David Friedman is always worth reading.

This suggests a more general point—is the existence of a public school system consistent with a serious commitment to the separation of church and state?

I think the answer is that it is not. While teaching a fundamentalist version of the origin of life is indeed taking a side in a religious dispute, teaching a conventional account of biology and geology is is also taking a side in that dispute, just the opposite side. I do not see how I can honestly tell a fundamentalist that it is a violation of the separation of church and state to teach children that his religious beliefs are true but not a violation to teach children that they are false.

Read it.

Note the caption on the picture.

Freeberg speaks wisdom.

The hippies have taken over the coastlines, which sends my two primary requirements for my retirement environment — I want to wake up to the smell of real salt air, and I want to shatter the beer bottles from last night with a large-caliber sidearm in my own backyard — into a collision with each other. Hippies hate guns. Everything will be rainbows and unicorns as soon as we get rid of all the guns.

Read it.

And sign me up.

When was the last time you saw a hunt-and-peck pianist?

Preach it, brother.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

Christine O’Donnell has been widely mocked for expressing doubt as to the presence in the Constitution of separation of church and state. As you can see from the First Amendment, quoted in full above, she is correct and her critics are mistaken. Not only do the words not appear in the Constitution, the idea does not appear either. Establishment of religion was a well understood concept; it meant an official state church, supported by government money. England had had such an arrangement since at least the sixteenth century and still does. So, currently, do Denmark, Norway, and Iceland (all Lutheran), as well as lots of Muslim countries. When the First Amendment was passed, Connecticut and Massachusetts had established churches.

Steve Sailer is unique.

A big part of this New Centrist obsession (e.g., Waiting for “Superman”) with changing the culture of NAMs is motivated by job-seeking on the part of Nice White People. The private sector, with its stock options, used to be cool, but now private sector jobs are in short supply. The public sector, with its jobs with defined benefit pensions and health insurance, is where it’s at in 2010. Moreover, violence is down among NAMs, so a lot of Nice White People are thinking they’d like one of those lifetime tenure jobs with benefits and a pension reforming NAM children. Of course, people already have those jobs, so the people who don’t have them are raising a stink about how the people who do have them are discriminating against NAMs by not turning them into Nice White People and thus should be fired … and replaced by a new set of Nice White People.

Read it.

I can certainly see a day when your OS comes on a cheap USB stick.

They’ll have to get a lot cheaper before they replace the CD/DVD, though. Amazon has 4GB USB sticks for about $7, which is easily 10x the cost of an equivalent-sized DVD blank.

Megan McArdle is more realistic than 95% of the rest of Washington.

I have no idea how you could stop this process.  To keep our neighborhoods the way Jacobs and I liked them would involve massive coercion not just of real estate owners, but of merchants, food vendors . . . everyone in the network of service providers that supports a neighborhood.  The more people like me who move into my current neighborhood, the more services the neighborhood will attract–and those, in turn, will bring further waves of gentrifiers who will use their higher incomes to drive up rents, home prices, and the assessed values upon which property taxes are based.

I want the services, but I don’t want this to price out all the people who already live there.  Unfortunately, it’s a package deal.

Read it.

Cats are like children but without the potential for supporting you in your old age.

Read it.

Mike Masnik touts this as the most entertaining explanation of abundance and scarcity in this modern world Ever, and I would not doubt his word.

Read it.

I happen to like Comic Sans. But that’s just me.

Read it.

I guess rich guys are awakening to the fact that it’s less hassle to hire them than to marry them.

Read it.

Of course, this is from tReason magazine, who sort of have a bit of, shall we say, investment in there not being a draft, but it still has some good points.

Hendrik Hertzberg noted recently in The New Yorker magazine that “for the first time in a century, America is fighting a long war—indeed, two long wars, each longer than our participation in both World Wars put together—without conscription.”

On the other hand, these are ‘little wars’, of the sort that Britain fought for centuries without a draft. I suspect that if the war were with, say, Russia or China, we’d have a draft so fast it would make your head duck and cover.

