Even if it could be proved that judges who are making rulings that go counter to the written law produce better results in those particular cases than following the letter of the law would have, that does not make society better off. When laws become unreliable and judges unpredictable, lawsuits become a bonanza for charlatans, who can force honest people to settle out of court, for fear of what some judge might do.
* The mainstream media never expressed half the outrage about Mao Zedong as they did about Ronald Reagan. Yet, when it came to killing millions of innocent civilians, even Hitler was an amateur compared to Mao.
* The Obama administration seems to be following what might be called “the Detroit pattern”– increasing taxes, harassing businesses and pandering to unions. In the short run, it got mayors re-elected. In the long-run, it reduced Detroit from a thriving city to an economic disaster area, whose population was cut in half, as its most productive citizens fled.
* Safety advocates who say that we shouldn’t take chances, but should ban things that might be unsafe, don’t seem to understand that if we banned every food to which somebody had an allergy we could all starve to death.
* Intolerance may not promote progress but it can promote survival. An intolerant Islamic world may outlast the Western world that seems ready to tolerate anything, including the undermining of its own fundamental values and threats to its continued existence.
* The vocabulary of the political left is fascinating. For example, it is considered to be “materialistic” and “greedy” to want to keep what you have earned. But it is “idealistic” to want to take away what someone else has earned and spend it for your own political benefit or to feel good about yourself.