Author: Tim Kowal

/// April 15, 2013

Gosnell and our inadequate public discourse on abortion

Tim Carney wrote yesterday that when Obama was a state senator, he “repeatedly voted against legislation requiring hospitals to care for babies born during abortions” because “[s]uch laws might somehow be used in the future to infringe on abortion’s legality.” Carney argues that “Gosnell’s method for aborting babies wasn’t substantially different from a procedure Obama enthusiastically defends.” Today, the White House has no comment on Gosnell, noting that it concerns on an ongoing legal matter. A totally valid response—is what […]

/// January 3, 2013

The Doomsday Provision

Note: This post is part of our League Symposium on Guns In America. You can read the introductory post for the Symposium here. To see a list of all posts in the Symposium so...

/// September 17, 2012

American Process and Its “Occasional Services to Liberalism”

Liberals endure much teasing for their inability to articulate just what liberalism means. Even their best and brightest flounder at the task. “[T]here is something deep within liberalism,” Michael Tomasky attempts, “that prevents it...

/// September 14, 2012

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/// September 12, 2012

Waxing Un-American

Conor Williams is exasperated and disappointed with the response to his criticism of conservatives criticizing Progressivism. I’ll excuse his missing my comments, set forth below, which answer his criticism directly. But on re-reading Conor’s...

/// August 11, 2012

Liberal Democracy Is Not Too Big to Fail

Note: This post is part of our League Symposium on Democracy. You can read the introductory post for the Symposium here. To see a list of all posts in the Symposium so far, click here. Three...

/// July 20, 2012

Somebody else made that happen—and he’s here to collect

The President has been insisting for some time now that those who earn more than $250,000 a year are not paying their “fair share.” One must assume that the President is aware that these...

/// June 12, 2012

Initial Thoughts on Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality

Note: This post is part of our League Symposium on inequality. You can read the introductory post for the Symposium here. To see a list of all posts in the Symposium so far, click...

/// May 24, 2012

“College is not for everybody”

A caller on NPR’s Talk of the Nation offered a very interesting story about whether a college degree is a sound investment. Note the reflexive defense from Kathleen Shea Smith, a student counselor who...

/// May 21, 2012

Presuppositional Constitutionalism

Does the Constitution assume certain presuppositions on the part of those it means to govern? If so, what are those presuppositions? I submit the answer to the first question is yes, and explain the...

/// May 5, 2012

Stimulus first, austerity later

Via Alex Tabarrok, a recent study by Richard Evans, Laurence Kotiloff, and Kerk Philips at VoxEU examines the effects of long-term large-scale redistribution of young Americans’ savings to the elderly: [T]he young, because they...

/// March 14, 2012

New ADA Guidelines Expose Pool Operators to Private Lawsuits

On Jan. 31 of this year, DOJ granted the pool industry’s call for a clarification: But it was not the answer they wanted. All 300,000 public pools in the United States must install a permanent fixed lift. The deadline for compliance is tomorrow, March 15. Call it “Poolmageddon.”

/// March 7, 2012

The World American Dysfunction Made

Military policy is one of those subjects that requires certain bona fides to discuss them with any level of sophistication. It crosses history, sociology, military history and strategy, each of which is a serious...

/// February 11, 2012

Pondering Positive Rights

In light of some of the responses to the League’s constitutional convention, I’ve been doing some thinking on the subject of so-called positive rights and want to take the pulse of readers here. To...

/// February 6, 2012

Our Unlovable Constitution

A new study by David S. Law and Mila Versteeg concludes that the world’s democracies are no longer emulating the U.S. Constitution, and are instead resorting to other templates that guarantee more “generic building...

/// January 14, 2012

No, Americans are not “operationally liberal”

Responding to my demurrer to “the old saw that Americans are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal,” Yeggmen sticks up for the saw: what researchers have (repeatedly) done is get a bunch of people together...

/// December 19, 2011

Under Siege: How Government Centralization and Expansion Puts Democracy in the Service of Special Interests

In its first full year of business in 1998, the 99 Cents Only store in the north Los Angeles city of Lancaster did over $5 million in sales. This was welcome news to the...

The Final Revival of Opal and Nev

/// October 30, 2011

Can the Occupy Movement Tackle Crony Capitalism?

In a comment on Shawn Gude’s previous post on the main page about the Occupy movement, I asked who the “1%” is and whether Occupy protesters were primarily aggrieved about “Wall Street,” or whether...

/// September 28, 2011

Affirmative Action and Equality, Cont’d

I would be remiss to leave the recent discussions on affirmative action and equality without citing Frederick Douglass’s moral argument against affirmative action made in 1865 to a group of abolitionists: “[I]n regard to...

/// September 27, 2011

California Legislature Proposes Racial Discrimination in University Admissions Policy

Via Pacific Legal Foundation, the California Legislature recently passed a bill, SB 185, that would require the state’s public universities to discriminate on the basis of race and gender in their admissions policies. Here’s...

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