• So What is Marriage? That’s the question I take up with Ryan Anderson, editor of Public Discourse and William Simon Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, in the current Liberty Law Talk.

• A Pathology of Democracy: Darío Fernández Morera’s review of Kenneth Minogue’s The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life diagnoses western democracy’s obsession with equality:

Wisely, democratic governments and their intelligentsia find an inexhaustible supply of inequalities whose elimination, which is a never ending task, makes the servile mind happy, and in exchange for which open-ended elimination it accepts new forms of servility.  Hence the interminable series of “gaps” noticed by the intelligentsia’s “research” between all sorts of collective and therefore essentialized entities, gaps which government must urgently proceed to combat, with new “gaps” constantly being discovered and in need of destruction.

• Arnold Kling at EconLib pens a characteristically insightful essay on the free economy and its dependence on an array of historical, social, cultural institutions. The piece begins with a wise citation of Ronald Coase’s essay “Saving Economics from the Economists“:

At a time when the modern economy is becoming increasingly institutions-intensive, the reduction of economics to price theory is troubling enough. It is suicidal for the field to slide into a hard science of choice, ignoring the influences of society, history, culture, and politics on the working of the economy.

• Talking about Shelby County v. Holder with Michael Carvin in the Federalist Society’s latest Scotuscast. Also worth considering is the Fed Soc’s current edition of the Journal of Law and Public Policy which is a force on the administrative state with articles from Richard Epstein, Peter Shane, Boyden Gray, and David Freeman Engstrom on an array of problems.

• So the regulatory state is regressive: Diana Thomas’ new paper @Mercatus argues that “that regulations often burden low-income households disproportionately, either by increasing costs of goods and services, lowering wages, or both. Consequently, the most vulnerable households have less money on hand to implement the choices that would improve their welfare the most.”

• Does Decline become us? Robert Merry retells Spengler’s prophecy and relates it to America’s contemporary self-understanding and the implications for its foreign policy.

• Can you imagine a world without Subs?