Mr. Redlegs' Mustache Wax

I’d like to thank everyone on the right who spazzed out and started talking about the 25th Amendment, you did a great job convincing the Iranians that Trump really was crazy and probably helped our negotiators

This was one of Mancur Olson's important points in The Rise and Decline of Nations. In societies with long periods of stability, "distributional coalitions" slowly accumulate. Lawyers are his main example: they thrive on regulatory complexity, litigation, and zero-sum redistribution rather than productive innovation. The result is institutional sclerosis. Ironically, stability breeds stagnation.

What the proper historiography should be is not necessarily what the Founders believed. Caesar was an epithet to the Founders. The best Anti-Federalist essays were written under the pseudonym Brutus. If Hamilton used “Caesar” instead of “Publius” in The Federalist essays the Constitution wouldn’t have been ratified. They didn’t see the late republic as healthy and acknowledged the decline due to corruption and the loss of civic virtue, but they imputed noble intentions to those opposing Caesar and believed their goal was to restore the republic to past glory. Rome was a cautionary tale about the fragility of republics, the need for civic virtue, and the susceptibility of republics to degenerate into tyranny.

Looks like a volume worth having, especially as we approach America 250. The Founders were products of the Western tradition and they looked to its entire history — from the ancients to the Enlightenment and everything in-between — for inspiration and guidance in justifying the revolution and, later, when creating the Constitution.

Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our democracy. But right now, they’re under attack. Several Republican-controlled states have redrawn their congressional maps to give themselves an unfair advantage in the midterm elections. Now Virginia has a chance to help level the playing field. If you live in the Commonwealth, early voting begins March 6, and Election Day is on April 21. Vote YES.

The "social conservatives" were right about everything. We have been right about everything for decades. Literally everything. We told you that if you tolerate euthanasia even for the terminally ill, even for the "extreme cases," very soon it will be used to put down anyone the state deems inconvenient or burdensome. And that is exactly what has happened, just as we said it would.