That change represents a sort of throwback to the early days of the republic. When President James Madison proposed conscription for the War of 1812, New Hampshire’s Daniel Webster rose on the House floor in eloquent opposition.

“Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or wickedness of government may engage it?” he demanded. That was the end of that idea, until the Civil War.

And wouldn’t that put ‘progressives’ in a pickle? All their groovy-granola hippiness would hyperventilate and pass out if the Obamassiah decided to fight racism and inequality somewhere. Popcorn would be at a premium in right-wing households.

David Henderson, an economist who teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., says he sometimes asks his students, all officers, how many favor a return to conscription. “It’s been zero for the last 15 years,” he says. The common view is, “Why would I want people under me who don’t want to be there?”

Funny how they never asked that question during the Cold War, even when officers were being fragged in their own billets.

Another is that it’s a colossal waste to cycle large numbers of people, many of them poorly suited to military service, through the ranks for a couple of years just so they can bail out at the first opportunity.

On the other hand, it makes them all rub shoulders together (take that, Harvard) and gives some actual exposure to the military other than playing Call Of Duty for 48 hours straight. We increasingly have people in Congress, and people voting for people in Congress, whose only exposure to the military was picketing recruiters for extra credit for their Gender Studies seminars and watching Dr. Strangelove in Film Appreciation class (when not asleep).

Freakonomics is on the case.

In all my years of studying gangs, I have met only a handful of individuals who have actually participated in the dealer-to-rapper fast track program. Alas, they end up going to jail before they get successful, and most of the ones I’ve seen can’t sing worth a lick. I’m deeply skeptical about rappers who proclaim experience with drug sales. Sure, there are a few exceptions, but for the most part I would be very careful about the claims that are made in songs. Many rappers are highly trained musicians who have spent little time on the streets, as it were — think of Mos Def.

Read it.

My father in law told me he wants a tablet but $500 for an iPad seems high to him. I asked him if he’d pay $199 for an Android tablet. He said “where can I get one”? When he told me his primary uses of the tablet will be Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Calendar, I told him he’ll be better off with Android.

Read it.

That question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.

It didn’t turn out that way. In poring over medical journals, he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings. Of course, medical-science “never minds” are hardly secret. And they sometimes make headlines, as when in recent years large studies or growing consensuses of researchers concluded that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told; or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression; or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t really help fend off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed. Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.

Q: What is the most serious problem facing medicine today?

A: Getting funding.

Read it.

Teeing up the next fight with the Nanny State.

In academic papers with titles such as, “Your Chair: Comfortable but Deadly,” physicians point to surprising new research showing higher rates of diabetes, obesity, heart disease and even mortality among people who sit for long stretches. A study earlier this year in the American Journal of Epidemiology showed that among 123,000 adults followed over 14 years, those who sat more than six hours a day were at least 18 percent more likely to die than those who sat less than three hours a day.

“Every rock we turn over when it comes to sitting is stunning,” said Marc Hamilton, a leading researcher on inactivity physiology at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana. “Sitting is hazardous. It’s dangerous. We are on the cusp of a major revolution about what we think of as healthy behavior in the workplace.” He calls sitting “the new smoking.”

Not so fast, other experts say. Standing too much at work will cause more long-term back injuries – ask factory workers, they say. Incidences of varicose veins among women will increase. The heart will have to pump more. Alan Hedge, a noted ergonomics scholar at Cornell University, went so far as to call standing at work “one of the stupidest things one would ever want to do. This is the high heels of the furniture industry.”

Russ Roberts of Cafe Hayek is another datapoint on Steve’s mystical journey.

I wasn’t going to get one–I have a Kindle for reading which I like a lot and my laptop goes everywhere with me–so I have all my photos (about 3000) and all my music (about 3000 songs). What use would I have for a device that weighed more than the Kindle, promised to distract me from reading with browsing and email, and added little functionality beyond my laptop?

