In a recent blog
post about the recent agitations about Confederate statues, I cited
disapprovingly the opinion of economist and gadlfly Tyler Cowen.
Cowen offered a fuller explication of his position in a
recent column for Bloomberg News. In it he says in part, “I wouldn’t
mind having a statute of limitations for public statues and monuments, so they
are to be taken down eventually, unless they are part of an essential national
core,” Of course the problem in the U.S. is that substantial numbers of
citizens cannot agree on what constitutes our “essential national
core” worthy of commemoration.
I’m not convinced, but as usual even his
nonsense is thought-provoking.
This article appears in Aug 17-23, 2017.
