Over at City Journal, the skeptical doctor calls out the White House Press Secretary for her inadequate and evasive answer to a reporter’s straightforward question concerning the dismissal of members of the U.S. Fine Arts Commission.

This way of thinking is both a symptom and a cause of the absence of an unenforceable moral code that is held, if not universally, at least by a large proportion of the population. As Edmund Burke knew, where there is no inner restraint, there will have to be external restraint—in other words, the law, which will be permissive and repressive at the same time.