Freespace

A final plea on behalf of the people of Hong Kong

In my latest review for The Objective Standard, I review the final book by my late friend, Bruce Herschensohn. A Profile of Hong Kong was a final plea on behalf of the freedom of a place he loved dearly. Excerpt:

He adored its beautiful skyline, its stubborn people, and its political liberty—“almost a relaxed form of anarchy,” as he called it in his 1999 book Hong Kong at the Handover. Indeed, he called Hong Kong “the epitome of free enterprise . . . the combination of the dreams of Adam Smith and Ayn Rand.”

Hong Kong is less than 450 square miles, smaller than the island of Kauai, Hawaii, but home to some 7.5 million people—among the highest population densities on the planet. It has no natural resources to speak of but has a GDP of $366 billion, a higher average per capita income than the United Kingdom, and the longest life expectancy in the world. The key to its prosperity, of course, is freedom. Governed for nearly a century by the British instead of by the communist People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong enjoyed relative liberty under a government that—although retaining certain illiberal features of British colonial law—was far freer than anything offered on the totalitarian mainland.

Read the rest…

Taxing and spending: how Progressives are using ballot initiatives to raise taxes

My colleague Matt Beienburg and I have an article in National Review Online this morning about the Arizona Proposition 208 case, and how ballot-box taxation is coming to your town soon. Excerpt:

Prop. 208 sought to exempt the measure from these limits — not by amending the constitution, but by simply declaring that Prop. 208 was not subject to this constitutional rule. That didn’t go over well with the state supreme court, which ruled in August that an ordinary law cannot simply lay aside the constitutional rules. To the extent that the initiative mandated spending above what the state’s highest law allows, the justices declared, it was unconstitutional. They then sent the case back for trial to determine exactly how much Prop. 208’s spending mandate will exceed the legal limit.

That’s a welcome result, but it’s hardly the end of the story. The Prop. 208 saga — along with the $200 billion bonanza unions scored from federal COVID packages — make clear union leaders’ intentions to keep ratcheting up the costs, rather than the quality, of America’s K–12 schools. Arizona’s experience suggests that progressive activists will continue to frighten voters with false claims about school funding and, if necessary, disregard even existing constitutional limitations on their power in the quest to do so.

Read the rest...

September update

Don’t forget to subscribe to my Substack to get monthly newsletter updates. Same content as here, just in a more convenient form. Here’s this month’s: