I still don't really know what I think of the health care summit

So I'll just point you to things I've read on the subject that I liked. Like Matt Welch's post. Also, Arnold Kling.

Paul Ryan's speech was also somewhat heartening.


Weariness and stuffiness continues. In that vein, possibly the problem is that my neurons are just firing at lower than normal speed, but Internet feels dull. Does anyone have suggestions for things I should write about? Please leave in comments.

Miscellany

... because I am too tired and too sick with Pnin's cold to write anything especially coherent. I made it through the early part of the week on an adrenaline binge aimed at defeating a particular piece of bad legislation, but for naught. Now, the rush is giving out, and I'm on the point of crashing. Grrr. Well, anyway:

1)It's reassuring that my weakness for salt may be doing me less harm than I thought.

2)National juries would be awesome, except that they would deprive my fellow political junkies and me of some sense that we mattered. Then again, that might be a feature rather than a bug. (Kicks article to member of her household who actually knows something about the subject.)

3)ANCIENT HOBBITS ARE THE BEST THINGS EVER. See also.

4)Should it not be "Objectification SENDS"? Because "Objectification" is the subject there, not "women?"

There are days when I grow frustrated with the right, and then I remind myself that Montagnard liberals who put up signs really are even more annoying.

Apparently

President Obama's health care proposal would impose an excise tax on indoor tanning services. I guess taxes on services that I don't want to buy are good?

Here is Richard Epstein...

saying something that is intelligent and interesting.

Derbyshire, the American Renaissance, and "free speech culture"

John Derbyshire defends the America Renaissance movement. Oh dear. There's much here that is cringeworthy. Jews are okay because they look white! And why is it that conservative Jewish intellectuals so frequently decline to grace white supremacy groups with lecture appearances? Also, some white supremacists are actually quite cultured!

This feels awfully Libertarianism 101, but here goes nothing. Yes, the people who want to stop the American Renaissance convention should not have used death threats and other threats of violence to get their way. Yes, the sponsoring hotels had the right -- perhaps, even, the responsibility -- to call the police once they heard such threats.

But we libertarians are committed to freedom of speech when such means freedom from state action. This does not mea that a private hotel has any duty to sponsor groups it finds offensive. And similarly, private individuals and groups have every right to use moral suasion to stop private hotels from harboring groups whose views ought to be beyond the pale.

The more interesting angle to problems like the above, which Derbyshire doesn't explore: groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education occasionally publish things about the need for "free speech culture" on campus. Even private universities which aren't state actors for First Amendment purposes, they argue, ought to inculcate in their students respect for freedom of expression and dissent. In the name of creating such a "free speech culture," universities should regulate speech with a light hand even when they legally can do otherwise. I am not so sure I agree. Yes, FIRE is good at pointing to egregious cases. But universities also have had traditionally some responsibility for the moral and ethical formation of their students, a responsibility which makes it difficult for universities to act like small scale libertarian states.

Hotels, of course, are different from universities. They have no traditional responsibility to encourage respect for freedom of expression and dissent. But what role should non-academic institutions play in creating "free speech culture?" Put another way, I don't think that this hotel's actions compromise freedom in any significant way. But it may have compromised "free speech culture," which may be as problematic in a different way. Derbyshire would have done better to spin this out more clearly.

The Repogle plan to restore parity

I've written already about potential reasons to support Joe Asch '79's candidacy for Dartmouth's alumni trustee board. Recently, the Powerline guys have weighed in on reasons to vote against his opponent John Repogle.

The most interesting facet of Repogle's candidacy so far: his alternative plan to restore parity to the Board of Trustees by having each graduating class vote one of their own to the Board of Trustees. These young alums would then serve for four years apiece.

Involving more young alumni on the Board isn't necessarily an awful idea. They* have a better intuitive sense of what's going on day to day at the College than older alums do. On the other hand, young alums may have a tendency to overgeneralize from their own experiences. I had mostly positive personal experiences with the Greek system. Yet plenty of other women wrote scathing op-eds about experiences that were quite different from mine. Suppose that someone produced more systematic data showing that their more experiences were more typical than mine. I'd be inclined to try to discount it based on my biases.

Ditto my not getting exercised about long class wait lists, a fate I avoided almost entirely by studying history and art history. Again, the board would really be better off with someone who looked solely at the numbers.

Very young candidates would also likely be left on (national) political issues than would older candidates. A poll of my graduating class showed that 80% of my classmates supported Kerry, and just 5% Bush in 2004. It's true that I don't have comparable data for older alumni, and Pnin does love to point out that contrary to popular Churchillian wisdom, most people's political affiliations don't change much as they age. This is supposed to be especially true of the highly educated, meaning that we Dartmouth people should be unusually inflexible in our views.
Sill, I'd be hard pressed to imagine that older alumni could be significantly more liberal than the 80/5 liberal/conservative breakdown suggests.

Dartmouth's conservatives and libertarians have also been using the logic of collective action to our benefit. That is, most non-conservative alumni didn't (and don't) really care about trustee elections. But we do, and we show up to vote. And there are enough of us that we can win elections. But outgoing liberal seniors still do care deeply about the place that they're about to leave. They're still living and breathing Dartmouth, in a way that people twenty (or...er...five) years out simply aren't.

Frivolous concluding note: Burt's Bees, the firm that Repogle heads, does sell very nice lip gloss. But I have never had any luck with their shampoos, which leave my hair unpleasantly greasy. Those readers rich enough to afford something nicer than whatever is on sale at the drugstore, you're advised to shell out for Kiehl's instead.



*At five years out, I can't say "we" here anymore, can I?

I should probably stop writing about markets and meritocracy

... lest I bore all five of my readers to death. But see Sandy Levinson, a generally smart and thoughtful guy who here lets his passions get the better of him:

We must recognize that all public servants are, in their own ways, "heroes." The Republican Party for the past generation has systematically viewed all public servants, save for the military, as chumps, who if they had any real talent, would be working in the private sector (perhaps in Goldman Sachs, etc.).

There's much about this particular post that is... overheated... in tone. Yeah, the progressivism as cancer comment probably was not Glenn Beck's finest moment; I'm no Beck fan either. But I strongly suspect that it was just a florid metaphor, and that Beck does not really harbor any desire to exterminate progressives. As I said above, though, some of Levinson's more, uh,
temperate stuff is interesting, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt here. So I do find it telling that he would reach for a variation of the "contemporary conservatism is nothing more than warmed over Social Darwinism" trope in his moment of frustration with the right.

For the record, I proudly disclaim being a heroine in any way. (Does the grand term "public servant" apply to all government employees? Even to, say, the secretaries, janitors, and other people whose work is nearly identical to their private sector counterparts?)