Socialists tragic ignorance, getting the voting act wrong and other commentary

For the last decade, “people have been trying to explain the American left’s socialist turn,” observes The Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Continetti.Here’s one possible explanation: “ignorance.” “You can’t earn a billion dollars,” argued Rep.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, adding that “the American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time.” One problem: “The link between individual effort and reward isn’t always clear.State action is visible; the operations of the market are not.” But neither “billionaire” nor “wealth” appear in the Declaration of Independence, and the Revolution was actually “fought over political power,” not to cut down billionaires.

How tragic: “To forget the causes and aims of the Revolution is to lose touch with America itself.”“The prevailing interpretation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965” as “requiring states to create congressional districts along racial lines” is plain wrong, explains Frank Miele at RealClearPolitics.Section 2 of the act banned any “qualification or prerequisite to voting” based on race, “to guarantee minorities access to the ballot box as equal participants in the democratic process” — but it didn’t mandate “racial engineering of congressional districts.” Indeed, the 1982 revision to the VRA specifically rules out the “right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.” The VRA “never explicitly required states to create majority-minority congressional districts,” and the Supreme Court’s recent decision undoes decades of illegal application of racial consideration to the drawing of congressional districts.While President Trump’s proposed “gas tax holiday” is welcome, “the real bite isn’t the federal 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline and 24.4 cents on each gallon of diesel fuel,” contends Reason’s J.D.

Tuccille.Indeed, if you travel and especially if you rent a car...