expands. A business owner who sees him or her self as building a multi-generational source of income will worry about critical resources indefinitely into the future.
That principle extrapolates beyond businesses, too. People who are thinking about their own children and their children’s children have a living, breathing reason to figure the future into everything they do. That is, making families and children central to personal and cultural meaning has philosophical benefits for the entire society.
This realization points an interesting light at secular progressivism, which is fundamentally anti-family in its philosophy. When progressives find it necessary to appeal to a long-term perspective for their political advocacy, as with the environment, they have to resort either to abstractions (the good of humankind) or to a religious elevation of something else (like the planet) as an object of concern in its own right.
Neither alternative can compete with the incentives that come from love of one’s children.
If we were inclined to pause and review video of incidents with an eye toward understanding why each person is doing what he or she is doing, maybe we could reduce the level of conflict in our society, but where’s the profit in that?
The rottenness of government power was used to target a political candidate as he became president, and we’re distracted by the personal rottenness his accusers decry in him.
On numerous occasions Planned Parenthood has been exposed doing things that most people would consider horrific. Each of these times it has been evident that Planned Parenthood stands not with women, but themselves, so why would any woman of good reason stand with them.
Pro-lifers from around the State came together in unprecedented fashion to defend the unborn and express opposition to radical abortion legislation.
Every year, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) revises its numbers for states’ employment statistics. Those results will be released tomorrow, but Rhode Island’s Department of Labor and Training (DLT) typically releases a limited press release the day before. As of this writing, the DLT’s Web site does not include the press release that went out to journalists and other interested subscribers.
In a word, the results are not good. The BLS revised data back to 2014, and the DLT only released round numbers back to December 2017, but in the name of informing people at Internet speed, here’s a preliminary chart comparing the revision to the originally reported numbers.
Some things to note:
For political context, I’ve marked the month that Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s first budget went into effect. Throughout most of 2018, the reported numbers were sufficiently good to open up the possibility that the governor’s policies simply had a lag in their effectiveness. Now, that seems to be less plausible.
From the time she took office, employment in the state has grown at a slower pace than it had been previously — by half. From December 2014 through December 2018, Rhode Island employment increased 0.77% per year. From the time the state hit bottom, around December 2011, through December 2014, the growth rate was 1.42% per year.
Perhaps relying on incorrect numbers, Rhode Islanders didn’t change direction with the last election. One test for the governor — and a sign of her intentions — will be whether she makes some adjustments or doubles down on her top-down, progressive, crony-capitalist approach.
I’m not sure I agree with Cal Newport’s description of the difference between blogs and social media (emphasis in original):
Blogs implement a capitalist attention market. If you want attention for your blog you have to earn it through a combination of quality, in the sense that you’re producing something valuable for your readers, and trust, in the sense that you’ve produced enough good stuff over time to establish a good reputation with the fellow bloggers whose links will help grow your audience. …
Social media, by contrast, implements a collectivist attention market, where the benefits of receiving attention are redistributed more uniformly to all users.
Not knowing Newport’s politics, I can’t say for sure, but I’d wager he’s pretty libertarian. I say that because it would explain why he doesn’t see (in my opinion) that social media isn’t collectivist (in terms of distributing the currency of attention); it’s hyper-capitalist. The owners have found a way to break down barriers so that more people can participate in the market, but one of those barriers, as Newport notes, is the requirement for quality. A collectivist attention market would give the social media platforms’ managers the ability to distribute likes, follows, and replies as they thought justified, according to their own criteria.
This analogy actually raises important questions that conservatives strive to answer in contrast to more-thoroughgoing libertarians. The higher quality and other benefits of blogs over social media represent a cultural good that was possible partly because they had barriers (to entry, to production, to audience building) that social media swept away. The conservative question is: By what mechanisms we can balance those cultural goods against the also-good principle that everybody ought to have opportunities?
The (admittedly not very satisfying) answer seems to be the same for online content as for the economy and other broader social goods. Basically, we have to remind each other of the value derived from an older way of doing things and make a deliberate effort to put aside seeming conveniences. We should also develop tools that bridge some of the gap, like using RSS feeds for information rather than social media streams. And of course, we have to make what we offer off the beaten path even more attractive.
Mostly, though, we just have to pray, and hope that less-healthy developments are fads that our society will self-correct.
