Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.

Obama, startled that components of government behave as interest groups, seems utterly unfamiliar with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis - how incentives influence behavior - to government.

Most presidents come to Washington bright as freshly minted dimes and leave much diminished.

(Pete) Rose's coming clean is the most soiled conversion of convenience since ... well, Aug. 17, 1998, when DNA evidence caused Bill Clinton to undergo a memory clarification. On the diamond, no one ever wrung more success from less natural talent than Rose did. But his second autobiography - which refutes the first - makes worse the mess he has made.

Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called "self-interestedness". This was not a portrait of man "warts and all". It was all wart - except that the dominating attribute was not considered a blemish.

[Cultural relativism] licenses the envy of the untalented, giving rise to what has been called the revenge of failure: Those who cannot paint destroy the canons of painting; those who cannot write reject canonical literature.

We have far more to fear from swift than from torpid government.