National Review made the bold decision to embrace Apple’s subscription service and offer its product in on a new media platform. It’s not a completely independent edition of the venerable publication – in fact, it’s simply a high-quality PDF of the printed version – but it is in no way dependent on outdated models of publishing. Unlike The New York Times, let’s say, which has built its cost structure to incentivize users to subscribe to its print edition ($8.75 a week for unlimited digital subscribers vs. $7.40 a week for home delivered print AND unlimited digital) , National Review has embraced the benefits of digital publishing and distribution, and is giving its readers every reason to do the same. A one-year digital subscription costs $19.99, as opposed to a $29.50 print subscription, or nearly $120 for twenty-four individually purchased issues. (For comparison, NYT digital costs $1.25 per digital edition, while NR costs 83¢. NYT with print costs $1.05 per issue. Not trying to compare NYT and NR by content, but rather the ways they are using pricing to incentivize digital subscriber behavior.)  Even better, by using Apple’s subscription service, National Review allowed me to opt out of sharing my personal data. That means that I won’t be sold as a product to any cause that wants to send me their mail (or more accurately, send my trashcan their mail). That’s something that would be worth paying more for – and I’m paying less for it.

This is my first experience with Apple’s subscription system. It took less than a minute to do. I don’t know if National Review is going to make enough through this process to justify shifting more of its resources to digital, but if there are more users like me out there to whom the ease of the process and the lowered price makes a difference, then the publisher has a good chance of making up in volume what it gave up in price. And that’s a very good thing for National Review, for Apple, for the future of publishing, and for users like me.

There is a sizable contingent that believes the surest way to increase the quality of education in American schools is to increase teacher salaries. The thinking goes that if a teacher’s pay is on the same scale as a lawyer’s or a doctor’s, then a greater percentage of intelligent, capable people with gravitate to the field and students will be the beneficiaries.

With all due respect to the fine men and women who are genuinely gifted educators (and I was lucky enough to learn from a couple myself), this notion fundamentally misunderstands the forces already at work to determine teacher’s salaries and misjudges the relationship between a good teacher and good students. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that students, parents, schools, and governments across the country have no idea what a good teacher is actually worth, or even what constitutes a good teacher to begin with.

Some will contend that a good teacher is invaluable. Ridiculous. Any individual who trades a skill or commodity in a marketplace has a value determined by the rarity of the skill or commodity and the desire of the potential customer – in short, by supply and demand. Determining that value is far more difficult when outside forces interfere with the functions of the market. In this instance, the primary culprits are teachers’ unions, whose primary motivation for decades has been to secure greater pay and benefits for their members, even at the expense of school districts’ budgets. By artificially driving up prices across the board, rather than allowing the market to determine the value of each individual educator, teachers’ unions are interfering with the only mechanism truly capable of identifying what good educators are worth.

The qualifier “good” is particularly important in this case, as a more market-like system would inevitably result in some teachers receiving significantly higher compensation than others, even within the same school. Unions would cry foul, of course, but this is how individuals’ value is determined in every other sector of the American economy. Everyone brings a certain set of competencies and experience to the table, and they are compensated accordingly by organizations that can benefit from the application of those competencies. Why should educators be any different? And if the market were allowed to determine the value of a good teacher, and if compensation reflected this value, then the result would be not only a wider range of salary between good and bad teachers, but also a greater incentive for bad teachers to improve themselves, and for good teachers to maintain a high level of performance. It would be as if they were – gasp! – employees!

I believe that the market is the only tool that can properly determine the value of a good teacher, with one condition: we must determine what constitutes a good teacher. This, I believe, is the single biggest challenge facing the American education system, and one few people seem to ready to acknowledge. In a country of 300 million people in vastly different economic and social situations, how does one establish a baseline for what an educator should be? Test scores are insufficient – tests are easy to game, easy to teach to, and reflect neither creativity nor lateral thinking (with a few exceptions). Nor can we rely on intangibles – teachers who will make students feel good, who “inspire” them, Dead Poets’ Society-style, but without corresponding results.

