Steven Pearlstein examines the old arguments for the morality of capitalism.
Careening from debt-ceiling crisis to sequestration to a looming government shutdown, the nation is caught up in a historic debate over the proper size and role of government.
That’s certainly one way to think about it. Another is that we are caught up in a historic debate over free-market capitalism. After all, if markets were making most of us better off, regulating their own excesses, guaranteeing equal opportunity and fairly dividing the economic pie, then we wouldn’t need government to take on all the things it does. ...
The seeds of this moral defense of free markets were planted by John Locke, Adam Smith and Ludwig von Mises, but they blossomed in America in the writings of the Russian emigre Ayn Rand, whose novels “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” are mandatory reading among right-leaning intellectuals and politicians. Where Rand once saw a world divided between “producers” and “moochers,” today’s conservatives see “makers” and “takers.” Where she warned of an America about to descend into totalitarian slavery, they warn of a slide into socialist egalitarianism, special-interest kleptocracy and innovation-snuffing political correctness.
Despite the decidedly pro-conservative slant of most of the article, this is still your "read it all" historical deep thought for the day.
Jump inside for more punditry...
Bill Keller looks at the next step in drone warfare.
If you find the use of remotely piloted warrior drones troubling, imagine that the decision to kill a suspected enemy is not made by an operator in a distant control room, but by the machine itself. Imagine that an aerial robot studies the landscape below, recognizes hostile activity, calculates that there is minimal risk of collateral damage, and then, with no human in the loop, pulls the trigger. ...
If a robot bombs a school, who gets the blame: the soldier who sent the machine into the field? His commander? The manufacturer? The inventor?
Frank Bruni feels that the new pope has an opportunity to move the Church in a new direction.
...the great opportunity before Pope Francis, whose biography and style make him an ideal candidate to point the church toward a new conversation and a better focus for its spiritual energies. To have it dwell less in the bedroom, more in the soup kitchen.
It’s time for the church to stop talking so much about sex. It’s the perfect time, in fact.
It’s on matters of sexual morality that the church has lost much of its authority. And it’s on matters of sexual morality that it largely wastes its breath. By insisting on mandatory celibacy for a priesthood winnowed and sometimes warped by that, by opposing the use of contraceptives for birth control, by casting judgment on homosexuals and by decrying divorce while running something of an annulment mill, the church’s leaders have enraged and alienated Catholics whose common sense and whose experience of the real world tell them that none of that is wise, kind or necessary.
Meanwhile, in the column right next door, (I'm not giving you a link because I made a vow not to), George Will does his morning ramble on the "shaky science of gay marriage."
Which of these men do you think will better define Catholic concerns over the next decade?
Richard Rodriguez takes a look at where this pope comes from... and what we think of ourselves.
We Americans have long told ourselves that we are a God-favored people, a churchgoing, moral people. But last week when the old cardinals of Roman Catholicism looked for the future of their church, they looked south. And what we Americans heard, as if for the first time, is that the spiritual center of Christianity is in the Southern Hemisphere, not with us in the north. ...
What went unsaid on talk radio and on the floor of Congress was that were it not for Latin American immigrants, here legally and illegally, many churches in the U.S. would be as empty as Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. And not just Catholic churches.
Increasingly, as young, white Americans abandon organized religion, Latin Americans in the United States have been flocking to evangelical Protestantism. Already, in Central America and Brazil, the rate of conversion to evangelical Protestantism is such that by century's end, Latin America may be in its majority, evangelical Protestant. Already, Protestant churches are sending missionaries from Latin America north to attend to our barren souls.
Doyle McManus doesn't think the high costs of the Iraq War bought a lesson that will stick.
Ten years have passed since the United States invaded Iraq, a decision that almost everyone now ranks as one of the worst foreign policy blunders of our time. Why "almost"? Former President George W. Bush and his top aides still maintain that the invasion was a good idea, even though the premise on which the war was based — that Saddam Hussein had acquired weapons of mass destruction — proved false, and even though the ensuing war claimed the lives of more than 4,500 Americans and an estimated 127,000 Iraqis. ...
When it comes to hubris, we've been cured — at least for a while. There's nothing like a decade of grinding war to teach that invasions aren't easy and counterinsurgency isn't short. If anything, the Obama administration has overlearned the lesson, hesitating long and hard before backing even indirect military aid to insurgents in Syria.
But no lesson lasts forever. It took only 15 years after the traumatic end of the Vietnam War for the United States to launch another large-scale military expedition, the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq.
Dana Milbank attends the conservative primal scream session that is CPAC.
Usually, CPAC is a time for the movement faithful to enjoy a diet of red-meat speeches that all sound the same. But this time they also tasted the clumpy quinoa of self-doubt and the curdled soymilk of recrimination.
The only possibility that wasn’t seriously entertained by the attendees was the most obvious: that the voters aren’t buying the conservative policies Republicans have been selling. ...
Republican National Committee official Morton Blackwell assured the audience that the party’s postmortem, to be released Monday, would be a quality product. But Fox News’s Pat Caddell said the report would be a “whitewash,” and he cast blame at Mitt Romney (“single worst campaign in the history of the United States”), Romney adviser Stuart Stevens (“threw the election”), Karl Rove’s super PAC (“what a disaster”) and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (“if you can’t win, get the hell gone”). “The Republican Party,” Caddell said, “is headed the way of the Whigs.”
David Kindred thinks that whole college basketball system that brings us our annual bout of office pool madness is beyond broken.
Once, we lived for March Madness. It was the final, thrilling chapter of a winter’s tale filled with heroes, fools and other dreamers. We were pumped. What would happen next? But this season, not so much. This has been a slog through a forgettable four months. For some of us, this is March Sadness.
Perhaps unwittingly, Sports Illustrated reminded us two weeks ago that college basketball isn’t what it used to be. The magazine picked the 10 greatest players in NCAA tournament history, only one of whom had played in a Final Four in the past 33 years.
I don't know if he's right. I only know that after the way Kentucky played this year, something's definitely wrong with the world.
Leonard Pitts says that "right to counsel" thing is more like a suggestion.
It is a right we take for granted now, part of the boilerplate every TV cop rattles off to every suspect. “If you desire and cannot afford an attorney . . .” and etcetera. It is hard to imagine that such was not always the case. Perhaps you’re grateful to live in a country where even the humble poor are ensured of quality representation when they stand before the bar of justice.
Except that you don’t. Hence, the nightmare.
It turns out there is a gulf between the 1963 promise and the 2013 reality. It turns out one lawyer can be expected to try 400, 500, 600 cases a year. It turns out public defenders are so underfunded and overwhelmed it is not uncommon for a defendant to meet his attorney for the first time in court. It turns out the situation is so dire that in at least one jurisdiction a judge pressed tax attorneys and property lawyers into service in criminal court. It turns out poor people’s justice is to justice as monkey business is to business.
Depending on where you live, this problem can be even worse. When murder suspects meet their lawyers for the first time in the courtroom and attorneys first read their clients' files while the case is being introduced, it's not representation. It's just processing.
Dick Teresi interviews "resuscitation specialist" Sam Parnia over questions where "can" and "should" are often in conflict.
What is the biggest problem in bringing someone back to life?
Reversing death before the person has too much cell damage. People die under many different circumstances and under the watch of many different medical specialists. No single speciality is charged with taking and implementing all the latest advances and technology in resuscitation.