Michael Kinsley

The basic case against New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s latest crusade, to outlaw the sale of extra- large sugared soft drinks, is Libertarianism 101: In a free country, people should have the right to do what they want, even if it’s bad for them. The major exceptions and complications to this basic principle don’t seem […]

As demand starts to build on President Barack Obama to “do something” about the deteriorating situation in Syria, let’s review where the U.S. and its citizens stand on the general question of using military force abroad. On this issue, Americans are divided in strange ways. It’s no longer a matter of hawks and doves. There […]

China Daily, the largest English- language newspaper in China, carried a front-page headline last week: “Village Gratitude Shows Integrity of Task.” Not clear what that’s about, and the opening sentence isn’t much help: “On a hot afternoon, Zhou Yi picked up a bag of freshly boiled eggs that had been left on the doorstep of […]

How well I remember the day many years ago that I was walking through the quad at Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Suddenly I heard a voice shouting, “There he is, the bastard!” It was Mitt Romney, who went on: “He’s the guy who favors health insurance reform with an” — he spat out […]

The people at the New York Times Magazine must think that nobody has ever read Ayn Rand, or maybe even Adam Smith. Their cover story on Sunday — misleadingly titled, “Are the Rich Worth a Damn?” — reports breathlessly that there is this fellow named Edward Conard who believes in free-market capitalism and is willing […]

Mitt Romney didn’t exactly fire Ric Grenell, who is gay, as his foreign policy spokesman. But when the religious right got wind of Grenell’s hiring, his job started to shrink. Grenell was told to sit in on conference calls with reporters and not say anything, which is tantamount to firing him. He was told to […]

Two floating bridges across Lake Washington connect Seattle with its eastern suburbs. The roadbeds rest on huge pontoons and sway a bit as you drive across them on a windy day. One is the last gasp of Interstate 90 as it finishes its journey from Boston to the Puget Sound. The other is State Route […]

“I am being sunk by a society that demands success when all I can offer is failure,” says the ruined theater impresario Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks’s “The Producers.” Mitt Romney sees things differently: He is offering success to a society that seems to actually prefer failure. “If people think there’s something wrong with being […]

Everyone says there’s a class war going on in the U.S. If so, it is, at least so far, a war of words. It’s also a war in which a principal tactic is to accuse the other side of fighting a class war, while denying that you’re fighting one yourself. Meanwhile, everybody claims to be […]

The busiest subway stop in downtown Washington was until recently festooned with green banners and billboards warning of a terrible danger. One of America’s great national symbols is under attack: the dollar bill. A few unpatriotic senators want to phase out the dollar bill and replace it with a dollar coin. Several previous attempts to […]