O’Rourke to Obama: Stop Being a Grinch!

P.J. O’Rourke has an op-ed in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, “Dear Mr. President, Zero-Sum Doesn’t Add Up.” He thanks the president for doing his job, getting bin Laden and not being Jimmy Carter, but also refuses to thank him for the variety of foreign policy and economic mistakes of his presidency.  Mostly, O’Rourke goes after …

Denzel Washington to GQ: Take Responsibility for Yourself

So, with classes over for the winter break I browsed the October edition of Gentlemen’s Quarterly (stop snickering) and found an interesting interview with Denzel Washington, one of my favorite actors. I thought his closing comment worthy of note. When asked, “If you had one thing to say to African-American readers of GQ, what would …

America’s Dwindling Crime Problem

The American Conservative just published an anti-gun article by Zach Beauchamp of Think Progress (!). Throughout the article, Beauchamp keeps repeating the figure of “32,000 deaths from gun violence per year.” I guess this is supposed to shock the reader—it certainly seems like a big number. But it would be nice to know how this number …

Calvin Coolidge, Morality and Economy

The Acton Institute has an interview with Garland S. Tucker, III the author of The High Tide of American Conservatism: Davis, Coolidge, and the 1924 Election. The book is interesting because it examines the two major nominees in the 1924 election, the last time that both parties nominated conservatives. On why modern conservatives should know …

Toward the Denationalization of Conversations

Of all the silly abstractions that politicians conjure up, I think that the idea of a “national conversation” is one of the worst. Nations cannot converse; only individual people can. And in the society that we live in, the individual people who will have the media access to lead a national conversation are not the …

The NRA vs. The Constitution

Michael Maharrey and the good folks at the Tenth Amendment Center have an excellent post responding to a bizarre and patently unconstitutional policy proposal by NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre. In a recent media event, Mr. LaPierre suggested that Congress should authorize the placement of armed police officers in every school nationwide. Of course, as …

Medicare Debate, Continued

Continuing our debate on Medicare and death panels, Jonathan Darden responds to my last arguments. He makes two points of note. First, he believes my comparison of healthcare to food is off-base, because food products are easily substitutable but, supposedly, healthcare treatments are not. You may not be able to afford the aforementioned truffle oil, but …

Civilization and Firearms: A Response to Alan Jacobs

In “Guns, Risks, and Safety,” Alan Jacobs argues against the proposal for arming school teachers to reduce the amount and magnitude of violence in public educational facilities.  Although expressing some reasonable observations concerning the problem of creating legislation in response to extreme or rare cases, and although raising some potentially valid logistical issues concerning arming …

On Guns and Military Sycophantism, the Civic Republican Response

The whole gun control issue that the Newtown tragedy has brought to the forefront of the American political conversation has, for me, coincided with some thoughts I’ve been having recently on America’s disturbing trend of military sycophantism. While these two things may seem a bit unrelated, I believe that a there is a common solution …

Bestiality and Libertarianism

Often in gay marriage debates, the question arises: If we allow gay marriage, what next? Bestiality? Conor Friersdorf—who supports gay marriage—thinks this is silly, and claims that because an animal cannot consent to sex with a human, then libertarians should not worry about the ethics of criminalizing bestiality. Here is a good reply by Samuel Goldman …

More Gun Control Emotionalism

Yesterday, I wrote that the most important thing to do in the midst of this anti-gun mania is to keep your cool, think rationally, and avoid appeals to emotion. Today, Joe Scarborough says that “Friday changed everything” and that “From this day forward, we can never be the same again.” He goes on to indicate …

Against Gun Control Hysteria

After the shooting in Colorado this past summer, Roderick Long had an important insight, which applies equally to the Connecticut shooting. Whenever there’s a violent tragedy, someone immediately starts using it as an excuse to restrict civil liberties. Many on the left understand this when it comes to the Patriot Act, but not when it …

The Second Amendment Protects Only Muskets?

