The head of a state agency vowed that he was going to stage a sting to put Uber out of business, thereby benefiting Uber’s taxi and limousine competitors. Ducey says he fired the man and abolished the agency.
Ducey has sided with Airbnb against local governments restricting it to protect competitors, and has removed government-imposed limits (benefiting large beer brands) on the growth of microbreweries. He does not want Arizona to be part of “the permission society.”
.. About a third of Americans now need some form of government permission to do their chosen work, and Ducey wants Arizona to be an oasis of liberty in a society plagued by excessive occupational licensing.
.. Ducey wants Arizona to have a “West Coast vibe with a Midwestern work ethic,”
.. California’s business climate is a powerful incentive for firms to relocate in Arizona, where more than 60 percent of the residents were born elsewhere.
.. Ducey calls himself a “full-spectrum conservative,”
.. “This is called the Republican Party. It’s not called the Conservative Party.”
Trump and academia actually have a lot in common
such a “storm of outraged ego” is an increasingly common phenomenon among students who, having been taught to regard themselves as peers of their teachers, “take correction as an insult.” Nichols relates this to myriad intellectual viruses thriving in academia. Carried by undereducated graduates, these viruses infect the nation’s civic culture.
.. “College, in an earlier time,” Nichols writes, “was supposed to be an uncomfortable experience because growth is always a challenge,” replacing youthful simplicities with adult complexities. Today, college involves the “pampering of students as customers,”
.. “Rather than disabuse students of their intellectual solipsism,” Nichols writes, “the modern university reinforces it,” producing students given to “taking offense at everything while believing anything.”
.. Much attention has been given to the non-college-educated voters who rallied to President Trump. Insufficient attention is given to the role of the college miseducated. They, too, are complicit in our current condition because they emerged from their expensive “college experiences” neither disposed nor able to conduct civil, informed arguments.
.. Soon, presidential enablers, when challenged about their employer’s promiscuous use of “alternative facts,” will routinely use last week’s “justification” of the illegal voting factoid: It is the president’s “long-standing belief,” so there.
In his intellectual solipsism, he, too, takes correction as an insult. He resembles many of his cultured despisers in the academy more than he or they realize.
A most dreadful inaugural address
Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s White House counselor, had promised that the speech would be “elegant.” This is not the adjective that came to mind as he described “American carnage.”
.. But cheer up, because the carnage will vanish if we “follow two simple rules: Buy American and hire American.”
.. the checks and balances of our constitutional architecture. They are necessary because, as Madison anticipated and as the nation was reminded on Friday, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”
Why Are Millions of Men Choosing Not to Work?
America’s economy is not less robust, and its welfare provisions not more generous, than those of the 22 other affluent nations of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Yet America ranks 22nd, ahead of only Italy, in 25 to 54 male labor-force participation. Eberstadt calls this “unwelcome ‘American Exceptionalism.’”