I think David Frum’s essay in The Week on the dual legacy of Jack Kemp is very good. But while Frum appreciates the merits of Kemp’s attempted outreach to the African-American community and the problematic nature of most conservatives’ failure to follow his lead, I think he winds up understating the extent of the problem. For yet another example of the nature of the problem, consider this clip of Glenn Beck angrily booting from his show an ACORN spokesman. Beck is full of righteous indignation at having been called a racist:

Robert Stacy McCain hails the clip as a great example of “how to deal with cheap liberal accusations of ‘racism.’”

And I should say, if someone called me a racist I’d get pretty indignant about it. Nobody likes that accusation. And I wouldn’t like to see someone I admire get that accusation leveled at them. But at the same time—and this is the crucial difference between progressives and conservatives on this front—I also get indignant about actual racism. Glenn Beck, by contrast, like most conservatives, think that the preeminent racial problem in the United States is that white people are too put upon by political correctness. Conservatives are very very very concerned about this alleged problem of anti-racism run amok. And they’re very concerned about the alleged problem of reverse discrimination. But they don’t seem concerned at all about racism or discrimination and certainly not nearly as concerned as they about helping out the poor, put-upon white man.

And it’s not just a quirk of Beck’s. This attitude goes deep in the DNA of the modern conservative movement. National Review’s position on Civil Rights was that segregation was bad, but the cure of the civil rights movement was worse than the disease of white supremacy. Barry Goldwater campaigned for president on the proposition that Jim Crow might be bad, but not nearly so bad as the Civil Rights Act. As the policy status quo shifted, the precise nature of the conservative position changed with it so that now affirmative action is worse than discrimination against minorities and “political correctness” is worse than racism, but the basic spirit is the same.

I’m not a huge fan of the general approach to the banking sector that the Obama administration has decided on. But as I’ve said before, I think that ship has sailed. However, I have a specific concern about the implementation going forward from today’s “stress tests.”

As I understand it, some banks will be deemed inadequately capitalized and given time to raise the needed capital. The belief is that for institutions that don’t need that much capital, they’ll be able to raise it from private sources. Those institutions that need a ton of capital—for example, Bank of America—will then be recapitalized by converting the government’s existing preferred shares into common stock. This, in turn, will substantially dilute the value of existing shareholders’ stakes and turn the government into a very large owner of Bank of American stock. But so then what does the government do with that stake? Do we act like a normal large shareholder and start demanding board seats and a voice in the operation of the company? Based on their conduct thus far, my guess is that Obama and his team aren’t going to want to do that. They’ll want to act as basically silent partners in the firm.

But if so, then it’s going to be a very strange firm. The non-passive shareholders are going to be people who’ve already lost the bulk of their investment. And the bank will be operating with a government guarantee. So their incentives will run in the direction of big bets aimed at pumping the bank back up at all costs, even if the odds on the bets are really bad. Alternatively, there could just be no really coherent corporate governance at all since such a huge part of it will be owned by a silent partner government. Then you’d have basically unaccountable managers probably working full time to extract as much wealth out of the enterprise (which will still be a really big and important enterprise) before the party’s over.

Better, I think, to act like a “normal” big institutional shareholder and try to appoint some directors.

This post by Neil Sinhababu not only contains persuasive (to me, at least) evidence that Sonia Sotomayor is, in fact, an intelligent woman, it also reminded me that I very much enjoyed the work by Peter Railton I was assigned in college. Thus, I thought I might be interested in his book Facts, Norms, and Values: Essays toward a Morality of Consequence. But here it is for sale on the Kindle for over $30 and even more for a brick-and-mortar copy.

Given that the marginal cost to Cambridge University Press of giving me a Kindle copy of the book is almost $0 it seems a bit absurd for the price to be so high. What’s more, according to the CUP website: “As a department of the University of Cambridge, its purpose is to further the University’s objective of advancing knowledge, education, learning, and research.” It seems to me that knowledge, education, learning, and research are not being advanced by seeking to extract exorbitant monopoly rents from relatively obscure philosophy books. Would not knowledge, education, learning, and research be better advanced by making such books as widely available as is practical? Obviously, in an era of physical books even a commitment to such a policy would imply a fairly high price. But electronic publishing via Kindle, it seems to me, ought to change the occasion.

We live in a world where, in principle, it ought to be viable for CUP to offer Peter Railton’s books for sale quite cheaply. That would be a world where thousands and thousands of non-specialists who read about Railton on the internet since he came up incidentally in the context of a Supreme Court confirmation might indulge their curiosity and check out some of his work. That, it seems to me, would be a world in which knowledge, education, learning, and research are being advanced.