Then I met someone who treated it like a serious business tool.

Then I had an idea for a serious economics education app for the device.

Then someone gave me one.

Hey, if ‘somebody gave me one’, I’d use it too.

It’s gloriously beautiful. I’ve added apps and bought some I don’t expect to use much just because I want to admire they way they look on the screen. Examples are Star Walk, Solar Walk and the Louvre app.

So it’s a toy. My. How nice.

David Friedman knows more than most.

The central difference, so far as I can see, is that almost all U.K. recreation consists of performances for an audience, usually a paying audience. Almost all SCA recreation, and I think (although I might be mistaken) most U.S. recreation in other periods, most notably the U.S. Civil War, is done by and for the participants. An SCA tournament has an audience, but it is a medieval audience—an audience of participants dressed in some attempt at period clothing. The spectator at the tournament may also be one of the people cooking the evening’s feast or, later, teaching renaissance dances.

Read it.

Ilya Somin from the Volokh Conspiracy (and a Real Lawyer) gives us the news.

Don’t say that we never have useful stuff here.

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The Mexican billionaire, who Forbes still lists as the world’s richest man, said in 2007 that he could do more to help fight poverty by building businesses than by “being a Santa Clause.”

Mr. Slim’s signature also has been noticeably absent from the Gates-Buffett Giving Pledge. At a conference in Syndey last month, Mr. Slim said that charity accomplishes little.

“The only way to fight poverty is with employment,” he said. “Trillions of dollars have been given to charity in the last 50 years, and they don’t solve anything.”

Read it.

Walter Olson has some fun with a Democrat Congresswoman.

The union- and trial-lawyer-backed Paycheck Fairness Act, which would greatly expand the scope of lawsuits against private employers alleging gender pay inequality, has run into considerable resistance in Congress. The Bangor Daily News, for example, notes that middle-of-the-road Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, known for their willingness to support some Democratic initiatives, have criticized the PFA as “broad,” “unprecedented,” and costly to employers (Snowe) and as likely to “impose excessive litigation on the small-business community” (Collins).

Read it.

Each of them – and they constitute 80% of humanity – is born the most beautiful baby in the world. Each is an above-average child; in fact the entire 80% is in the top 20% of human beings (it’s crowded up there). Each grows up knowing that he or she is deeply special in some way, and destined for a unique life that he or she is “meant” to live. In their troubled twenties, each seeks the one true love that they know is out there, waiting for them, and their real calling in life. Each time they fail at life or love, their friends console them: “You are a smart, funny, beautiful and incredibly talented person, and the love of your life and your true calling are out there somewhere. I just know that.” The friends are right of course: each marries the most beautiful man/woman in the world, discovers his/her calling, and becomes the proud parent of the most beautiful baby in the world. Eventually, each of them retires, earns a gold watch, and somebody makes a speech declaring him or her to be a Wonderful Human Being.”

You and I know them as losers.

Read it.

Who would have guessed that in the 21st century one of the world’s largest military powers, a nuclear state no less, would contemplate handing the reins of power to an untested neophyte?

The exact details of his birth have been kept under wraps. The details of his elite private education are shadowy, too.

He’s the ultimate product of a corrupt political dynasty. He was nurtured for his role by observing the hardball machinations of toadies, thugs and thieves. As a government underling, he was a cipher. His ascension to power was marked by unearned awards and the fawning, irrational devotion of brainwashed throngs.

We don’t know if he has a goal beyond the ruthless exertion of his will upon the masses.

But enough about Barack Obama. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, a/k/a Dear Junior, is pretty scary, too.

Read it.

Speed the day when the disintermediation that comes with advancing technology makes government one of the middlemen that get eliminated.

Arnold Kling get sociological.

People often care more about status than pay. Most college-educated parents would rather see their offspring work for $40,000 a year at a “professional” job than earn $60,000 a year as an air conditioning repairperson.

