Columnist for the New York Times Ross Dothat, a reliable guide in Catholic matters, tells us in a recent column – “Pope Francis and the end of the imperial papacy” -- that the late pope had unraveled “the attempted doctrinal settlements of previous popes,” thereby “unsettling conservative like me.” The unraveling of papal authority had been hastened by “two rebellions” tolerated by Francis. The first involved a partly successful suppression of the Latin Mass. “After Vatican II in the late 1960s… Pope Paul VI “remade the church’s liturgy” The pope “commanded enough deference that he was able to swiftly consign the mass that every Catholic in the world had grown up with to the modern equivalent of the catacombs – to church basements, hotel rooms and schismatic chapels.” When Francis later attempted a like suppression, “reversing the permissions granted by [Pope] Benedict, only his most loyal bishops really went along, and the main effect was to stir resistance and co...
Some underrepresented conservatives and libertarians in Connecticut were buoyed, momentarily, by the neo-progressive resistance to President Donald Trump’s tariff initiative. A tariff is a tax, a political charge on incoming goods, said the anti-Trump chorus, and taxes raise the price of goods for middle class Americans and the American poor. This refreshing honesty burst several neo-progressive bubbles. There is no essential difference between a tariff and a corporate tax. As a political Gertrude Stein mighty put it: “A tax, is a tax, is a tax,” and what can be said of tariffs may also justly be said of corporate taxes, or indeed any other taxes. Corporations are not tax payers; they are tax collectors. A “fair” corporate tax is charged upon a company by a government; the company then collects the tax in the form of a higher price for its goods or services, shuttles the tax to the government’s receivables, and then uses the price difference to defray it...