Charles Murray

I heard this guy speak on education reform at the Cato Institute in DC. A guy I went with said he was regarded as a pretty extreme libertarian. I found this essay on The Europe Syndrome at realclearpolitics.com (if you haven't checked this site out, do it today). The Europe Syndrome to which he refers is the thought that the social policies of European states are examples of success in ideal governance. In reality, as Murray argues that new data is beginning to show, these policies are undermining key facets of life that provide true happiness or "deep satisfaction."

Read it all: The Europe Syndrome

Or some excerpts for those shorter on time:

That mentality goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible. If that’s the purpose of life, then work is not a vocation, but something that interferes with the higher good of leisure. If that’s the purpose of life, why have a child, when children are so much trouble—and, after all, what good are they, really? If that’s the purpose of life, why spend it worrying about neighbors? If that’s the purpose of life, what could possibly be the attraction of a religion that says otherwise?

For some years a metaphor has been stuck in my mind: the 20th century was the adolescence of Homo sapiens. Nineteenth-century science, from Darwin to Freud, offered a series of body blows to ways of thinking about human beings and human lives that had prevailed since the dawn of civilization. Humans, just like adolescents, were deprived of some of the comforting simplicities of childhood and exposed to more complex knowledge about the world. And 20th-century intellectuals reacted precisely the way that adolescents react when they think they have discovered Mom and Dad are hopelessly out of date. They think that the grown-ups are wrong about everything. In the case of 20th-century intellectuals, it was as if they thought that if Darwin was right about evolution, then Aquinas is no longer worth reading; that if Freud was right about the unconscious mind, then Nicomachean Ethics had nothing to teach us.

But the fact remains: It is the elites who are increasingly separated from the America over which they have so much influence. That is not the America that Tocqueville saw. It is not an America that can remain America.