I suspect that this has a lot to do with the prevalent ‘send every kid to college’ viewpoint–it’s really just a search for status, the desire to ‘work clean’.

Many, perhaps most, of the people going to college these days (a) just aren’t sufficiently intelligent to handle it and/or (b) aren’t really suited to the sort of work for which college is the appropriate preparation. I’ve got three degrees and I’d much rather be working as a cabinetmaker than at anything I’m likely to get a job doing these days; unfortunately, it’s too late in life for me to switch, so I’ll just wait until I retire and do it as a hobby (if at all; I’m pretty lazy).

As the time horizon gets long, the effects of monetary incentives and status motives may be hard to disentangle. In the short run, you raise marginal tax rates, and few people reduce work effort, because the status of being “employed” is much higher than the status of being a homebody. However, once a few people decide to become homebodies, the status of being a homebody goes up enough that many people choose not to work. So the long run effect of the higher marginal tax rate is much higher than anything you might have predicted, because it has affected cultural norms. I worry about this much more near the median of the income distribution than at the very high end.

Nick Gillespie is outraged.

Thanks, President Obama, you’ve chiseled down one of the few things that has helped to force doctors and patients to discuss pricing in medicine. For those of you not familiar with MSAs, participants park money in a tax-free account that is used to pay out of pocket medical costs. Insurers typically issue a charge card that allows users to pay for all health-care-related spending – office co-pays, prescriptions, basically any out of pocket cost. While I’m no fan of giving preference to one sort of spending over another (why is health care sacralized?), the system works swell all the way around partly because it allows users to keep track of costs and balances. And it lets users roll over unused money from one year to another, creating a potential pile of cash that can be used as you age and need more health care.

I have a Health Savings Account with a high-deductible plan, and I can testify that it makes you very very conscious of the prices of drugs, and very proactive about finding ways to reduce that cost.

Read it.

Most of the media noise around the Columbus Day holiday is about the holiday’s excuse, not the holiday itself. Realizing that helps to put matters in perspective.

The American system of holidays was constructed mostly around a series of great events and persons in our nation’s history. The aim was to instill a feeling of civic pride. Holidays were chosen as occasions to bring everyone together, not for excluding certain people. They were supposed to be about the recognition of our society’s common struggles and achievements. Civic religion is often used to describe the principle behind America’s calendar of public holidays.

Bryan Caplan is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

The most strident objection to merit pay is that “merit” is utterly subjective.  It’s an interesting claim.  But it’s hardly an argument for basing pay on seniority.  The natural implication of the unreality of merit, rather, is that we should simply hire whoever’s cheapest.  Why pay extra for imaginary differences?

Read it. And watch the video.

I got chills from this. ‘My gripe is, we were told, not asked.’

That’s my gripe, too.

Read it.

US admiral Bob “Rat” Willard is the most powerful military commander in the world. If you haven’t heard of him, that’s because Australia lives in a peaceful region. If that changes, Willard will become the central figure in our lives.

Willard is the commander of the US Pacific Command, or PACOM as it is known. He has 325,000 personnel, military and civilian, reporting to him. He commands five aircraft carrier battle groups and 180 warships. When you add the aircraft of the US navy and air force, and the dedicated air power that army and marine units command, Willard has thousands of aircraft at his disposal. He is responsible for all US military activity in more than 50 per cent of the surface of Earth, from the west coast of the US through to the western edge of India.

Australians understand the dialectic.

His headquarters is high up in a huge office in Hawaii’s Camp Smith, on a ridge not far from Waikiki, and commanding one of the most beautiful, and tranquil, views in the Pacific. I met Willard there – and noticed all the toy rats and rat-related memorabilia on his desk – for a long discussion about US strategy in Asia.

Who besides me (and the Admiral, obviously) remembers Willard?

Freeberg descends into Content — the swine.

