Wit & Whim

Everyone has a framework that they use for determining whether or not a law is good. They may not be conscious of it, or have thought through their heuristic, but like Brillat-Savarin, tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you where you stand on an issue and how you got there. For both American conservatives and progressives, the defining filter of the second half of the twentieth century right up to this moment is individualism. Self determination is the only good. The question then becomes one of utility: is the greatest threat to self-determination government overreach, or systems of power? The fed, or the corporate oligarch. One side says that a good law is one which does the least to impede the natural rights of the people. The other will say that the law needs to remove barriers to the enjoyment of human rights. Well, okay, they won't say those things, but that is back behind it. If you zoom out a little further, the one will believe that rights are negative; things you hav...

The most deeply troubling hot take I have seen increasingly from young couples, even from some people I care about, is that it is ultimately no business of anyone else whether or not one chooses to procreate. The decision to remain child free and do what is right for you is yours alone, and has no bearing on and is not the business of other people. Depending on what source you draw from, the average cost of raising a child is somewhere between 300Gs and half a million to adulthood. I think that number is a bit high, even at the low end, but I will let the experts be the experts. Although private school tuition will do its best to make a liar of me. So for my family with four beautiful little girls I will spend an extra decade of wages and countless hours of parental care to bring these children to maturity, and to raise them as contributing members of society. I will take fewer vacations. I will have fewer nice things. I will see far fewer nights of full sleep. Your end of the bargain ...

The masters of the world are born that way. Andrew Carnegie started as a bobbin boy--a poorly paid and often dangerous job. The kind of job that gets mentioned in the chapters between the triangle shirtwaist fire and Sacco and Vanzetti, but right before Upton Sinclair rides in on a white stallion. Perhaps not exactly the hunger games, but an unlikely place from which to become a notorious industrialist and philanthropist (I mean books, seriously, if he actually loved the people he would have given them healthcare).  Napoleon was a junior officer from a provincial backwater. His family were political dissidents, and thus he started his career with a dubious anti-connection: with doubts of his ultimate abject loyalty to the republic and the revolution. And yet he became the most formidable warrior king the world has ever seen. The greatest general since Sobutai. The greatest law giver since Hammurabi. The Corsican Ogre, deserving of the mythological appellation for his near supernatu...