Victor C. Bolles
Nay 22, 2023
Historian Stephen Kotkin asserts that the War on Ukraine has evolved into a war of attrition. He further asserts that two key elements to continue such a war are the ability to resupply the unceasing casualties and the depletion of military equipment and munitions backed by the willpower to continue the fight. The Ukrainians are willing to fight but the essential willpower is not Ukraine’s but America’s. Now some Republicans are showing an unwillingness to support Ukraine’s struggle. In this commentary, we investigate why such unwillingness undermines America’s global leadership.
Quote from the Commentary:
Donald Trump is wrong. Wealth and power are not what made America great. America became rich and powerful because it was great (actually exceptional) at its creation. If we truly want to make America great again, we can only do that by embracing those original ideals and principles on which America was founded.
Victor C. Bolles
May 8, 2023
Who is Vivek Ramaswamy? When Vivek Ramaswamy announced that he would seek the Republican nomination for president of the United States everyone (including me) said, “Who the heck is Vivek Ramaswamy?” Since that announcement, Mr. Ramaswamy has been writing position papers and appearing with the Sunday morning talking heads in order to become better known. But he still has a long way to go. In this commentary, we try to understand a little bit more about him and what he has to offer the Republican Party and the nation.
Quote from the Commentary:
But a meritocracy is an insufficient definition of what America should be. Communist China also aspires to be a meritocracy. Mr. Ramaswamy’s vision for the future of America needs to be amplified. It needs to incorporate the founding principles that inspired the Founding Fathers to forge a disparate group of thirteen colonies into a new nation and create a new order for the ages.
Victor C. Bolles
April 27, 2023
The bizarre and previously fringe philosophy that is postmodernism has become mainstream among US academics as the principal Counter-Enlightenment school of thought. It is the philosophical underpinning of the woke ideology that has infected the American left. But while postmodernism can be effective in pointing out the past transgressions of Western Civilization, it has little to offer for the future. Most progressive activists of woke ideology would like to keep that future vague. In this commentary, we look at why progressives don’t want people to know what a woke future based on postmodernism would be like.
Quote from the Commentary:
Life in woke America, or whatever you want to call this new and different country, will not be pleasant. Education will be sacrificed to affirmative action, mathematics will be sacrificed to equity and merit will be sacrificed to inclusion. Like all collectivist societies it will degenerate into oppression and tyranny.
Victor C. Bolles
April 13, 2023
The progressive left has long desired that the US judicial system become more activist in promoting their progressive agenda unconstrained by an originalist interpretation of the US Constitution. They want the courts to forge ahead on abortion rights, gun control and many other controversial issues due to the inability of Congress pass meaningful legislation on these issues. But such actions would essentially give the courts the power to enact legislation as was the case in Roe v. Wade, but the Constitution reserves such power solely for Congress. Now Republicans are joining Democrats in attempting to capture the judicial system. In this commentary, we look at how the political parties are pushing the judicial system to the brink of collapse in their battle to gain advantage over their adversaries.
Quote from the commentary:
Progressives in the Democratic Party want an activist court to help implement their political agenda. Their agenda not only includes abortion rights, but also transgender rights, racial preferences, wealth taxes, among others. They believe that a court system delinked from its constitutional constraints would be a force for good in America. But a politicized system of justice will only be as good as the people who wield political power.
Explaining John Wayne
Victor C. Bolles
March 31, 2023
To kids growing up in the 1950s, John Wayne was the symbol of what those kids should grow up to be. A bit gruff, but honest. Fierce, but protective of those in need. And from westerns to war movies, he represented what it was to be a patriotic American. But today’s kids don’t know who John Wayne was and they don’t aspire to be patriots either according to a poll by the Wall Street Journal. Why not? Was it Covid? Was it Trump. Or maybe it was “woke” ideology. In this commentary we investigate the reasons patriotism is no longer popular and what we can do to reinspire patriotism in America.
Quote from the commentary:
America is special and unique even if our youth do not realize it. If you change the French government from a monarchy to a republic, the country is still France and the people are still French. France is on its fifth republic but it remained France throughout. But America is a country with people from all over the world. And they are all Americans. Because it is our Enlightenment principles and middle-class values that make a person an American, not their ethnic or racial identity.
Victor C. Bolles
March 24, 2023
Is Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg trying to indict former President Trump in order to incarcerate him or to assure that he becomes the presidential candidate for the Republican Party? And what is going through the mind of the former president as he announces on social media his coming arrest and arraignment calling on his loyal followers to protest, protest, protest. In this commentary we analyze the impact of the former president’s legal woes and what it means for the forthcoming election.
Quote from the commentary:
Donald Trump knows that his perp walk, with handcuffed hands behind his back, will be the lead article on every TV news show in the country, smeared on the front page of every newspaper, and blasted across every social media platform. And not just across America but all around the world. You would have to pay a huge chunk of money for that kind of publicity.
Victor C. Bolles
March 17, 2023
Where will we all be in two decades? A better question is where should we be in two decades? Seventy percent of American think we are heading in the wrong direction. But what is the right direction? We need to think about where we want to be in twenty years in order to determine what direction to go. And then we need to start going in that direction - starting now. In this commentary, we ponder these important questions and try to discover some answers to guide us.