You see where we’re going here — it all comes back to Melissa’s point. Cheerleading is a rough-and-tumble sport now because girls should have a chance to be just as tough as boys…and somehow, cheerleading is the only opportunity they have…not sure how we got there. But, Eating Disorders. Which is code for, it ought to be okay to be a fat, out-of-shape butterball.

Well, news flash: If you want to be injured doing something that requires exertion, your best shot at getting injured is to be out of shape.

The more you read of Liz Jones’ article, the more it becomes apparent that her problem isn’t with bare legs (actually, nylon-covered) or heaving cleavage. Choice versus coercion hasn’t got a lot to do with it either, since she got that essentially backwards and doesn’t seem to care one bit. Nor is it that her precious home turf is being invaded by Hooters. They just got one; one in the entire country.

She, like many people, is extraordinarily upset that somewhere, in proximity, is a place where the male can go and find acceptance, even if it’s only as a paying customer. She comes from a world where, even if a man pays and pays and pays, there is something awful about ever showing appreciation for anything he ever did or to even acknowledge that something has been made possible for others because of his contributions.

So we’re left with a whole lot of contention and disagreement precisely where someone was supposed to be toiling away at bringing harmony. The thing about bare female flesh is most confused of all; at one time, it is a banner of independence, then in a flash it’s suddenly causing eating disorders and is a symbol of male-on-female oppression, because someone’s doing something to make the men happy or something…and…

…wham. The womens’ “liberation” movement turns into the Taliban. All good looking women must wear pant suits, or else the men might get the idea that the women don’t want to make them perpetually unhappy. And who knows where that might lead? If a woman somewhere makes a man happy, then before you know it, women all over the place will start making men happy…and then the two sexes might actually get along with each other! Ick!

Jerry Pournelle addresses some important questions.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, where the teachers unions have the most favorable contracts I know of from a large school district, the District, forced to cut back, chose to do so by laying off teachers from the 3 worst performing schools in the district. The American Civil Liberties Union promptly went to court to upset this, saying they couldn’t solve their problems on the backs of students from schools for the poor. In theory the lawsuit was to protect the students, although what they are being protected from isn’t clear. Apparently they have a right to be taught by ineffective teachers? But the ACLU and the school district reached an agreement in which the District will be able to lay off teachers using complex rules that have some concession to teacher effectiveness rather than strict seniority. The LA teacher union, predictably, threatens court action. Solidarity forever. The student be damned, bad teachers have rights. Students don’t. Students have no right to an effective teacher: the purpose of the student is to justify the payments to their teachers, and teacher effectiveness must never be considered in school management. So it goes.

Read it.

An excellent review of just how much a drag ‘progressive’ policies are on the economy.

Read it.

A British racing pigeon called Houdini got lost on her first race and ended up thousands of miles away in Panama City.

Sometimes the system doesn’t work.

Read it.

A minimalist lifestyle can have many legitimate motivations. Sanctimonious anti-consumerism isn’t one of these, nor is saving money. A laptop computer with a sizeable hard drive replaced my desktop computer, all my DVDs, all my CDs, all my books and (given a scanner too) all my paperwork. This isn’t a “simpler lifestyle” in the sense that a laptop computer is simpler or cheaper than a book. In fact I still have all my DVDs and CDs in storage, in case I need to rip them all over again. Paring down all of one’s clothes to point where they all fit on one clothing rail is good, but the reason it’s good is not that an excess of clothes tarnishes the soul. It shouldn’t be conspicuous and self-congratulatory. A minimalist lifestyle does not make you a better person.

Steve Sailer cuts to the chase.

Illegal immigration hasn’t traditionally been a big political issue in New Mexico because there aren’t all that many illegal immigrants in New Mexico because there have been Hispanics in New Mexico for 400 years, so, New Mexico (state motto: Thank God for Mississippi) is a poor state, so illegal immigrants avoid it.

Megan McArdle does a synoptic review of the Government Motors situation.

Read it.

A 19-year old from Lancashire has been sentenced to 16 weeks in a young offenders institution for refusing to give police the password to an encrypted file on his computer.

