IN THE November 28, 2011, ISSUE
What Is Constitutional Conservatism?
Neither a populist nor a technocrat be.
Magazine
Also In This Issue
Articles
The Church of Grievance
Protest and violence are like gunpowder and explosion: It is not altogether surprising when one leads to the other. This is especially so when the protest is not the expression ...
Cristina’s Whirl
If you want to understand why Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner triumphed quite so conclusively (with 54 percent of the vote against 17 percent for her nearest challenger) in October’s ...
What’s New In Baku?
Out of the blue, I found myself invited to Baku. Azerbaijan has immense deposits of oil and natural gas, and in a blithe nouveau riche spirit chooses to put itself ...
A Hero of Us All
Last month, there were reports that Chen Guangcheng was dead. That they had at last killed him. “They”? China’s ruling Communists, who have tormented Chen for years. Other reports said, ...
The Great, Tragic Joe Frazier
‘Don’t you know I’m God?” taunted Muhammad Ali, in the first of the epic trilogy of heavyweight prizefights with Joe Frazier that defined the early 1970s. Ali even took to ...
Features
The Freeloader Myth
It began as a retort and became a fear. For years, when liberals would accuse conservatives of cutting taxes for the rich, our main argument was that low marginal tax ...
So You Want Debt Relief?
College loans are the big greasy grievance enchilada down at Zuccotti Park, but there’s other debt, too. One young woman was carrying a placard complaining of the $40,000 she owed ...
Conservative Foreign Aid
There is no softer target in GOP primaries than the United Nations and foreign-aid spending. Nonetheless, it is worth asking whether a blanket “Cut this now!” approach really makes sense, ...
Books, Arts & Manners
The Eternal Struggle
‘Keynes vs. Hayek” has turned out to be a more durable theme than could have been expected in the 1930s. As recently as the 1990s, big-time macroeconomic debates seemed to ...
Mid-Century Mind
Dwight Macdonald (1906–82) was a clamorous figure in 20th-century New York intellectual circles. Simply living here, one absorbed anecdotes about him, by osmosis: that an annoyed Trotsky said he favored ...
The Quest for Rules
There are many ways to experience the joys of overregulation, but friends tell me that one of the finest was a dinner date in Moscow circa 1986. First, you were ...
Religious Rights
This book is indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the degree to which the freedoms of religion and expression are being violated in Muslim-majority countries, and why this development has ...
The Fall
Prosperity has a thousand fathers; economic ruin is an orphan. Few liberals want to acknowledge that our Great Recession was made, in part, in Washington, D.C., by the well-meaning politicians ...
Sections
Letters
The Friedman-Durbin Amendment?
In The Week (October 31), the Editors write that the Durbin amendment’s cap on the fees that merchants pay for debit-card transactions prompted banks to “transfer the fee ...
The Week
‐ The headline above an Associated Press story on the 2012 election read, “Obama’s team banks on his ‘regular guy’ appeal.” We’re not in the habit of giving advice to ...
The 24-Hour Contempt Cycle
Americans prefer to avoid comparisons with the French lest the subject involve an area in which we could not possibly hold our own. Having already emerged as the laughingstock in ...
NSA Surveillance Transcript
Document Extract: 11.08.11
GMT 08.93
Begin Extract
UNIDENTIFIED MALE VOICE: Hello?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE VOICE #2: Who is this, please?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE VOICE: Herman? Herman Cain? This is Bill Clinton.
HERMAN CAIN: Bill Clinton? The Bill Clinton?
BILL ...
Lucky Strikes, Then Lucky Charms
The FDA wanted to put hideous pictures of dead people and gorge-jolting images of disease on cigarette packs, intending to warn us that smoking is bad for you. There’s one ...
Poetry
GHOST AND GUEST
Collapsing on a sleeping friend
Upon the couch, I fell
Sincerely sorry to offend
This guest in my “hotel.”
Our customary schedules changed,
He lay as if in pitch,
No boundaries, his form estranged
From ...
Treadmarks
Whenever I write in these pages about the corrosive effect of Big Government upon the citizenry in Britain, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere and note that this republic is fairly well ...