I’ll provide more depth with my usual employment post and Jobs & Opportunity Index (JOI) write-up after all the data becomes available tomorrow, but at first glance, it looks like the national recovery might be stalling out in Rhode Island:
The number of employed RI residents was 539,800, an increase of 200 from the August figure of 539,600. …
The RI labor force totaled 561,900 in September 2018, down 300 from August 2018 but up 6,000 from September 2017 (555,900).
… In September, the number of Rhode Island-based jobs was unchanged from the August revised employment level of 502,100. Overall, Rhode Island’s job count is up 7,000 from September 2017.
Keep in mind that these numbers are all seasonally adjusted, so one can’t cite the end of our summer season as the reason that RI-based jobs have stagnated, employment growth has slowed, and the trend of fewer people looking for work has resumed. If this is a slowdown, then maybe Rhode Island is a leading indicator for the rest of the country, or maybe our approach to policy has become so different from that of the federal government and other states that the Ocean State is now unable to capitalize on economic growth, period.
Tangential to this topic, I’ve seen murmurs here and there blaming the Republican tax cuts for current deficit problems at the national level. Yeah, well, I kind of wonder about that:
The Treasury Department reported this week that individual income tax collections for FY 2018 totaled $1.7 trillion. That’s up $14 billion from fiscal 2017, and an all-time high. And that’s despite the fact that individual income tax rates got a significant cut this year as part of President Donald Trump’s tax reform plan. …
Other major sources of revenue climbed as well, as the overall economy revived. FICA tax collections rose by more than 3%. Excise taxes jumped 13%.
The only category that was down? Corporate income taxes, which dropped by 31%.
Overall, federal revenues came in slightly higher in FY 2018 — up 0.5%.
Spending, on the other hand, was $127 billion higher in fiscal 2018. As a result, deficits for 2018 climbed $113 billion.
The U.S. economy sits atop of the World Economic Forum’s annual global competitiveness survey for the first time since the 2007-2009 financial crisis, benefiting from a new ranking methodology this year, the Swiss body said on Tuesday.
We are the economy — you and me. Our activity is the economy. The progressive approach to economic development that Rhode Island pursues is to control what we do in a way that powerful people believe is best, which includes taxing us so the government can redistribute the wealth. Stop doing that, and our economy will soar; government revenue should be secondary.
Our education conundrum: We’ve layered too much mere stuff in the system and created too many incentives for people to advocate against reform.
Linda Langlois expresses a relatively minor and easily overcome problem that she’s experiencing courtesy of the state’s regulatory regime:
Every few years, I go online to Readers.com to order my reading glasses. For several years now, I have needed the 4.00 strength and have received my eyeglasses within a few days. So imagine my shock when my online order this week elicited this pop-up: We’re sorry, but Rhode Island restricts the sale of the following: Reading glasses with powers over +3.25.I have emailed the governor’s office but have had no reply. I searched online for Rhode Island restrictions, statutes, laws, etc., to find
Wondering what changed, I contacted Reading.com, and the company’s spokesperson directed me to the relevant statute, which forbids the sale of corrective eyeglasses or lenses “unless a licensed optometrist, physician, or optician under the laws of this state is in charge and in personal attendance at the booth, counter, or place where those articles are sold.” The exception is for “simple reading magnifying glasses,” defined as those with “over plus 3.25 diopters or equivalent magnification.” However, this statute is not new, so nothing should have changed for Ms. Langlois’s recent order.
I asked Reading.com for further explanation but have received no response. Perhaps the company only recently discovered the statute. One might reasonably wonder whether the new requirement to collect sales taxes from Rhode Island residents made the risk of unlawful sales greater than the cost of adding protections against them.
Whatever the case, this is another of the countless ways Rhode Island’s government makes life more difficult and more expensive for residents and those who want to do business with us — reducing the ability for our own businesses to innovate. It is also a fine example of the frustration that people feel. Think of the process by which this law might be changed. Consumers or out-of-state retailers would have to lobby the General Assembly and overcome the entrenched interest of licensed optometrists, physicians, and opticians. If it became a fight, politicians would have to run on campaigns to change this tiny law and then expend political capital to make it happen.
After a few experiences like this, residents can conclude that the only solution is to leave. We would all benefit, however, from the election of politicians who operate under the general principle that government oughtn’t meddle so much.