The problem is that the demands of conservatives are out of control. They utterly reject the power of the mind to reason to a plausible understanding of moral values and their application to complex circumstances. Conservatives only use reason to extend by remorseless logic the demands of their primal moral feelings. They do not see that their views, when pushed to their logical limits, are incoherent.

The Newtown murders are a perfect demonstration of that incoherence.

Thomas Edsall devoted his blogpost today to several economists who claim that the upward redistribution we have seen over the last three decades is a result of revolutions in technology and that it will be difficult to reverse this development. In fact much of this economic analysis is quite sloppy, and it is easy to show that many of the factors leading to upward redistribution had nothing to do with technology.