Link(s) ‘o the Day

From Reason. Here’s the crux of it, but read the whole thing.

It is shameful that progressives are willing to throw free speech under the bus in their devotion to big government.

There is a simple way to get corporate money out of politics: get the government out of our lives and economic affairs. If government has no favors to sell, no one will spend money trying to win them.

Regarding “throwing free speech under the bus” the ACLU’s internal battle over this issue is also interesting.

“The worst thing you could do—the absolutely worst thing you could do—is transform a civil liberties organization into a liberal political organization,” Mr. Abrams, one of the most famous First Amendment lawyers in the country, told the board.

I couldn’t agree more.

Finally, a good read about Mark Twain:

Part of the difficulty of understanding Mark Twain’s political outlook is due to terminology and the tendency of politics to corrupt the meaning of everything. As often as you see him called a liberal, he is called a conservative, and sometimes both in the same breath. Critics puzzle about how one person could be champion of workers, owners, and the capitalist rich, while holding views that are antigovernment on domestic matters, antislavery, and antiwar. They often conclude that his politics are incoherent.

* * *

Twain was born as Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, when the meaning of liberalism was less ambiguous. To be liberal was to favor free enterprise and property rights, oppose slavery, reject old-world caste systems, loathe war, be generally disposed toward free trade and cosmopolitanism, favor the social advance of women, favor technological progress — and to possess a grave skepticism toward government management of anything.

* * *

The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble … and there is great danger that our people will lose that independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked … and, in time, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise.

Socio-Political