American luxury sedans dating from before the 1974 oil crisis. That column was, in part, an elegy for a vanished Golden Age of American manufacturing. In that column, I wrote: “It is hard to convey, at this remove, how completely American car companies used to dominate the American market. As recently as the mid-70s General […]
Matt Talbot: The United States of America is a beautiful country
Regular readers will know that I’ve offered my share of critiques of the United States in this space over the years. I offer them not because I hate America, but because I love her enough to believe she can be better, and I trust her enough to know that in the long run she will […]
Matt Talbot: Some thoughts on Universal Basic Income
I’ve come across the idea of a “Universal Basic Income” in the last few months, and the idea is interesting enough that I thought I’d devote some column space to it this week. The idea is fairly simple to explain: under most schemes, every adult citizen would receive an income sufficient to provide a basic, […]
Matt Talbot: A bright, flashing warning
Mark Twain supposedly once said, “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes,” and I think he was onto something. The United States is not Weimar Germany, but there are some non-trivial similarities that ought not to be dismissed. While Americans are not post-Great War Germans half-starved by years of reparations payments, I suspect a […]
Facing reality, part 2
In last week’s column, I quoted an article in The Imaginative Conservative by my friend, the author John Medaille: “This is not an election about the head, but about the heart, and at the heart of American politics is a burning rage. Rage that our livelihoods have been sacrificed to abstract economic theories; rage that […]
Matt Talbot: Facing Reality, Part 1
In a column last fall, I predicted that Bernie Sanders would get the Democratic Party’s nomination for president this year. Putting aside the completely unforeseeable, it is getting hard to imagine a path to the nomination, given the delegate math and Hilary Clinton’s lead going into the upcoming California primary. She currently has a greater […]
Some Memorial Day thoughts on war
“The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia […]
Matt Talbot: Some thoughts on the Republican Party
Early 20th century humorist Will Rogers liked to say, “I am a member of no organized political party: I’m a Democrat.” I suspect there are more than a few Republican voters who could make the same remark about the chaos currently consuming their own party. In the wake this week of the Republican primary voters […]
Matt Talbot: Why I care about Richmond
MY FAMILY MOVED TO BENICIA FROM RICHMOND when I was 13 ½ years old, on March 11, 1976. Benicia was a much smaller town then — Southampton existed, but only a couple blocks up from Southampton Road had been built out, and even in Old Town my parents’ house up on M Street had almost […]
Matt Talbot: The perils of utopianism
I’VE BEEN ENJOYING A NEW SERIES ON HBO, “Silicon Valley.” It is produced by Mike Judge, the man who made the 1999 cult hit “Office Space.” A running gag on the show is the conceit among the titans of tech that their inventions are “making the world a better place.” This idea ought to resonate […]