Monthly Archives: January 2015

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

Budget Driven Strategy

from Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal, America’s Strategy Deficit: excerpts: On Thursday came the testimony of three former secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger(1973-77), George Shultz (1982-89) and Madeleine Albright (1997-2001). Senators asked them to think aloud about what America’s

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Uber and DUIs

In LA Weekly Dennis Romero writes IS UBER REDUCING DUIS IN L.A? In a vast, 4,000-square-mile county, it’s hard for many folks to get around without a car. And that has meant that DUIs have become a much-feared epidemic. But

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Crony Inequality

from Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek A Quick Note On Inequality and Cronyism: Cronyism of the sort that Sam rightly and consistently decries does indeed unjustly enrich some people by making other people poorer.  So such income transfers (which, as

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Cheaper Does not Mean more efficient

from The New Yorker, a review on the book America’s Bitter Pill by Steven Brill.  The review is by Malcolm Gladwell. excerpt: It is useful to read “America’s Bitter Pill” alongside David Goldhill’s “Catastrophic Care.” Goldhill covers much of the same ground.

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Self Interest vs Selfishness

from Selfishness, Greed, and Capitalism by Christopher Snowden Like Chang, many critics of capitalism use ‘self- interest’ and ‘selfishness’ (or ‘greed’) interchangeably, but they are quite different. Selfishness implies indulging oneself at another’s expense, but free- market transactions only take

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A Portion of Keynes

  I have often wondered if Keynes would recognize the policies that are often carried out in his name.  Art Laffer and Kenneth Peterson addressed this question in The Investor’s Business Daily  in Obama Tax Hikes, Aimless Spending Ignore Keynes:

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A Low Information President

From The Washington Times, Lewis Uhler and Peter Ferrara write The rich pay more than their fair share. Excerpts: The latest CBO report shows that the top 20% of income earners pay 70% of all federal taxes, while earning just over 50% of before

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Just Buy Them Insurance

The ACA (Obamacare) was based on very distorted numbers about the number of uninsured, myopic predictions of its costs, outright deceptions in its presentations (Gruber), and a delusional faith in the competence of the resources to execute it.  It would

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Inequality in Progressive Cities

from 15 Statistics That Destroy Liberal Narratives by John Hawkins in Townhall: The more progressive the city, the worse a place it is to be poor and/or black. The most pronounced economic inequality in the United States is not in some Republican

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Where the Money Is

from USA Today, Glenn Harlan Reynolds writes Middle-class savings like blood in the Water: When a government is desperate for cash, it goes after the middle class, because that’s where the money is. Yes, the rich are rich, but the

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Lazy Concepts of Inequality

from Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux writes More Evidence of Evidence excerpts: Notice that, in one sense, the American middle-class is disappearing – at least as this class was defined, household-income-wise, in the mid-1970s. But it’s disappearing by becoming richer, even when measured in

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Natural, Rare and Necessary

From National Review, Lion to the Last by Larry Arnn: Excerpts: Churchill agreed with the socialists, partially, on one issue: He helped invent the social safety net. But he looked for ways to implement it without threatening the free-market system,

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The Iraq Amnesia Syndrome

From National Review,  The Biggest Lie, by Victor Davis Hanson There were all sorts of untold amnesias about Iraq. No one remembers the 23 writs that were part of the 2002 authorizations that apparently Obama believes are still in effect.

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The Biggest Thinking Machine

From The National Review, Davos’s Destructive Elites-“None of us is as dumb as all of us” by Kevin D. Williamson Conservatives are generally inclined to make a moral case for limited government: that transfers are corrupting, that taxes should be

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Progressive Inequality

The Golden State is now home to 111 billionaires, by far the most of any state. In total, California billionaires personally hold assets worth $485 billion, more than the entire GDP of all but 24 countries in the world. At

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Real Communities and Fake Communities

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review, The  Perils of Hypocrophobia: People with lots of financial and social capital can afford to make bad choices that would be devastating for others. Rich single parents can afford nannies and tutors and play

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Europe and The Jews

From PJ Media David Goldman, a.k.a Spengler, writes Election Envy: The Europeans and the Jews Europeans adore secular Israelis who wallow in existential doubts, for example, the novelist Zeruya Shalev, a bestseller in Germany and the winner of any number of

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The Observance of the Law

“The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.” – Calvin

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The Anti Poverty Career

From George Will in The National Review, Our Mushrooming Welfare State: Transfers of benefits to individuals through social-welfare programs have increased from less than one federal dollar in four (24 percent) in 1963 to almost three out of five (59

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Stepford Students

From The Spectator, Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’ by Brendan O’Neill; If your go-to image of a student is someone who’s free-spirited and open-minded, who loves having a pop at orthodoxies,

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