Monthly Archives: May 2014

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

Policies for Foreverland

Martin Feldstein writes in The Wall Street Journal, Piketty’s Numbers Don’t Add Up Excerpts: His conclusion about ever-increasing inequality could be correct if people lived forever. But they don’t. Individuals save during their working years and spend most of their

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Single Payer Rationing

VA Scandals Raise The Specter Of Healthcare Rationing The obvious question to ask about the VA scandal is: Why? Why would a VA hospital administrator direct doctors not to perform colonoscopies until patients had three positive tests for bloody stools?

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Intellectually Medieval

Kirsten Power writes in the USA Today, Liberals’ Dark Ages Excerpts: Don’t bother trying to make sense of what beliefs are permitted and which ones will get you strung up in the town square. Our ideological overlords have created a

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Protectionist Hypocrisy

From The Wall Street Journal, U.S. Steel Imports Spark Wave of Trade Complaints by John Miller Excerpt: American steelmakers filed 38 trade cases last year, the highest number since 2001, when the industry won White House backing for higher tariffs

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The Cycle of Corruption

From Daniel Greenfield’s excellent blog, Sultan Knish, The Inequality of Access: Excerpts: Campaigns against income inequality invariably become mandates for corruption as aggrieved voters convinced that the system is rigged against them embrace the unfair advantage that they believe they are

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Scratching the Instincts

In The American Spectator Online THE PEOPLE AND THE EXPERTS The hollowness at the core of liberalism today. By William Murchison Excerpts: The lack of a coherent, understandable goal. What would Climate Reform look like, once accomplished? Would all regions

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Politics is a Footnote

Kevin Williamson writes Welcome to the Paradise of the Real in The National Review Online.  It is a bit long but quite worthy of the time to read it in its entirety. Excerpts: Politics is parasitic. Even at its best, it produces

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Dr. Dre and Inequality

Dr. Dre (stage name for Andre Young) has hit the jackpot. From very modest beginning in Compton, California to success as a rap star to entrepreneur in the development of Beats headphones, he has discovered a market niche- high end

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On the Tracks Behind the Church

“IN AT LEAST one German town the railroad tracks ran behind the church. An eyewitness stated:  We heard stories of what was happening to the Jews, but we tried to distance ourselves from it, because we felt, what could anyone

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A Nation of Fools

“You see, the danger to America is not a single politician with ill intent. Or even a group of them. The most dangerous thing any nation faces is a citizenry capable of trusting a liar to lead them. In the

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Home Ownership and Unemployment

“The federal government has no fewer than 160 housing programs in all; each of them contributed in some measure to blowing up the bubble.” “Official government propaganda touted home ownership as the American dream. No one paid attention to studies

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Reading 2014 05 08

The Media Hate Republicans Hillary Pushes Gun Control “At the rate we’re going, we’re going to have so many people with guns everywhere, fully licensed, fully validated, in settings where [one] could be in a movie theater, and they don’t

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Equality Before the Law vs Material Equality

“What makes an outlook “conservative’ is that it is rooted in an attitude about the past rather than in expectations of the future. The first principles of conservatism are propositions about human nature and the way human beings behave in

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Tyrannical Equality

from Sarah Hoyt, Tiddlywinks — Threat or Menace? Look, guys, yes, some societies have been more egalitarian than others – mostly very poor societies are egalitarian because everyone is poor. – pioneer societies tend to be more “equal” because everyone

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Virtue and Keynesian Policy

In a Charlie Munger interview he discusses the necessity of social virtue for Keynesian policies to work.  Societies like ours, the Germans, or the Japanese have the virtues required for Keynesian stimulus to work.  Greece on the other hand lacked

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Feeding a Culture of Envy

During the question and answer session of the annual Berkshire Hathaway meeting one from the audience asked about fuller disclosure of compensation of more than the top executives as required by the SEC.  Since there were so many managers getting

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Extrapolating a False Conclusion

From Michael Barone at National Review- Equality at the Expense of Prosperity: “There’s a persistent tension,” writes Bloomberg’s Clive Crook, “between the limits of the data [Piketty] presents and the grandiosity of the conclusions he draws.” Like global-warming alarmists, he extrapolates from

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The Physical Economy

Kevin Williamson writes Welcome to the Paradise of the Real in The National Review Online.  It is a bit long but quite worthy of the time to read it in its entirety. Excerpts: The farther away we move from the physical economy

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The Age of Unreason

From Nigel Lawson at The National Review Online- A Wicked Orthodoxy. excerpts: So how is it that much of the Western world, and this country in particular, has succumbed to the self-harming collective madness that is climate-change orthodoxy? It is

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