Conservatives must transform culture to prevail Re: “Go ahead, pity the conservatives,” April 18
If conservatism is to get the upper hand and keep it, conservatives must develop their own organizations through which they take back the culture.
Media, education, law, the social sciences, the helping professions — these fields are where most Americans’ thinking is shaped.
Politicians, even those with convictions, experience and talent, can do only so much.
Sharon Kass
Silver Spring
What Jaffe calls ‘greed’ is really enlightened self-interest
Re: “Tall buildings in nation’s capital built on greed,” April 17
“The incentive to raise building heights is not about architecture or affordable housing or spreading development. It’s about greed, period,” wrote Washington Examiner columnist Harry Jaffe.
Leaving aside his poor understanding of real estate economics, Jaffe is correct that greed is behind the push for a higher D.C. height limit. It is greedy for District residents to want to live in better neighborhood and pay lower rents. It is greedy for commuters to want to live in D.C. rather than drive for an hour each way from Virginia or Maryland.
It is also greedy for Jaffe to use the law to constrain hundreds of thousands of others to protect his aesthetic and architectural preferences.
A free society consists of individuals who “greedily” act in their own self-interest so long as they don’t violate the rights of others. Maybe we need to find a different word to describe people like Jaffe who aren’t content to control their own lives, but seek to control others’ lives as well.
Michael Hamilton
Washington
Life experience can be gained without a paying job
Re: “Time for a cease-fire in the phony ‘war on women’?” April 14
The headline on Byron York’s column asks if it is time to end the Democrats’ phony charge that Republicans are at war with women because they oppose President Obama’s attempt to violate everyone’s constitutional guarantee of religious freedom by forcing us to pay for contraceptives, abortifacients and abortions in violation of our consciences.
Democrats started this phony war and launched another missile at Ann Romney, only to have it backfire and force them to run for cover.
Hilary Rosen insulted millions of women when she said that Ann Romney doesn’t know anything about the economy because “she never worked a day in her life.” The Romneys started life together at the bottom of the economic barrel. Ann raised five sons and has battled cancer and MS. She knows more about life than many women who work outside the home.
Carolyn Naughton
Silver Spring
