ELSEWHERE

Hear here! "Does Ronald Reagan deserve this? Does Nancy, who has nursed her dying husband through a horribly difficult decade as he struggles in the final hours of his life, deserve what is being done to her?"

Comparing the American and the Canadian health care systems shows that the solution does not lie in more state intervention but, on the contrary, in more business-like medicine." The waiting times in socialized medicine can be shocking. For one modern diagnostic test mentioned, the wait in Canada was 150 days compared to 3 days in the USA. Pity if you had a fast-growing cancer!

There is a good article here on the mutual admiration society that existed between Messrs. A. Hitler, F.D. Roosevelt and B. Mussolini in the 1930s. It points out that the American "New Deal", Italian Fascism and German Nazism were all basically the same thing economically and to some extent in other ways too.

That would be right: "A crackdown along the U.S.-Mexico border designed to prevent terrorists from entering the United States hasn't stopped even one known militant from slipping into America since Sept. 11, an Associated Press investigation has found"

Forgive me while I laugh: "Expensively-priced organic food sold in supermarkets has been found to contain pesticide residues equal to the maximum limit legally allowed in traditional food products".

But what's the alternative? "Giving the current president a pass on his super-sized government meddling programs just because he professes to be from 'the heartland' or a 'good Christian' or for 'the American way' is no different than excusing Clinton from the fact that he treats women like garbage simply because he claims to like feminists. We should judge the tree by its fruit, and the fruit of the Bush administration has been more of the same government-run-amok that flowered under the Clinton administration."

A good review here of a very interesting new book on elites by Laura Ingraham. Excerpt: "Ingraham explains that when elites use the phrase "freedom of expression," what they really mean is that they may criticize whomever they want with impunity, but if the average American exercises the same "freedom" to criticize an elite person or organization, it becomes "censorship"." It reminds me of another very good critique of Leftist elitism.

The Wicked one has an excellent story about American misunderstanding of the British. You may have to have lived in England to get the full force of it, though.

I have just completed the first draft of a new essay on the vexed question of how closely intertwined are conservatism and Christianity. To many American Christians, the question is a no-brainer. Of course Christianity is the basis of conservatism. Such a view makes sense given the current American political scene but in basically irreligious countries like Australia and England, the scene looks very different, with few conservatives being particularly religious and most outspoken church leaders clearly favouring the Left. I argue that Christianity and conservatism are indeed thoroughly separable. See here or here

As a follow-up to my recent post on the dubious economics of higher education, I have just uploaded a chapter called "Are we overeducated" from my book Conservatism as heresy. See here (Chapter 31) or here. In it I look at the usual non-economic arguments in favour of a liberal education and show how specious they are. I conclude that taxpayer funding of college courses in the "Humanities" cannot be justified.

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