Link Banana

Today, in the regularly-provacative Ideas section of the Boston Globe, lurks a piece to warm the hearts of “tax-and-spend liberals” (and will no doubt lead to at least one smug declaration of “That’s what I’ve said for years”). A sampling:

Lindert’s work surveyed a century of data across numerous countries and found that high taxes and social spending did not slow the growth of productivity or GDP. Statistically speaking, Lindert found no relationship between the level of social spending and economic growth. High tax nations like Norway grow rapidly and produce high standards of living. Even the income per hour of work in nations like France and Germany is equal to or even exceeds America’s.

Though the headline result of Gallup’s survey about what former presidents should be our new president isn’t too surprising, I was surprised that Mr. Clinton placed third overall. Also surprising: Mr. Kennedy was the second favorite among Republicans. Showing our short collective memory, anyone president before 1940 did rather poorly — with Mr. Lincoln doing the best among those more historic candidates.

(via The Page)

Sarah Vowell’s written the best tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. that’s likely to come out of this day of memory.

…there’s a pleasing symmetry in Reagan forking over a day to Dr. King. Both men owe their reputations to the Sermon on the Mount. The president’s most enduring bequest might be a city-smiting drug war, but thanks to a nice smile and a biblical sound bite that’s not how he’s remembered. Reagan cribbed from the Gospel of Matthew via the Puritan John Winthrop to dream up his “shining city on a hill” legacy. And Americans in general and Republican presidential candidates in particular still believe in it, probably because they’re not watching “The Wire.”

Here’s what Dr. King got out of the Sermon on the Mount. On Nov. 17, 1957, in Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the “loving your enemies” sermon this way: “So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all of my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you: ‘I love you. I would rather die than hate you.’ ”

Go ahead and re-read that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”