Michael Kinsley

Even a conservative who ordinarily doesn’t care much for government regulation of business ought to find the case for a government-mandated minimum wage pretty compelling. In brief: As a conservative, you believe in the dignity of work. And it sends a terrible message about the dignity of work when working full-time doesn’t earn you enough […]

Wait. Stop. What are we arguing about? I hate to spoil the fun, but deficit hawks and deficit doves are actually in agreement about how this sucker should play out. There’s an old joke in academia about how the disputes there are so vicious because the stakes are so small. In the current debate about […]

President Barack Obama’s on Monday made — or tried to make — two different points, both concerning the definition of “rights.” Although couched in the kind of president-ese appropriate to such an occasion, both goals were easy to spot, and both are parts of a solidly liberal vision of society and government. People have been […]

The most famous painting of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” commemorates the bombing of the small Spanish town on April 26, 1937, by the German air force, in support of General Francisco Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Hard to believe, but this was history’s first extensive bombing of a civilian population. In […]

The world is a better place because of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. That’s not the question. The question is whether it is a better place because of those last 20 hours of her 80-hour work week. Or because of the extra miles she flew to distant capitals? On one trip in […]

Critics of the capital-gains tax are absolutely correct when they say that a tax on capital hurts our economy by reducing the incentive to save and invest. They say the same thing about the tax on investment interest, and they’re right about that, too. Unfortunately, this is true of every method of taxing capital, just […]

The enactment of a so-called right- to-work law by the state of Michigan this week is indeed, as the news media have described it, a blow against the union movement. Michigan, of all places. But it is also a blow against fairness and common sense. “Right to work” sounds like a law guaranteeing you a […]

As an Anglophile, I’m as pathetic as the next chap. My idea of a good time is to be in London, drinking at lunch with some well-lubricated British journalist friends, stumbling out when it’s already getting dark, tea at a fancy hotel, and then theatre in the evening. Then repeat. And, yes, when I’m not […]

Bill Clinton became U.S. president on a platform of “change.” Not change in any particular way — just change in the abstract. Like characters in a Chekhov play, Americans found daily life unbearable in some usually unspecified way and dreamed of escape. But they didn’t have the energy to achieve escape velocity. Then along came […]

It’s a small matter, I know, compared with the historic issues now obsessing the commentariat, such as the fiscal cliff and how many mistresses and admirers former Army General David Petraeus could keep in the air simultaneously. But before we say goodbye to the Campaign 2012, I would just like to point out that the […]