You didn't build that

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. … You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.” – Elizabeth Warren

Provocative remarks—famously repeated by President Obama during his 2012 re-election campaign and stressed by the left today—but unpersuasive.

America is losing its moral roots

For most of our history, political thought was rooted in values. But in recent years, emotion has replaced these roots. The effects of this change have been momentous.

First, it has diminished the importance of learning from the past. Why study our predecessors for insights into truth, virtue and wisdom when the heart provides these ideals? If something offends us it is wrong, and if it makes us feel good it is right. Hence the decline of value-oriented subjects such as history, ethics and logic, and the rise of emotion-oriented subjects such as women, minority, and transgender studies at our universities. Graduates are fluent in emotional mantra on oppression and inequality, but clueless on American history and moral ethics.

Why the minimum wage promotes discrimination

Despite lofty rhetoric to the contrary, minimum wage laws increase the likelihood of racial discrimination.

According to black economist Walter Williams, it is “for a number of socioeconomic reasons that white youths, more often than their black counterparts, have higher levels of educational attainment and training,” and thus tend to be higher-skilled. While reasons for this are beyond the purview of this article, interested observers can read Williams’ Race and Economics.

Do right and wrong exist?

Popular culture increasingly encourages the idea that belief in universal principles—fixed notions of good and evil, right and wrong, moral and immoral—prevents “progress” and promotes intolerance. We must be “open-minded,” we are told, and eschew such rigidity. Yet “openness,” or relativism, is a path to national suicide.

The "Trickle-Down" Zombie

The New York Times's Paul Krugman routinely decries what he calls “zombie ideas”—those that survive despite overwhelming contrary evidence. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D – Ma.) should take note. Her recent attack on conservative tax policy is one that has long lost its battle against facts.

On Wednesday, the senator averred:

The Republicans have a pretty simple philosophy: they say if those at the top have more — more power for Wall Street players to do whatever they want and more money for tax cuts than somehow they can be counted on to build the economy for everyone else. Well, we tried it for 30 years and it didn’t work. In fact the consequences were nearly catastrophic.

GUEST POST: Legal Strategies for Challenging Voter ID Laws

The following piece was contributed by Seattle attorney Jonathan Collins.

For (mostly) Republican-controlled State legislatures, the flavor of the last decade has been voter ID laws; 22 states have implemented strict identification requirements since 2003.  So, are these laws constitutional?  Like most legal questions, the answer is: “maybe.” Let’s take a look at three viable legal theories for challenging these laws.

The Equality Illusion

In The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Thomas Sowell raises questions concerning “equality” scarcely considered in our time: How is “equality” defined, and what are the costs of pursuing it?

“Equality” may be easy to define for concepts like numbers, as they have “only one dimension, magnitude (2 + 3 = 5),” Sowell notes. The same is not true for people. A confluence of various and often unquantifiable factors—intelligence, ability, beauty, geographic location, economic status, luck, among many others—forms multidimensional human beings.  Striving to level one human dimension—say, the economic—invariably results in the inequality of another dimension—the political—by transferring political power into the hands of those anointed to pursue economic equalizing. Determining how much economic inequality to trade for political inequality is arbitrary. “Equality,” it turns out, is an illusion.