“Before 1882, immigration to the United States was barely regulated at all. Passports weren’t required, and 98 percent of all immigrants to Castle Garden in New York Harbor were admitted. Citizenship was not as easy to acquire, but the concept of illegal immigration did not yet exist. Almost anyone who wanted to move to America [...]
Archive for April 2010
If we would watch the sunrise we should go on burning oil.
April 28, 2010I don’t know about you, but I can’t resist mentioning a news item from today’s Times on my Blog. You may have been reading of the long controversy (going on for nine years now) over Cape Wind, on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. The plan is still after all these years to place 130 wind turbines [...]
“Will the sense of obligation meet the sense of entitlement?
April 27, 2010Our country is confronting a geometric rise in the growth of entitlements, more and more of which more and more people consider it the role of government to provide, even if the government has to go deeper and deeper into debt to do so. The very latest of the entitlements, health insurance for all, or [...]
This Land is your Land, this Land is my Land…
April 19, 2010There are things that are happening in our country. There are trends not of our own making, or rather not the result of our own planning. Should we be concerned? Should we be doing something to reverse those trends that seem to be a threat to our liberal democracy? What about this one: Should we [...]
SinisterSceptic on the Paradox of Tolerance
April 19, 2010I was about to write a post on the so-called paradox of freedom as described by Karl Popper in his, The Open Society and its Enemies, when a Google search led me to SinisterSceptic’s Blog post, The Paradox of Tolerance. Mr. SinisterSceptic had said pretty much what I wanted to say, juxtaposing Popper’s ideas with [...]
Jaime Escalante’s Example to which few have responded
April 2, 2010Andrew, it’s just not going to happen. (I’m writing this in response to Andrew Coulson’s piece in the WSJ today, Escalante Stood and Delivered. It’s Our Turn.) Andrew, “Our Turn” is just never going to be. Only a tiny few will ever respond in their turn, if at all, to Escalante’s example. Instead, what works, [...]
On the Tea Party Opposition to Obamacare and the Libertarian Opposition to Global Warming
April 2, 2010In regard to the first of these, the Senate health care reform bill, Atul Gawande writes, in the New Yorker of April 5, “The major engine of opposition remains the insistence that health-care reform is unaffordable….In 1965, health care consumed just six per cent of U.S. economic output; today, the figure is eighteen per cent. [...]
