Chesapeake Observer

Worth Reading March 7, 2023

March 7, 2023

JDQB writes: Last weekend’s Wall Street Journal Interview was really a highly favorable summary and review of Philip Howard’s new book Public Unions vs. The People. I had not appreciated that all presidents, even the sainted FDR, opposed public unions until JFK legislated them into existence supposedly “as a payback for union support.”. The book’s author, a […]... Read More

The Supply Side of Inflation

February 21, 2023

By David Montgomery As my self-imposed deadline for this article loomed, I started asking myself what I could write about the economy that would add value to that which anyone can read daily in the Wall Street Journal. Finally a topic my colleagues and I studied several years ago came to mind: the impact of […]... Read More

Worth Reading

JDQB:

Last weekend’s Wall Street Journal Interview was a highly favorable summary and review of Philip Howard’s new book Public Unions vs. The People. I had not appreciated that all presidents, even the sainted FDR, opposed public unions until JFK legislated them into existence supposedly “as a payback for union support.”. The book’s author, a lawyer, has concluded that the public union problem has become so entrenched that it cannot be solved politically, but must be attacked through the courts as an unconstitutional limitation on the executive power to terminate employees, a proposition that has strong constitutional precedent. A link is here (paywall). I was persuaded to buy the book.

I am new to Mark Halperin, who puts out a daily email called Wide World of News. On Saturday he did a short piece on Trump’s nearly two-hour stemwinder at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee CPAC conference. Then on Sunday he did an equally short piece critiquing DeSantis’ performance in his first “major” speech, which was at the Reagan Center. The former is The Trump Machine Hums at CPAC . and the latter is Is That All There Is?. Spoiler alert: he thinks Trump did way better than expected and that DeSantis did worse than expected.

WDM:

I urge readers to ignore the title and skim through the insider-only story of the Intellectual Dark Web to get to Christopher Rufo's perceptive discussion of the need for conservatives to get beyond writing polemics about CRT and gender ideology and get down to political action. One of his points, in bare bones, is that public school curricula are and always have been set by government bureaucrats, the political bodies that appoint them, and the voters that elect them. Conservatives should not therefore be deterred by accusations of "banning books" from electing their own to run the schools and revise the curricula. The other is that those who care about these issues have no choice but to work to take over the Republican party, as there is no other route to electoral success.