Monthly Archives: June 2010

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

Is Compounding the Problem a Solution?

Hard core party loyalists who damned Bush for his record deficit spending seem quiet about the multiples of prior deficits the Obama Administration has accumulated .  Rather than apply the same standards to their president, they question where the Republicans

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Free Speech and Free Markets

Jonah Goldberg writes in National Review Online, Capitalism vs Capitalists Excerpts: “Every ten years I quote the same adage from the late Austrian analyst Willi Schlamm, ….. ‘The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.’” If

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The Source of America’s Economic Strength

“Whenever you hear a snotty (and frustrated) European middlebrow presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as “uncultured,” “unintellectual,” and “poor in math” because, unlike his peers, Americans are not into equation drills and the constructions middlebrows

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The Favorite Lie

“As the mortgage crisis unfolded it soon became clear that a different Bush was in charge. As late as the spring of 2008, only the Bear “hedge funds” and a bunch of mortgage originators had been all;owed to die. No

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Money Before Mind

“The government fell into the same deeply anti-capitalistic error that plagues contemporary financial theory: it put money before mind. Rather than addressing the intellects of citizens with the information to make prudent decisions, it tried to bribe them with cash

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The Jewish Century

This is the Intro to Yuri Slezkine’s “The Jewish Century” I just found it to be a compelling observation. The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular is the Jewish Century.  Modernization is about everyone

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How to Turn Crisis Into Catastrophe

“The bankers fervently believed their new structures and systems would better ensure the soundness of their loans than old- fashioned credit analysis and human judgment, fraught as ever with human error.  Having crafted a system that seemed to relieve them

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Calvin Coolidge Explains the Laffer Curve

The Laffer Curve is considered by its opponents to be a form of ‘voodoo economics’, to use the phrase coined by George H. Bush when he ran against Ronald Reagan before becoming his vice president.  But the Laffer Curve is

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Helen Thomas- Finally Finding the Line to Cross

Anti-Semitism continues to prove to be the most adaptive hatred as well as the oldest.  Its most recent incarnations have drifted more to the left. This is a relatively recent development, spurred by the closer affection the Christian evangelical community

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We Do not Know what We do Not Know

“I started putting an error rate on the Gaussian (by having my true distribution draw from two or more Gaussians, each with different parameters) leading to nested distributions almost invariably producing some class of Extremistan. So, to me, the variance

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The Distance Between Means and Ends

Life in a modern, money economy… is characterized by ever greater distances between means and ends. Determining how to attain our ends is a matter of intellect, of calculation, weighing, comparing the various possible means to reach our goals most

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Religion and Economics

Jews not only monopolized money-lending prior to the fourteenth century, when Christian prohibitions against usury broke down.  The dispersion of Jews throughout the know world, east and west, also gave them international advantages in global trade and finance because family

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The Politics of Easy Targets

In Israel and Its Liberal Friends WSJ columnist Bret Stephens asks what if the standards of friendship Israel’s ‘friends’ claim is the source of their criticism was applied to the Palestinians as well. an excerpt Finally there’s the fact that

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Absolving Fannie and Freddie

In a New York Times Article Paul Krugman took exception to another who laid blame for the financial crisis on Fannie Mae.  In Contending with Paul Krugman, part II, Charles Lane takes exception to Krugman. An excerpt: What is the

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Something for Nothing

“Politicians have  trouble giving up the idea of something for nothing; it’s such a sweet vote catcher. A government can give most people something for nothing by taxing the few people with money. This is how Sweden has gotten into

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The True Source of Power

Our political model, then, is only slightly different from Jefferson’s, who believed that the people themselves are the most honest and safe depository of the public interests, although not necessarily the most wise.  The electorate itself, in our model, is

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O’Rourke on Inflation

“A government can give all the people something for nothing by simply printing more money.  This doesn’t work, because it makes all the money worth less, as it did in Weimer Germany, Carter America, and Yeltsin Russia.  Inflation is a

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Free Markets vs Efficient Markets

The “ideology of modern finance” replaced the capitalist’s appreciation for free markets as a context for human creativity with worship of efficient markets as substitutes for that creativity. The capitalist understands free markets as an arena for the contending judgments

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Capturing vs Creating Wealth

“Prevailing in Washington as on Wall Street were the most vile and self destructive assumptions of anti-capitalists everywhere who imagined they could wield capital even while abandoning the principles that created it; that systems could substitute for the moral standards

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