Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.

Americans complain a lot about the government and they voice a generalized suspicion of the government, but they constantly clammer for more of it.

Corporations do not pay taxes, they collect them, passing the burden to consumers as a cost of production. And corporate taxation is a feast of rent-seeking - a cornucopia of credits, exemptions and other subsidies conferred by the political class on favored, and grateful, corporations.

The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.

The problem with intelligent-design theory, is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet - a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school's science curriculum.

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.

Today it would be progress if everyone would stop talking about values. Instead, let us talk, as the Founders did, about virtues.