George Will on higher education

George Will on the higher education bubble.

Liberalism's rendezvous with regret

George Will on the redistributionist drive of liberalism.

The welfare state’s primary purpose is to subsidize the last years of Americans’ lives, and the elderly are, after a lifetime of accumulation, better off than most Americans.

Well, socialism won't work indefinitely. We know that from what we see in the current European budgetary crises. 

Is Paul a Dewey?

George Will compares Ron Paul to Thomas Dewey, Republican candidate in the 1948 election.

Can government be limited?

George Will: Is there no limit to Congress' power under the Commerce Clause?

George Will quote of the day

Quote of the Day: George Will on Obama.

George Will thinks that we are moving toward libertarianism. The real questions this summer is: "What should be the nature of the American regime? America is moving in the libertarians" direction not because they have won an argument but because government and the sectors it dominates have made themselves ludicrous. This has, however, opened minds to the libertarians" argument."

George Will on the 2012 presidential winner

George Will has narrowed it down for us. "'This is the most open scramble on the Republican side since 1940 when Wendell Willkie came out of the woodwork and swept the field,' Will said. 'I think — people are complaining this is not off to a brisk start. I think that’s wrong. I think we know with reasonable certainty that standing up there on the West front of the Capitol on Jan. 20, 2013 will be one of three people: Obama, [former Minnesota Gov. Tim] Pawlenty and [Indiana Gov. Mitch] Daniels. I think that’s it.'"

Note: No Palin, no Gingrich, no Romney. Not even Ryan.

See video here.

George Will on the Tucson tragedy.

George Will: Writing about "puritanical progressives," Will cites this quote: "Today's crusaders," [a] lawyer said, "come less from the pulpit than from university social science departments, but their goals and tactics remain the same."

Very funny. 

George Will on TSA shakedowns:

The average American has regular contact with the federal government at three points - the IRS, the post office and the TSA. Start with that fact if you are formulating a unified field theory to explain the public's current political mood.

Everyday we are losing our freedom. 

George Will, commenting on the recent election, nails it as usual: Americans rejected liberalism, which has become increasingly intrusive.

"These ideas," [economist Don] Boudreaux says, "are almost exclusively about how other people should live their lives. These are ideas about how one group of people (the politically successful) should engineer everyone else's contracts, social relations, diets, habits, and even moral sentiments." Liberalism's ideas are "about replacing an unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas . . . with a relatively paltry set of 'Big Ideas' that are politically selected, centrally imposed, and enforced by government, not by the natural give, take and compromise of the everyday interactions of millions of people."
This was the serious concern that percolated beneath the normal froth and nonsense of the elections: Is political power - are government commands and controls - superseding and suffocating the creativity of a market society's spontaneous order? On Tuesday, a rational and alarmed American majority said "yes."

George Will comments on the GM bailout. He adds this:

When Washington bailed out Chrysler in the late 1970s, Alan Greenspan, then a Wall Street consultant, said the danger was not that the rescue would fail but that it would work, thereby whetting Washington's appetite for interventions. The bailout "worked" in that the government made money from it and Chrysler survived to be rescued 30 years later by an administration that, as a wit has said, can imagine the world without the internal combustion engine but not without Chrysler.

George Will on the coming month of Thermidor for Democrats.

Wikipedia: ... [F]or historians of revolutionary movements, the term Thermidor has come to mean the phase in some revolutions when the political pendulum swings back towards something resembling a pre-revolutionary state, and power slips from the hands of the original revolutionary leadership.

George Will discusses Obama's approach to health care reform and compares him to Woodrow Wilson. It can't get much worse than that.

George Will: The president should just mail in his state of the union address. The postal service needs the business.

 Newsbusters: George Will and Robert Reich debate health care reform.

Reich, "[R]ecipients of health insurance don't know what they are buying very often. Until there are common standards, minimal standards, then people are going to be taken."
Will, "There you have the premise of this legislation and the core of today's liberalism: the American people are such dopes they can't be counted upon to buy their own insurance" (video embedded below the fold with transcript): 

George Will sums up the our current health care politics.

George Will argues that health care reform as the Democrats have created it is unconstitutional. "Would it be constitutional for the government to legislate compulsory calisthenics for all Americans? If not, why not? If it would be, in what sense does the nation still have constitutional, meaning limited, government?"

George Will's latest column is about college football and higher education, two completely separate topics. College football is big business.

Betsy's Page explains why Americans don't trust Obama's plans for health care reform, with help from George Will and Thomas Sowell.