The shattering of the three-network television oligopoly (where 30 years ago 80% of TV sets at dinner hour were tuned to ABC, CBS, NBC) is on balance an excellent thing, even though it has been driven in some cases by weird people, because the country no longer gathers around three campfires.

A column is a craft, not an art—like making shoes—and a columnist isn't doing the job right if readers don't learn things beyond the writer's opinions.

The administrative state is inherently an engine of inequality because those most able to manipulate the administrative process—the wealthy, well-connected, and compact interest groups with legal talent—dominate it, while the unorganized mass of Americans are simply not involved; this follows the law of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs (e.g., sugar quotas benefiting roughly a dozen families at the expense of 308 million sugar-eaters).

Some conservatives who are clear-eyed about the limits of government working its will domestically lose that clarity when the same government tries to work its will abroad—an inconsistency exposed by asking soldiers (trained and well-suited to kill with minimal casualties) to do counterinsurgency nation-building work they are not suited for.

Steroid use in baseball will never be fully eliminated because the psychic and economic rewards of athletic excellence guarantee perpetual incentives to cheat and an ongoing arms race between chemists devising performance enhancers and chemists devising tests—though Will believes the testers are currently winning.

What is alarming in Washington isn't what's done that's illegal but what's done that's legal.

American political conflict today is no more vicious than in past eras—the 1790s, the 1850s sectional crisis (e.g., the caning of Charles Sumner), the 1920s Red Scare, and McCarthyism—so complaints about today's 'tone' overstate a historically mild period; what is genuinely different is the proliferation of media outlets that outpaces the supply of talent, giving weak minds strong larynxes.

It is an iron law that as government expands the rule of law contracts, because Congress—unable to lengthen the day while its workload grows twentyfold—stops passing binding laws and instead passes sentiments, delegating substance to an executive rule-making process recorded in the Federal Register, marginalizing Congress as the progressive design intended.

Democracies only act on difficult problems under the lash of necessity—when they have no other choice—just as the British listened to Churchill without hearing him through the 1930s and only got serious when Hitler reached the Channel ports; the US is not yet at its 'Channel ports moment' on fiscal reform.

The Soviet Union 'died of ignorance' because, lacking a price system, it could not know what anything should cost, leading to a manufacturing process of 'value subtraction' in which it produced goods (e.g., shoes) worth less than the materials that went into them.

Baseball's economic dysfunction stemmed from competitive imbalance driven by local broadcast revenues tied to the number of TV sets in a team's market—unlike the NFL, which shares national TV revenue equally so a small-market team can win the Super Bowl—and the sport has been slowly evolving from an 'Articles of Confederation' of loosely federated franchises toward a unified 'Constitution' of one entity with 30 partners.

Since the Second World War the three biggest events in baseball were Jackie Robinson (bringing waves of new talent including from Latin America), free agency (extending to players the basic right to negotiate employment with the employer of their choice, without the predicted bad consequences), and Camden Yards (reviving the old-style ballpark that takes advantage of baseball being the most observable team game).

The Tea Party movement is a genuine spontaneous combustion reflecting Americans' retrospective political bearings (taking their orientation from 1773, the founding, and the Constitution) and a Madisonian recoil from what Mitch Daniels called the 'shock and awe statism' of the Obama administration, indicating strong residual respect for limited government.

The Yankees demonstrate the declining utility of dollars in baseball, just as Meg Whitman's failed California gubernatorial run showed it in politics—money buys less competitive advantage than commonly assumed.

The growth of the administrative state inherently produces rent-seeking because when government decisions allocate great wealth and opportunity, great wealth will be spent influencing those decisions—making lobbying a natural market consequence, not a moral failure.

It is one of the crowning ironies of the era that liberals, who are the great architects of the administrative state, are also the great complainers about lobbyists, who are the natural consequence of that state's growth.

Civil rights legislation and Brown v. Board of Education actually changed attitudes, not merely behavior, because you can stigmatize conduct with law—forcing integration of schools, pools, and lunch counters worked precisely because it legislated against moral behavior rather than against appetites (unlike Prohibition or drug laws, which failed).

The coming Supreme Court case on the constitutionality of the health-care mandate will determine whether there are any limits to the power government can derive from the Commerce Clause; if there are none, the Madisonian project of limited government is finished, making it a near-Dred-Scott-level constitutional moment.

The label 'discretionary spending' is misleading because virtually all federal spending is discretionary—Social Security and Medicare are mandatory only until Congress chooses at its discretion to make them not mandatory—with the only genuine exception being the roughly 6% that is debt service.

McCain-Feingold radicalized Will toward libertarianism because it never occurred to him that the political class would have the audacity to pass legislation controlling the quality, content, and timing of political speech about the political class, or that the Supreme Court would affirm it.