I like to check in at the Power Line blog every once in a while, just to find out what's going on in right field. To date, none of the philosophers has explained why the cop in North Charleston, South Carolina, was justified in shooting that scary black guy in the back multiple times before retrieving his Taser and dropping it by the dying man's body, then calling in the following message:
"Shots fired and subject is down. He took my Taser."
This was before he knew a bystander had captured the incident on video. When his lawyer saw what had happened, he quit, and South Carolina's Republican governor, presumably after considering the English language's store of adjectives, settled on "unacceptable" to describe the police work displayed on the video. By their silence, I'd say the Power Line bloggers agree. Murder is "unacceptable"--or maybe it was the attempt to frame the victim that crossed the boundary.
Anyway, it's not as if the philosophers have lapsed into total silence. In a post called "Red States and High Tides," Steven Hayward begins:
I’m not sure who was the first to point out that income inequality is highest where liberals govern, i.e., New York City, San Francisco, LA, etc. It’s also true of housing prices, not coincidentally. This is only the beginning of a pattern recognition linked to liberal governance and elite opinion formation.
I think he's saying that "liberal governance" causes income inequality. He might as well say, however, that "liberal governance" causes wealth. There is a lower limit to income: zero. If almost everyone is making nothing or not much more, as in the states of the reddest hue, there is little income inequality. Income inequality requires that some significant number of people are doing very well, while lots of others are doing poorly. It's not a good thing, but "the Mississippi model" is hardly the remedy. When you list the states, top to bottom, on median income, the high ten are:
Maryland
Alaska
New Jersey
Connecticut
Massachusetts
New Hampshire
Virginia
Hawaii
Delaware
California
And numbers 40 through 50:
Idaho
Oklahoma
South Carolina
New Mexico
Louisiana
Tennessee
Alabama
Kentucky
Arkansas
West Virginia
Mississippi
This is the case for "conservative governance"?
