BuckeyeBlog

In a time when most pundits merely parrot banal talking points in support of their political party or make wild accusations in order to get media attention, George Will stands increasingly alone. He is erudite, well-read, and isn’t afraid to disagree with his party when it stops living up to its ideals. Case in point: his column today, where he exposes the anti-market actions of both John McCain and George W. Bush. God bless you, Mr. Will:

In any case, McCain’s smear — that [SEC Chairman Chris] Cox “betrayed the public’s trust” — is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are “corrupt” or “betray the public’s trust,” two categories that seem to be exhaustive — there are no other people. McCain’s Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law’s restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending….

The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not McCain’s party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale. Treasury Secretary Paulson, asked about conservative complaints that his rescue program amounts to socialism, said, essentially: This is not socialism, this is necessary. That non sequitur might be politically necessary, but remember that government control of capital is government control of capitalism. Does McCain have qualms about this, or only quarrels?

Proving that she will continue Marc Dann’s legacy of using the Attorney General’s office to interfere in your personal decisions, Nancy Rogers has joined 24 other Attorneys General in protesting Miller’s new Sparks Red drink. Their problem — it is an energy drink that is 8% alcohol. The horror!

The hysteria over a drink that combines “stimulants and alcohol,” as the Attorneys General letter repeatedly says, is ridiculous. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, which never met a fun activity it didn’t want to ban, claims that this drink “encourages binge drinking, underage drinking, drunken driving and sexual assaults.” The same thing can be said about regular alcohol, though. Just because you feel a little more energetic doesn’t increase the chance of bad stuff happening. Plus, it’s not as if the drink is causing these things — have we forgotten about the personal responsibility of those who consume them? 

A trendy drink from a few years ago (maybe it’s even still trendy, I don’t know) was Red Bull and vodka. I’ll bet there was more alcohol and caffeine in one of those drinks than in one Sparks Red. Did the amount of binge drinking, underage drinking, drunken driving, and sexual assaults increase when that drink became popular? I doubt it.

Nancy Rogers and her fellow Attorneys General are trying to coerce a company from selling a perfectly legal drink because they don’t like the fact that some of you may consume it. Perhaps someone should remind Nancy Rogers that she was appointed Attorney General, not Ohio’s Mom.

If you watch any of the cable news shows you may have seen Naomi Klein on them recently, discussing her book The Shock Doctrine. In it she makes the claim that Milton Friedman was essentially an enabler of dictators around the world and that he and his followers fomented crises in order to deregulate markets and thereby plunder the wealth of these nations. Anyone who has read Friedman knows this is ridiculous, but Klein has become a celebrity on the statist circuit for telling those audiences what they want to hear.

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