Lessons for an Anti-Establishment Movement

Daniel McCarthy at The American Conservative's blog has an interesting post on the pro-life movement 37 years after Roe v. Wade. Despite some obvious discrepancies between mainstream pro-lifers and libertarians, I have never believed that the two must be as antagonistic as many "economically conservative, socially liberal" Libertarian Party members would indicate. And the problems that McCarthy points out are important ones for any anti-establishment, minority movement (including our own) to consider:

The right-to-life movement has been impaled on the horns of a dilemma for 37 years. Republican politicians and conservative movement hacks have long wanted pro-lifers to keep their mouths shut and loyally vote for the party that throws them table scraps. Pro-lifers who want to be realistic think they have to settle for this, even to the point, apparently, of valorizing the pro-Roe Scott Brown. The pro-lifers who commit themselves to principle over partisanship, on the other hand, all too often run down the blind alleys of third-party politics (which isn't politics at all, but is to politics what "Dungeons and Dragons" is to medieval history) and New Left-style protest theater. (The March for Life itself, of course, is modeled on the civil-rights and antiwar marches of the 1960s, whose successes are vastly exaggerated - if marches could end wars, we wouldn't be in Iraq today.)

Read more here

Is inflation coming?

Despite the fact that the monetary base has nearly doubled in the last year, we don't seem to be suffering from obvious excess inflation...at least not yet. But is it coming?
Read more here

The Tom Sawyer Model of Virtue

The American Conservative discusses the implications of the GIVE Act, as well as the existent program it addresses, AmeriCorps:

In 2003, the Office of Management and Budget concluded that “AmeriCorps has not been able to demonstrate results.

Read more here

United States of Argentina

Phillip Jenkins pens a telling consideration of the similarities between the U.S.'s current course of economic policy and the one which progressively ruined the Argentinian economy over the last century.  While it is almost inconceivable to imagine an American economic downfall to the level of Zimbabwe, for example, Argentina's "story involves a flourishing Western country with a large middle class that nevertheless managed to spend its way into banana-republic status by means very similar to those now being proposed in Washington." "
Read more here