The 20 most interesting Daily Caller op-eds of 2011

The Daily Caller published more than 2,000 op-eds this year. I recently combed through all of them and put together a wholly subjective list of the 20 most interesting ones — the top 1%, so to speak. They’re listed in chronological order. (Here’s last year’s list.)

1.) I revived the RNC (1/3/11): The year began with Michael Steele fighting to retain his Republican National Committee chairmanship amid allegations that he had mismanaged the RNC’s finances. Steele made his case for re-election in this Daily Caller op-ed. “I ask to be judged on the only criteria that matter in this job — fundraising, turnout and election results,” Steele writes. “Based on those metrics, the RNC has been more successful in the past two years than ever in its history.” Steele went on to lose the election to Reince Priebus.

2.) Christianity is neither conservative nor socialist (1/20/11): It’s a familiar question: Is Christianity conservative or socialist? According to Dr. Brian Lee, the pastor at Washington, D.C.’s Christ Reformed Church, it’s neither. Unlike Judaism or Islam, “Christianity is not political at all,” Lee writes. “It is in a sense politically agnostic. But in another sense it calls into question the basis of every earthly power, including politics.”

3.) Seasteading: the entrepreneurial way to fix government (2/10/11): In 2008, Patri Friedman founded The Seasteading Institute, a non-profit dedicated to establishing floating city-states that will experiment with innovative political, legal and social systems. In February of this year, Friedman, who is Milton Friedman’s grandson, wrote an op-ed for The Daily Caller explaining the logic behind seasteading. “By letting a thousand nations bloom on the ocean,” Friedman writes, “we can discover what works and improve government without running the risk of breaking it.” Friedman says he hopes that someday in the not-too-distant future millions of people will live in floating cities.

4.) Will women marry down? (4/18/11): In this piece, Kay Hymowitz, the author of the best-seller “Manning Up,” explains why college-educated women are unlikely to marry non-college-educated men, even though there’s a shortage of college-educated men. In part, it’s because college-educated women have more in common with the latter group of men and are therefore more compatible with them. But, according to Hymowitz, the biggest reason that college-educated women choose to marry college-educated men is that they want to have smart kids. “Americans don’t like to think of themselves as class conscious,” she writes. “But marriage brings out the snob in the most democratic man or woman — for better or worse.”

5.) Classroom grading is an attack on students (5/12/11): Of course, education reform activist Bob Bowdon doesn’t really think grading is an attack on students. But by pretending to, he highlights the ridiculousness of teachers’ unions’ opposition to reforms that would hold teachers accountable for their classroom performances. “Until someone devises a grading system that can equalize all these disparate factors and compensate for which students have advantages and which don’t,” Bowdon writes, “the only fair course is to avoid grading completely.”

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