Daily Clips: April 25th, 2016
The founding fathers weren’t concerned with inequality: So argues a column by Alana Semuels. I find her argument to be tepid, at best. She points out that “neither the Bill of Rights, nor the Declaration of Independence, nor the U.S. Constitution talk explicitly about the nation’s role in making sure its citizens have jobs or homes or earned enough to avoid being impoverished.”
That’s true, but at this point in world history brave people were merely trying to attain basic civil liberties. That was the main philosophical and political battle of their time. Screw universal health care, we just want to be treated equally under the law!
While Semuels notes that there is only brief mention of pledging to “promote the general welfare” in the preamble of the Constitution. Ok. But did she not read any of The Federalist Papers? If she did, she would have found that James Madison (the father of our Constitution) was very concerned with the idea of general welfare:
…the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.
2016’s scrambled coalitions: EJ Dionne contends that “ideology has mattered less in the GOP primaries this year than in the race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.”
What good are hedge funds? A very good question and a very interesting article.
Tweet of the day: Can you imagine Jeb being the head of the NFL? Yeah, me neither.
@mattsgorman @AdamSchefter Travesty. Fire Goodell…immediately hire the NFL's original choice for the job, @JebBush
— Jesse Hunt (@JJHunt10) April 25, 2016