Ignoring the irony of a YouTube video bringing down the heads of one of America’s great establishment media organizations, I have trouble believing this will have a great long-term impact on the way NPR is run. NPR’s bias is not the result of the Schillers’ influence, and their departure will not result in a profound shift in ideology. The truth is that NPR will always lean left. NPR produces news coverage favorable to liberals because it knows that if elected, liberals will protect NPR funding. By the same token, liberals protect NPR funding because NPR produces coverage favorable to liberals, thus increasing their chances of being elected. It’s an obvious conflict of interest, far more so than corporate funding of private news organizations. Consumers at least have an impact on the financial success or failure of private news firms. They exert no such control over publicly-funded entities like NPR.

So while it’s refreshing to see the Schillers given the boot, it’s hard to imagine that we’ll suddenly be treated to fair and balanced news coverage. For NPR, there’s simply too much at stake to go down that road.

I expect that over the next two or three days, we’ll see yet another pivot along the lines of [...] “Conservative commentators need to be banned from the airwaves so that their vile proclamations can’t poison the minds of sane, forward-thinking people.”

I knew I could count on you, James Clyburn:

The shooting is cause for the country to rethink parameters on free speech, Clyburn said from his office, just blocks from the South Carolina Statehouse. He wants standards put in place to guarantee balanced media coverage with a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, in addition to calling on elected officials and media pundits to use ‘better judgment.’

Looking at the publication date on that post (January 10th), it seems that this pivot was ahead of schedule. Sigh…

Credit where credit’s due, though: the President implicitly called out members of his own party last night by rejecting the correlation between political rhetoric and the actions of a madman:

And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let’s remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy – it did not – but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud.

Well said.

There has been no shortage of individuals and institutions that have sought to capitalize on the shootings in Tucson. Add Vermont senator Bernie Sanders to that list.

This afternoon Sanders sent out a fundraising appeal, seeking to raise money to fight Republicans and other “right-wing reactionaries” responsible for the climate that led to the shooting

Having lived in Vermont when Sanders was elected and seen up-close the kind of Senator he is, this is sadly unsurprising.

Second meme: “Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and conservative commentators had a strong direct influence on the right-wing nut who pulled the trigger.”

Third meme: “Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and conservative commentators are responsible for creating a climate of hate that inspires acts of violence against public servants.”

I expect that over the next two or three days, we’ll see yet another pivot along the lines of “Sarah Palin’s very existence is akin to a cry for violent revolution against elected officials” or “The Tea Party should be outlawed so as to bring some civility again to American politics” or “Conservative commentators need to be banned from the airwaves so that their vile proclamations can’t poison the minds of sane, forward-thinking people.” Think I’m exaggerating? When prominent Democrats are referring to the murders in Arizona as “an opportunity to [...]  build a closer emotional connection with the middle of the electorate” and a chance to “deftly pin this on the tea partiers,” hyperbole becomes more and more difficult to measure.

There are two propaganda efforts that the professional Left is attempting to ingrain in the public conscious. The first is that there is a causal relationship between the political rhetoric of prominent right-wing figures and the attempted assassination of a sitting Congresswoman by a psychotic who cites “Mein Kampf” and “The Communist Manifesto” as two of his favorite works. The second is that the American right is solely responsible for creating a “climate of hate” in which violent political rhetoric overcomes civility, while the Left is forever the sane voice in an increasingly-insane world. Both of these propaganda efforts are profoundly dishonest and blatantly political in nature, as a simple reading of the facts – not to mention a basic understanding of the concept of personal responsibility – will demonstrate.

First, let’s examine the notion that Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the Tea Party (none of whom I am particularly fond, by the way) drove Jared Lee Loughner to embark on his killing spree. As always, it’s best to begin by examining the evidence at hand. Now, what actual evidence is there that Jared Lee Loughner read Sarah Palin, watched Glenn Beck, and attended Tea Party events? There is none. Now, what evidence is there that Jared Lee Loughner was sympathetic to Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the Tea Party? Again, there is none. What evidence is there that Jared Lee Loughner ever saw Palin’s shockingly conventional political crosshair map targeting representatives for electoral defeat? Again, there is none. What evidence is there that Jared Lee Loughner in any way subscribes to a belief structure even superficially resembling modern American conservatism? Again, there is none.

Furthermore, what evidence is there that Jared Loughner – a registered independent who didn’t vote in 2010 – felt the influence of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, much less was driven to murder by it? There is none. The popular theory among the Left that the “climate of hate” generated by the right had any bearing on Lougher’s state of mind is grounded in… nothing. It’s a meaningless postulation, academic in nature, with no supporting evidence behind it. The only person who knows what was going on in Jared Lee Loughner’s head is Jared Lee Loughner, and the parade of left-wing commentators who are rushing to speak for the murderer are making baseless assumptions about his motives.

