The power to spend money for the "general welfare" is a power to spend for purposes that benefit virtually everyone or implement other parts of the Constitution, not a power to spend on anything that Congress concludes might benefit someone in some way. The Supreme Court disagrees, and so do most legal scholars.
It has obviously not occurred to him -- or if it has, he declines to believe it -- that "benefitting someone in some way" might well benefit everyone else too, even if only indirectly. But then, some people don't seem to think that a happier, healthier populace could possibly be good for everyone. (For what definition of "good," he might ask...)
And then of course we get back to my longstanding question of: whose money (water, air, land, wealth of any sort) is it, anyhow? Does it belong to whoever grabs the most, or can the rest of us band together (as a government, perhaps) and insist on a relatively fair distribution?
2025-08-19 13:01:39
Okay, I'll see what I can do about the archive link. Ugh.
(Fixed, I think.)
2025-08-19 13:01:09
Russell is a far better man than I in thinking that David Brooks is “nice.” But then again, when I was in my early teens, “nice” was one of the more damning judgments you could make about a person.
I haven’t actually read a full Brooks column for years. The links below provide a good snapshot of why. (AKA life is too short.) From just last night at BJ, where Anne Laurie calls him a “blog favorite chew toy." One about how he plays fast and loose with (or is just plain ignorant about) statistics.
(Innumeracy is endemic among journalists and opinion-havers, but that’s a topic for another time.)
From the archive (since I don’t have a login to the Times), a column he wrote halfway between the year he was divorced from his wife of long standing and the year he married his intern (much gossip about that online, but Wikipedia has only the dates):
https://web.archive.org/web/20150304114417/https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/opinion/david-brooks-leaving-and-cleaving.html
(Sorry about the bare, margin-busting link. I couldn't get the embedded archive link to work right in the comment box in the time I had available to play with it.)
Given that the alleged "paper of record" saw fit to print that moralizing, self-serving drivel, an over-the-top take-down doesn’t come amiss.
And as to this passage that lj quoted:
It has obviously not occurred to him -- or if it has, he declines to believe it -- that "benefitting someone in some way" might well benefit everyone else too, even if only indirectly. But then, some people don't seem to think that a happier, healthier populace could possibly be good for everyone. (For what definition of "good," he might ask...)
And then of course we get back to my longstanding question of: whose money (water, air, land, wealth of any sort) is it, anyhow? Does it belong to whoever grabs the most, or can the rest of us band together (as a government, perhaps) and insist on a relatively fair distribution?
Okay, I'll see what I can do about the archive link. Ugh.
(Fixed, I think.)
Russell is a far better man than I in thinking that David Brooks is “nice.” But then again, when I was in my early teens, “nice” was one of the more damning judgments you could make about a person.
I haven’t actually read a full Brooks column for years. The links below provide a good snapshot of why. (AKA life is too short.)
From just last night at BJ, where Anne Laurie calls him a “blog favorite chew toy."
One about how he plays fast and loose with (or is just plain ignorant about) statistics.
(Innumeracy is endemic among journalists and opinion-havers, but that’s a topic for another time.)
From the archive (since I don’t have a login to the Times), a column he wrote halfway between the year he was divorced from his wife of long standing and the year he married his intern (much gossip about that online, but Wikipedia has only the dates):
https://web.archive.org/web/20150304114417/https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/opinion/david-brooks-leaving-and-cleaving.html
(Sorry about the bare, margin-busting link. I couldn't get the embedded archive link to work right in the comment box in the time I had available to play with it.)
Given that the alleged "paper of record" saw fit to print that moralizing, self-serving drivel, an over-the-top take-down doesn’t come amiss.