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Jack Jordan, Spiked: online

When the spotlight of the Western media was last on Ukraine, optimism was in the air. ‘Our man’ was in, the oligarchs were out and a new era in Eastern European politics was being predicted by journalists and politicians alike.

The so-called Orange revolution – in which the opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko fought his way to the presidency despite electoral fraud, the state-controlled media and an attempted poisoning – was hailed as a shining example of the New Europe in action. It made for a good Hollywood narrative: the dioxin-scarred Yushchenko finding the strength through ‘people power’ to take on the dark forces of the post-Soviet world. With the colourful occasion of his inauguration ceremony and the party afterwards on Kyiv’s central square, the story was given a neat climax, and the attention of the world turned elsewhere.

Arnold Kling, Tech Central Station

Economists support the idea of health insurance. However, many of us believe that policies that pay for all health care services are not real health insurance. Insurance should protect people against catastrophic loss, but it should not insulate them from the cost of all health care. As an economist, I believe that the law of demand applies in health care. I believe that if patients are insulated from the cost of health care, then they will err on the side of obtaining unnecessary CT scans, MRI’s, and visits to specialists. They also will “err” on the side of obtaining useful preventive care.

Charles Krauthammer, Commentary

The post-cold-war era has seen a remarkable ideological experiment: over the last fifteen years, each of the three major American schools of foreign policy—realism, liberal internationalism, and neoconservatism—has taken its turn at running things. (A fourth school, isolationism, has a long pedigree, but has yet to recover from Pearl Harbor and probably never will; it remains a minor source of dissidence with no chance of becoming a governing ideology.) There is much to be learned from this unusual and unplanned experiment.

S. T. Karnick, The National Interest

In the last several decades, modernity–the period initiated by the Enlightenment–has come under increasing criticism. Most prominently, of course, the postmodernists have put together a critique of pure reason, as it were, that uses logic to question the rationality of modern, Enlightenment-based philosophy. In arguing that all reasoning is based on attempts to gain, sustain or increase power, postmodernists openly seek to obliterate the very foundation on which the modern world was built: the supremacy of reason.

Robert Cooper, The National Interest

IT IS DIFFICULT both to be good and to be powerful. This seems to be the common view among statesmen, sages, poets and thinkers. A core thesis among thinkers of the realist persuasion has been that in foreign affairs, being good may in the end be bad for the people you serve, and that moral ends may best be served by thinking in terms of power and how it should be preserved, instead of aiming to do directly what seems morally good. This lesson is repeated in the works of Machiavelli, Morgenthau, Kissinger and many others. Realism is about power, and though barren and inadequate as a description of the way international society functions, it is at least consistent. Likewise, liberal internationalism, though its proponents have sometimes mistaken aspiration for reality, is also consistent. But the attempt to combine the two, as Charles Krauthammer did in these pages (“In Defense of Democratic Realism”, Fall 2004), presents difficulties in both theory and practice.

Rachel Donadio, The New York Times

Two monuments rise like emblems from the green countryside of Wiltshire, England, not far from the secluded house of V. S. Naipaul: Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral. They are signposts in a landscape Naipaul has been traversing for more than half a century, one in which the impulses of culture, civilization and progress have always existed in close and uneasy proximity to the impulses of paganism, religion and disorder.

Peter Abramov, WPR

Bulgaria has a new government. The former communists (BSP), the party of former Bulgarian king Simeon Saxe – Coburg – Gotta (National Movement Simeon II or “NDSV”), and the party of Turkish minority (Movement for Rights and Freedoms or “DPS”), have entered in coalition after two months political conflicts around distribution of ministry seats in the future administration.

By Christopher Hitchens, Slate

One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the danger of success on either front was infinitely slight.

Patrick Sookhdeo, The Spectator

“By far the majority of Muslims today live their lives without recourse to violence, for the Koran is like a pick-and-mix selection. If you want peace, you can find peaceable verses. If you want war, you can find bellicose verses. You can find verses which permit only defensive jihad, or you can find verses to justify offensive jihad.”

The Future of Socialism
THINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERG

WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. By the 1970s, roughly 60 percent of the earth’s population lived under governments that espoused socialism in one form or another. But this is the era of free market economics. In Britain, Tony Blair has changed what it means to be a socialist. Israel’s famed kibbutz system, once the ideal of socialist utopianism has withered and what is left is now part of the market economy. And China is redefining its own brand of communism. What is the future of socialism?