Second, let’s look at the idea that the right alone is responsible for the so-called “climate of hate” that incites violence. This has been the Left’s explanation of choice for every violent act against a public figure since the Kennedy assassination. It rests on the assumption that the mildly heated rhetoric and imagery common in politics for more than a hundred years – rhetoric including “campaign” and “target”,  and imagery including bulls-eyes – is not only generated solely by the right, but also that it is capable of driving individuals to unspeakable acts of violence.

Let’s examine the second assumption first: that there is a causal relationship between heated political rhetoric and acts of violence – that the so-called “climate of hate” is actually responsible for men like Jared Lee Loughner. Again, let’s begin with the hard evidence, of which there is none. Second, let’s examine the circumstantial evidence, of which there is… none. Once again, we have no insight whatsoever as to what was going on inside Jared Lee Lougher’s head, much less whether there was correlation, let alone causality, with the right’s “climate of hate.”

Efforts to advance this theory are an attempt to transfer responsibility for this tragedy from the murderer to political opponents. It’s just another example of an increasing trend in our society, where concerned elites, unwilling to accept the notion that individuals are directly responsible for their own decisions, seek to reassign blame in order to avoid indicting the central assumption of their political ideology: that no one is responsible for their actions. If personal responsibility is a country’s lodestar, then the progressive agenda simply collapses, and for the professional left, that is unacceptable.

Now let’s turn to the assumption that the right is alone in utilizing “violent” rhetoric and “militaristic” imagery. For refutations, we turn to Red State:

• “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” Barack Obama in July 2008

• “I want you to argue with them and get in their face!” Barack Obama, September 2008

• “Here’s the problem: It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger. You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger.”  Barack Obama on banks, March 2009

• “I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry! I’m angry!” Barack Obama on ACORN Mobs, March 2010

• “We talk to these folks… so I know whose ass to kick.” Barack Obama on the private sector, June 2010

• “A Republican majority in Congress would mean ‘hand-to-hand combat’ on Capitol Hill for the next two years, threatening policies Democrats have enacted to stabilize the economy.” Barack Obama, October 6, 2010

• “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.” Barack Obama to Latinos, October 2010

And to Hot Air:

• “Andrew Sullivan wrote: “When a congresswoman is shot in the head in the very act of democracy, we should all pause. This is fundamentally not a partisan issue and should not be.” He wrote this directly below the graphic of Sarah Palin’s 2010 target map (which included Giffords’s district), and followed up with an attack on Palin. That Democrats publish similar maps and that militaristic terms are endemic to political campaigns (just used one) and reporting went unsaid, because the shooting of a congresswoman in the head is very much a partisan issue to Andrew Sullivan. And that is before you get to his penchant for paranoid consipracy theories and Trig Trutherism. He apparently finds a riding a high horse necessary to be seen from his very deep gutter.”
• “Markos Moulitsas, the owner of Daily Kos, blamed Palin with a link to her target map, despite having put a bullseye on Giffords’s district himself (and seemingly disappeared that post temporarily).”
• “NYT columnist Paul Krugman blamed Palin and the Tea Party, although he has written that opposition to cap-and-tax schemes is a form of treason, and encourages and enables his fellow travelers to burn their political opponents in effigy. No extreme or violent rhetoric involved there, natch.”
• “CAP blogger Matt Yglesias, so very busy denouncing hateful rhetoric over the weekend, advocates lying to advance one’s political agenda and calls his opponents Nazis.”

And to Daily Kos, who had some rather interesting phrasing concerning Congresswoman Giffords only weeks ago (via Ace of Spades).

And to the DLC, who had a familiar visual metaphor on their electoral map.

And to MoveOn.org, who ran ads comparing George W. Bush to Hitler and whose supporters once bit off the finger of an opponent of nationalized health care (a “regrettable” incident, said MoveOn representatives).

In the context those examples, how can one seriously advance the proposition that the right alone is responsible for creating a “climate of hate” among the populace? You simply can’t. For every Bill O’Reilly, there’s a Keith Olbermann. For every Glenn Beck, there’s an Ed Schultz. If there is a “climate of hate” out there inciting violence – a notion that I find difficult to believe, given the hundreds of millions of people who don’t rush out and commit acts of violence based on, say, the reading of the Constitution in Congress – then it’s not the fault of one side alone.