Question for the reader: How long would he get for having child porn on his computer?

What are the chances that police will find something to hang him on if they really want to?

Freeberg says it all.

2. Using “y’know,” “totally” or “basically” more than three times within five sentences.

9. (Men) Wearing a baseball cap backwards.

21. Three thousand dollar rims on a one thousand dollar car.

29. Climbing into the cage to make friends with the wild animal at the zoo.

37. “Irregardless.”

Read it.

Read it.

Sorkin has teamed up with veteran director David Fincher (Fight Club) to strike back at Kids These Days by making a supremely accomplished bit of up-market razzle-dazzle, The Social Network, an enjoyably bogus hatchet job on 26-year-old zillionaire Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.com. Hyped as The Film that Defines a Generation, The Social Network is more an entertaining compendium of the worries of the new generation’s upper middle class parents: elite colleges, IQ, money, the social status of their kids on the marriage market, and why young people never go outside anymore.

The hubbub over The Social Network is a reminder that, despite all the technological innovations in ways to amuse yourself in your own room, movies that you have to leave your house to see remain the apex predators of popular culture.

There’s much debate in the press about how realistically the film portrays the tycoon. The obvious answer is that Sorkin is projecting onto Zuckerberg his own (perhaps not wholly undeserved) self-loathing over sex, drugs, and ethnicity.

Read it.

Perhaps even more than the fight between Republicans and Democrats is the fight within the Republican Party, which has been simmering (and sometimes breaking out into an open boil) since the time when Teddy Roosevelt decided to become a Bull Moose.

One of the characteristics of the history of organized labor in America is the so-called ‘company union’, an organization of a company’s employees that appeared to be an independent body but was actually created and controlled by the company’s management. Company unions typically served to make it appear that the company was unionized while not inconveniencing management the way an actually independent union would. Grass-roots Republicans have long charged that the party ‘establishment’ were the political equivalent of a company union, having more in common with their Crustian analogs in the Democrat party than with most other Republicans. (The poster child for this situation was Bob Michel, the long-time Republican minority leader in the House of Representatives who was ousted by Newt Gingrich in the same election that brought Republicans to power in the House for the first time in decades.)

Read it.

Mostly that we’re a bunch of slackers, but that wouldn’t make for much of a New Yorker article.

Erick Erickson coins a brilliant new phrase.

Read it.

And why you ought to, as well. I’m hoping that this represents the future of education.

Read it.

Lesson One:  Don’t honk unless it’s friendly.  And for goodness’ sake don’t honk at the Ford stopped interminably at the town’s lone traffic light.  It’s bound to be Miss Carrie, age 82, deciding whether or not she needs to go the bank (right), or straight on home to start dinner (left).  What’s your hurry anyway?  Honk and make her jump and you’ll feel guilty for a month.  Also the older men seated on the courthouse bench will catch you at it.

Wisdom. Attend.

Read it.

Among liberals in the planning profession today, the story of the Great American Streetcar Conspiracy is widely known. There are more nuanced variants, but it goes something like this: Streetcars were once plentiful and efficient, but then along came a bunch of car and oil companies like General Motors and Standard Oil, and they bought up all the streetcar companies, tore out their tracks and replaced the routes with buses, and ultimately set America on its present path to motorized suburban hell. Although the story dates back to a 1950 court conviction and was retold by academics and government employees throughout the ’60s and ’70s, the theory leapt into the public consciousness in 1988 with both a 60 Minutes piece and a fictionalized account in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Even today it resonates with liberals – The Atlantic casually mentions it as the reason America abandoned mass transit, The Nation wrote a whole article about it a few years ago, Fast Food Nation discusses it, and in the last week I’ve seen two references to the theory in the planning blogosphere.

It is perhaps because of this progressive complicity in streetcars’ demise, along with continued loyalty to state ownership and regulatory power, that the modern liberal narrative omits the true reasons for the decline of streetcars in America.