The basic problem liberals have a hard time grasping: Murray is a soaked-to-the-bone libertarian. He doesn’t think the government is qualified or entitled to do much of anything. But whenever liberals hear conservatives or libertarians talk about race they automatically leap to images of Nazism or Fascism when virtually all serious or mainstream rightwing thinkers endorse, at most, benign neglect AKA colorblindness. You can take exception to such arguments, even passionate exception, but it is outrageous to suggest that Murray or Bill Bennett (remember his Freakonomics hypothetical?) or pretty much any other conservative or libertarian worthy of the label wants to use state power to oppress or eliminate minorities. It is a slanderous projection of liberal biases onto conservatives and it has been with us since the days when Herbert Spencer was demonized for being a radical liberal.
This is the same mindless jumping to conclusions that causes some people to call me a Republican, or “right winger” or “conservative,” or “neo-con.”
By the way, Jonah’s new book looks pretty interesting.
To the readers..who have written me about how I should be worried about the (in the words of one) “extremely strange” and “Scientology-level strange” beliefs of Mormons, here’s my response: In my own faith, we believe that the cause of all evil was a single mistake by human beings many millennia ago
Well, actually, replace “sincere” with disingenuous. Nonetheless, this is one of the reasons that, if I were a Republican, I’d be voting for Fred Thompson.
And I should add that I don’t actually agree with the Cuba embargo, but it’s not a huge issue for me either way.
And speaking of Huckabee, one can see why the Dems would think him the most beatable candidate. I pretty much agree with everything here. I can’t stand Huckabee, either. My nightmare is a Hillary!/Huckabee choice.
Oh, one more comment. I was listening to Dennis Miller this morning in the car on the way to the dentists, and they said “Hey, he misspoke about Mormons thinking that Jesus and the devil were brothers. He meant to say Jews.”
Lee Harris points out the fatal flaw in the argument of the “non-interventionists“:
We may agree with Ron Paul that our interventionist policy in the Middle East has led to unintended negative consequences, including even 9/11, but this admission offers us absolutely no insight into what unintended consequences his preferred policy of non-intervention would have exposed us to. It is simply a myth to believe that only interventionism yields unintended consequence, since doing nothing at all may produce the same unexpected results. If American foreign policy had followed a course of strict non-interventionism, the world would certainly be different from what it is today; but there is no obvious reason to think that it would have been better.
Lee Harris points out the fatal flaw in the argument of the “non-interventionists“:
We may agree with Ron Paul that our interventionist policy in the Middle East has led to unintended negative consequences, including even 9/11, but this admission offers us absolutely no insight into what unintended consequences his preferred policy of non-intervention would have exposed us to. It is simply a myth to believe that only interventionism yields unintended consequence, since doing nothing at all may produce the same unexpected results. If American foreign policy had followed a course of strict non-interventionism, the world would certainly be different from what it is today; but there is no obvious reason to think that it would have been better.
Lee Harris points out the fatal flaw in the argument of the “non-interventionists“:
We may agree with Ron Paul that our interventionist policy in the Middle East has led to unintended negative consequences, including even 9/11, but this admission offers us absolutely no insight into what unintended consequences his preferred policy of non-intervention would have exposed us to. It is simply a myth to believe that only interventionism yields unintended consequence, since doing nothing at all may produce the same unexpected results. If American foreign policy had followed a course of strict non-interventionism, the world would certainly be different from what it is today; but there is no obvious reason to think that it would have been better.