So, to recap: there’s no hard evidence tying Jared Lee Loughner to the right. There’s no circumstantial evidence tying Jared Lee Loughner to the right. There’s no hard evidence to support the theory that a “climate of hate” drove Jared Lee Loughner to action. There’s no circumstantial evidence to support the theory that a “climate of hate” drove Jared Lee Loughner to action. There’s no evidence whatsoever that the right alone is responsible for this theoretical “climate of hate” that is apparently driving us all to violence. If there is a “climate of hate,” there is substantial evidence to indicate that the Left is just as responsible as the right for creating it. And if the left is equally as responsible for this climate as the right, then should the Left be held equally responsible for the actions of Jared Lee Loughner?

Of course not. Every man makes his own decisions and is responsible for his own action. Whatever was going on inside of Jared Lee Loughner’s head, and whatever forces were acting on him, it was he alone who decided to go on a shooting spree, and he alone who bears the responsibility for killing those innocent people in Arizona. Efforts to shift that responsibility elsewhere in order to score cheap political points off a national tragedy are not just irresponsible; they’re effectively attempts to let Jared Lee Loughner off the hook, and profoundly disrespectful to the deceased.

So here’s my suggested fourth meme, which should have been the meme all along: “The murderer is responsible for his actions. So let’s shut up and pay our respects to the dead.”

First, this extension is not confined to millionaires. In fact, it spares all Americans from a potentially crippling tax hike hitting in the middle of a recessionary period. To imply that this extension is aimed solely at millionaires is simply disingenuous.

Second, this extension is not a tax cut. It simply maintains the current tax rate across the board, rather than implementing tax hikes. In essence, it’s a tax freeze, and no more a tax cut than a spending freeze is a spending cut. No one is about to see their taxes decrease as a result of this extension, millionaires included.

So why all the fuss? If the status quo is being maintained, if no one is seeing their taxes increase, if no one’s share of the pie is about to devoured, then why are some people so upset about this development?

It can’t be because they feel the need to raise revenue for the government. After all, this government has not only embraced deficit spending, it’s courted, married, and settled down in the suburbs with it. The government has spent far, far more than it could ever hope to raise by taxing the rich, so why bother?

It can’t be because they think that raising taxes on revenue generators will spark an economic recovery. Tax hikes by their very nature discourage investment and curb the prospects of an economic recovery. Anyone who claims that raising taxes will inspire growth has failed to conceptually understand growth.

In fact, there’s only one way to justify rage over the absence of a tax hike: class warfare. Some people, convinced of the inherent immorality of the economically successful, are continually searching for ways to punish them in the name of “fairness.” To them, just as the absence of a tax hike is a tax cut, so too is the absence of punishment a reward.

The campaign against the “tax cuts for millionaires” is just another chapter in an old story, in which government attempts to wrest influence from the market in order to impose its own vision of fairness on us all.

A figure like Mark Zuckerberg is never going to be understood or properly appreciated in his lifetime. Zuckerberg, like Gates, Jobs, and other tech titans before him, has fundamentally redefined the way human beings communicate with one another. Regardless of what one thinks of Facebook in its present form, its founding may one day be looked back on as a defining event in human history, and a genuinely revolutionary moment.

The romantic notion of a revolutionary has always struck me as being fundamentally flawed. The word itself conjures images of guerilla fighters, underground warriors, rebels – small, nameless men of nebulous ethos who often fight losing battles but are remembered by history for fighting at all. The world’ most famous revolutionary in the modern sense of the world – Che Guevara – is more recognized now as an icon than a man, his face sold on t-shirts as a brand in defiance of the ideology he preached. To be a revolutionary in this sense is to be a failed revolutionary.

Who are the successful revolutionaries of our modern age? They’re the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Steve Jobses, the Bill Gateses, the Sergey Brins, the Michael Bloombergs, the Jack Dorseys. They’ve done more to shape lives than anyone gives them credit, because when most look at them, yet we write them off as simple executives, too locked into our own conception of what is and isn’t revolution to recognize the real thing when we see it.

The difference between Keynes and Hayek is that Keynes’s theories were primarily concerned with providing politicians cover for expanding government control of the economy, whereas Hayek’s were concerned with explaining how things work.