The academic Left has spent a lot of time combatting the constitutional theory of originalism, which holds that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its writers’ intent. But after recent gun violence in Connecticut and Colorado, lots of liberals have started to embrace a new form of ultra-originalism, at least when it comes to the …

“Rationing Truffle Oil:” Also Known as “Buying Food”

Jonathan Darden replies to my post criticizing the fact-checking industry. I don’t want to rehash the whole debate about Sarah Palin and death panels, but in the course of his response Jonathan makes a very strange argument. He criticizes me for believing that healthcare can be rationed according to a free price system. He writes: …

The Righteous Path

Since Kelse had a music-themed post recently, I thought I would join in. I was taking a walk this afternoon when the Drive-By Truckers’ song “The Righteous Path” came up on my MP3 player. If you don’t know the song, here’s a video of the band performing it at Austin City Limits: The narrator tells …

Norway’s Libertarianish Criminal Law

The Atlantic has an article on the criminal sentencing of Anders Breivik, who went on a shooting spree last year at a Norwegian children’s camp. He received a 21 year sentence, which might seem shockingly low to an American. Breivik, after all, killed 77 people. As the article discusses, whereas American criminal law focuses on punishing …

Praise for Emory University

. . . from the Ludwig von Mises Institute! I’m happy to see my favorite source of economic and philosophical commentary praise my alma mater. The link refers to Emory’s decision to eliminate some dead-weight graduate programs. My experience has told me that, among universities, Emory’s administration shows a shocking degree of common sense. Unlike …

Music for the Obama Era

I finally finished my final exams today. Part of the silver lining of law school exams is that, because I’m sitting in front of my computer from the time I wake until the time I go to sleep, I end up finding a lot of new music to listen to while I study. As a …

Abbeville Institute: Is America Too Big?

The Abbeville Institute has launched a new video series, “Is America Too Big?” The first video is here, featuring the left-wing decentralist Kirkpatrick Sale and the inimitable Donald Livingston, a philosopher of secession who also served as my undergraduate honors thesis advisor. The Abbeville Institute is a broadly paleoconservative and paleolibertarian organization that promotes political …

Georgia Secession Poll

The USA Today ran a brief story the other day on recent polling that shows “Georgia Republicans are divided on an issue with roots in the Civil War: secession.” Set aside for a second the humorous historical error of believing that the ageless political act of breaking away from one political society to create another …

Actual Scholars vs. “Fact Checkers”

Score one for legitimate scholarship! Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy has a great takedown of one of Politifact’s recent “fact checks.” Briefly, Politifact claimed that the statement “operating an Obamacare exchange would be illegal under [several states’ state law]” is “false, because federal law supersedes state law.” As Adler points out, even though the Constitution …

Krugman on Conservative Blogging

With the final exam period approaching, there’s been a sharp drop-off in blog posts here at Beyond the GOP.  I will be back to blogging on a more regular basis in about a week and a half.  In the meantime, here’s some old insight on conservative blogging from Paul Krugman, who one of our authors …

The Constitution Really Limits Federal Power After All

In the run up to the Supreme Court’s Obamacare decision this past summer, legal academics hotly debated whether the Commerce Clause contains any kind of “limiting principle.” The orthodox, center-left position was that basically anything can be regulated under the Commerce Clause (even the non-action of not buying health insurance) as long as the government …

Someone at Barnes & Noble Has a Sense of Humor

Spotted at a recent visit to my local Barnes & Noble. (I promise that I wasn’t the one who put it there.)

Benevolent Sexism

Here’s a great point-to link from Charles Murray over at AEI. It’s the abstract for an article from the Psychology of Women Quarterly on “benevolent sexist.” Read and enjoy the combination of ridiculous academic prose and even more absurd academic reasoning. Previous research suggests that benevolent sexism is an ideology that perpetuates gender inequality. But despite …