Quote from the commentary:
In the United States the time horizon for our politicians never exceeds 24 months – the time until the next election. So setting goals to be achieved over the next 20 years for the United States is practically inconceivable (while the Chinese keeping unerringly working toward achieving theirs). We need bold leaders to lay out those goals and get the American people (and maybe even the politicians) unified in working toward achieving them.
Victor C. Bolles
March 8, 2023
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System have been put in charge of running the US economy. But it shouldn’t be this way. The Fed wasn’t created to run the economy, but only to manage a small part of the economy. The Fed has the tools and the expertise to manage the money and the interbank interest rate in order to assure the stability of the financial system. Beyond that it lacks the powers and expertise to run an entire economy. In this commentary, we discuss the causes and effects of this over-reliance on the Fed to manage the economy and make some recommendations on what steps should be taken.
Quote from the commentary:
Milton Friedman had a different opinion on what central banks should do. The finance and banking courses I studied in college (before the passage of Humphrey-Hawkins) assumed a very passive role for the Fed. The money supply should grow at a rate to accommodate the growth of the underlying economy, not at a faster rate in order to spur the economy. Friedman actually recommended that the Fed be replaced by a computer that would calculate all of the economic data and adjust the money supply accordingly.
Victor C. Bolles
February 28, 2023
Yale professor Timothy Snyder recently did a Ted Talk where he asserted that democracy should be a verb, something that you do. He asserts, “democracy has to be understood as a spirit.” He appears to believe that the more democracy the better. Then why did the Founders include limitations on democracy in the Constitution? In this commentary we examine what Professor Snyder asserted in his Ted Talk and investigate why the Founders had their doubts about democracy.
Quote from the commentary:
“I consider democracy a tool. The Founders did not set out to create a democracy. They sought to create a government that would “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Democracy wasn’t the goal, but rather a tool or mechanism that would allow them to achieve their goal, which was liberty.”
Victor C. Bolles
February 17, 2023
Despite heightened rhetoric about systemic racism and arguments about disparate outcomes, everybody from ordinary people to superstar quarterbacks are the blurring the lines that define racial and ethnic identity. There is a growing disparity between the world defined by diversity, equity and inclusion activists and the one we see around us. In this commentary we look at the changing demographics of America and discuss how that affects the conversation about race.
Quote from the commentary:
“The point that I am making is that it is getting harder and harder to put a person into a neat little ethnic or racial box. I come from a different era, but my son ‘s wife is Hispanic, and my son-in-law’s brother is married to an Indian. Kids are getting all mixed up genetically. All you have to do is go to the grocery store to see families made up of many races and ethnicities. The number of mixed race couples portrayed in TV advertisements has skyrocketed. They hardly existed at all a decade ago.”
Victor C. Bolles
February 13, 2023
Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959 until 1990 incorporated the concept of junzi, the Confucian ideal of being a moral person, as a key element in his plan to raise Singapore from a swampy, corrupt backwater into a modern metropolis. Henry Kissinger describes how Mr. Lee accomplished this feat in his recent book on leadership. Twenty-first century America has a lot to learn from Mr. Lee’s accomplishments because we seem to have forgotten how we became rich and powerful ourselves. In this commentary we review Dr. Kissinger’s observations about his friend, Lee Kuan Yew.
Quote from the commentary:
“Mr. Lee believed that only a tightly knit, rugged, adaptable people united by a common national identity could resist internal disorder. The sacrifices that had to be borne to eventually achieve independence and prosperity could only be sustained by a sense of common belonging and shared destiny.”
Can Artificial Intelligence Cure Healthcare?
Victor C. Bolles
January 30, 2023
Healthcare in the United States is a mess. And it is a mess because of people. Different people want different things. And powerful people and the institutions they lead have the ability to enact policies that primarily benefit themselves. All these different people and different policies have resulted in a healthcare system that is costly and inefficient and doesn’t serve anyone very well. But maybe we can take people out of healthcare policy. In this commentary, we investigate the possibility of using artificial intelligence to create a healthcare system that actually works.
Quote from the Commentary:
“the Congressional Budget office projects that healthcare will make up almost a third of our economy by 2035, converting the country into a gigantic hypochondriac incapable of self-defense let alone global leadership.”
Victor C. Bolles
January 12, 2023
Last year I published a commentary (Urgent Priorities, December 30, 2021) on the urgent priorities that America had to confront in the year 2022. Since many of those priorities were addressed very ineffectively or were not addressed at all, I was tempted to simply republish that commentary again this year. But the world is dynamic, and conditions change so I felt that America’s urgent priorities had to be updated to reflect those changes. In this commentary we will discuss the unfinished business of 2022 and the priorities of 2023 and beyond.
Quote from the Commentary:
“There are priorities that affect all Americans, rich and poor, black and white, young and old, whatever. We live in a complex and dangerous world. While our country is rich and powerful, it is not invulnerable. We cannot ignore the events happening around us and we need to be able to influence those events or be prepared to suffer the consequences.”