Let’s get this out of the way right now: the election of Scott Brown was a straight-up referendum on Barack Obama’s presidency.  Obama made it so by heading to Massachusetts to campaign for the bumbling Martha Coakley, and didn’t even attempt to deny when stumping for her. But Scott Brown also made it so by running on an explicitly anti-Obama platform.  It’s not like Brown was trying to hide his conservative stripes from the electorate. In fact, what makes his victory so astonishing is that he actually ran as a tax-cutting national security hawk who promised to be the forty-first vote against Obama’s health care monstrosity.  A full 72% of the electorate believed that Brown was at least somewhat conservative, compared to only 22% that saw him as a moderate.  And he won! In liberal Massachusetts, a state that hadn’t elected a Republican Senator since 1972, he won a seat that hadn’t been held by a Republican since Henry Cabot Lodge in 1952. Add that to the fact that fully 56% of voters said that health care was the issue that most influenced their vote; that 50% of voters said it would be better to pass no bill at all than the bill before Congress; and that 51% percent of voters flat-out oppose the current health bill (with 41% percent strongly opposing it), and it becomes difficult to see the election as anything other than a slap in the President’s face. (All figures from Rasmussen Reports.)

And you know, that’s not a shock either. What President hasn’t faced some sort of rebuke from the public? It happens. In fact, it’s meant to happen. Our particular form of democratic republicanism is structured to enable the electorate to let their government know when it’s going to far. The Founding Fathers were fearful of rapid change spurred by momentary eruptions of public outrage, and when they wrote the Constitution, they installed mechanisms to prevent it.  There’s no question about that.  Insofar as the results of the election reflected the will of the people of Massachusetts – and by extrapolation the will of the American people, who have repeatedly shown themselves to be strongly against the President’s current health care proposal – the system worked.

But the liberal literati seem to think that far from being a perfect example of the electorate exercising its power over the government through the system, Brown’s election demonstrates that American democracy is in fact broken.  Yes, their interpretation of the results is that because the public consciously chose to derail the Obama agenda, the system has in fact failed.  How do they arrive at that conclusion? Well, I can’t claim to know what lurks in the mind of every liberal, but my instinct tells me that the reaction comes from a paradox, which is a necessary condition of the liberal philosophy as it exists in modern America.

The fact is that the progressive agenda that drives liberals cannot be fully enacted by the will of the American people. This is because it is in many ways fundamentally at odds with the traditional American ideas of individualism and self-reliance, and consequently is relegated to minority status among American philosophies. (Witness this Gallup poll, which found that only 21% of Americans identified themselves as liberals by the end of 2009.) However, the general thinking among progressives is that despite their agenda’s unpopularity – and they recognize it as unpopular, or else they wouldn’t feel the need to disguise it every election cycle – it must be enacted in the name of social justice.  And there is the dilemma. Liberals recognize that their policies are not widely supported by the American people, yet they believe that those policies must be implemented in the name of righting societal wrongs.

When the electorate votes them into office, liberals naturally celebrate. They seem to think that the people have finally come around to them; that they have accepted the progressive agenda and recognized the genius of their enlightened leaders. In short, the agenda has won people over. But when they are voted out of office, liberals refuse to believe that their agenda lost people. Instead they panic, because suddenly the system no longer serves their goals. They realize that under a system in which people can turn against the enlightened agenda so quickly, no true “progress” can be made. Consequently, this system – the system of American democracy – has failed them. It is at this point that they claim to have lost faith in democracy.

I’m not going to pretend that conservatives always handle electoral defeats with grace and dignity.  But I will say that I’ve never heard a conservative rail against the system itself simply because the people have dealt them a defeat. Most conservatives simply try to figure out how to win next time, how to win the people’s favor once more.  Liberals, though, seem to want to cut the people out of the process entirely, because to them, anything that stands in the way of enacting the progressive agenda now must be eliminated.

But that’s nothing new. It’s just the logical extension of a philosophy that holds at its core the belief that not only does an enlightened elite knows what’s better for a country than the citizenry as a whole, but that it is the right of that elite to see its agenda implemented, regardless of public opposition.

And so you see, the latest electoral setback that liberals have endured – the victory of Scott Brown – may have inspired headlines like the one above. However, for liberals, faith in American democracy did not just evaporate because of Scott Brown. It vanished a long time ago, when they chose to embrace a philosophy that holds as its highest virtue the service of “social justice,” rather than the service of the will of the people.