http://www.nationalreview.com/node/365404/print Bob Fu’s new book, God’s Double Agent, tells of his fight for Christians’ freedom in China. Pondering the plight of the people of China, one’s head can start spinning. The stories of oppression — including imprisonment and executions; citizens simply “disappearing”; dissidents undergoing torture, beatings, and intimidation; and absolute control of just about every aspect of everyday life — seem […]
“But Mr. Hannan shouldn’t be faulted for his optimism—particularly given the gravity of his book’s central argument: that the survival of democratic self-governance, individual rights and economic freedom depends largely on the choices made today by the world’s English-speaking cousins.’
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303789604579200063693919116?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecondBucket
I am reading this wonderful book…Daniel Hannan could write about 50 ways of cooking kale and it would be delightful….rsk
Years ago, when I was an American student in Edinburgh, I had a long conversation about British foreign affairs with another student—an Italian—and remember finding it slightly amusing that he kept referring to the British as “your cousins.” I had never thought much about the political and cultural ties binding the U.S. and Great Britain and was at the time more keenly aware of the differences between the two peoples than of their essential sameness. But as Daniel Hannan observes in “Inventing Freedom,” his history of the principles and institutions that have defined English-speaking nations, non-English speakers much oftener think of the U.S. and Britain as a single entity than as two countries. When French political commentators and European Union officials complain about “Anglo-Saxon” values—liberalized labor markets, low taxes—they are coming closer to the truth than Americans and Britons typically realize.
Mr. Hannan’s book is more than intellectual history; it’s also an argument and a plea. The principles of representative democracy, individual liberty and property rights aren’t the products of some general European phenomenon called “capitalism,” he says, and any belief that they are owes more to Karl Marx than to the historical record. These principles originated in pre-Norman England, were realized fully in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and spread as English speakers left the British Isles to colonize the New World, India, East Asia and Australia.
Maybe Eric Schmidt can get Merrill Newman out of Pyongyang. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304854804579236150756070232?mod=Opinion_newsreel_4 Thinking of taking a holiday in forbidden North Korea so that you can one-up your friends who spent two weeks in exotic Bhutan? The best advice: Don’t. That’s a lesson being learned the hard way by Merrill Newman, a retired executive from California who […]
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303670804579234550517363202?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
If Ronald Reagan was not a conservative, there is no modern American conservatism. But if Yuval Levin’s provocative new book, “The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right,” is correct, Reagan was anything but a conservative on what Mr. Levin regards as the most fundamental division between left and right—Burke’s and Paine’s rival conceptions of political change.
In his 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense,” Paine famously proclaimed that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Burke, whom Mr. Levin regards as the progenitor of conservatism, saw the future as inextricably linked to the past and present. Abrupt or revolutionary change begins with social destruction and ends in self-destruction. Change that improves the world is rooted in respect for the tacit wisdom of the present. A true patriot and wise politician, Burke wrote, “always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country,” a thought that Mr. Levin summarizes as “we do not have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
This brings us to Ronald Reagan, whose attitude toward change was more like Paine’s than Burke’s. Reagan often quoted Paine’s “we have it in our power” affirmation and did so in one of the most systematic statements of his creed—his acceptance speech at the 1980 Republican convention.
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/dec/3/obamacare-lotteryand-you-lose-sucker/ It is becoming increasingly obvious that some Americans will benefit from Obamacare, but most of us will lose our doctors, our hospitals, in fact our entire heath care plans because, in horseplayer parlance, there’s a sucker born every minute, and suckers are us! We gambled on the wrong man. The wrong man came up […]
http://www.timesofisrael.com/sound-and-fury-masking-true-debate-over-bedouin-resettlement/ The fiery rhetoric surrounding the Prawer-Begin resettlement plan is hiding the real needs and complicated reality of Bedouin modernization. There is nothing new in the intense interest foreigners take in the Israeli-Arab conflict. But the concentrated flurry of discussion and activism abroad over the government’s so-called Prawer-Begin plan to resettle some of the Bedouin […]
