BrianGarst.com

Nick Gillespie, “Shut Up and Shop This Turkey Day:”

As Calvin Coolidge put it famously to a bunch of newspaper editors back in 1925, “The chief business of the American people is business.” Just as you can’t have Thanksgiving without a meal that fully no one actually enjoys (and a guest list that always seems only slightly less arbitrary, resentful, and ill-mannered than the manimals in The Island of Dr. Moreau), you can’t have a functioning free-market economy without massive amounts of shopping. Every day is “Buy Nothing Day” in North Korea and look where that’s got them.

John Stossel, “Thankful for Property:”

This idea that happiness and equality lie in banding together and doing things as a commune is appealing. It’s the principle behind the Soviet Union, Medicare, the Vietnam War, Obamacare and so on. Some communal central planning is helpful, but too much is dangerous. The Pilgrims weren’t the first settlers on the East Coast of the New World to make this mistake.

John Fund, “Reid’s Law:”

Democrats say the crippling of the filibuster will make government more efficient and allow legislation to pass more easily. But there is a downside to majoritarianism and the “efficiency” it brings. As Phil Kerpen, author of the 2011 book Denying Democracy, told me: “The filibuster change will make it far more likely that major legislative accomplishments can be swept away in the next swing of the political pendulum. Public policy will be less stable and long-term business planning will be confounded.”

Jason Kuznicki, “This One Weird NPR Story about Manure Explains Our Government:”

You mean large farmers love these regulations? Of course they do! In fact, larger firms love regulations in general. And if you happen to love regulation, well, I gotta tell you – your love may or may not be well-founded. But one thing’s for sure: It’s killing the smaller, more local firms. Regulation is one of the main explanations for why corporations must be so large, so impersonal, and so powerful in our society.

Roger Pilon, “Harry Drops the Bomb:”

The Democratic hypocrisy on the subject boils down to this. After sitting on George W. Bush’s appellate court nominees during his first two years when they controlled the Senate—never even holding hearings—Democrats for the next two years, after losing the Senate in the 2002 midterm elections, conducted unprecedented filibusters of Bush’s appellate court picks—all of which ended only with the “Gang of 14” compromise in 2005. But now that the Republican minority has used that same practice—directed this session only at the latest D.C. Circuit nominees—Democrats have moved to strip it from them—and not by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, as Senate rules require, but by a simple majority. It’s heads I win, tails you lose.