Monthly Archives: August 2016

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

Determined to Save

From Barron’s Stephanie Pomboy: A Grim Outlook for the Economy, Stocks by Leslie Norton Post-crisis, the consumer has clearly pulled back. How many months did we have disappointing retail sales numbers that no one could explain? They’d say it’s too

Read More

The Buyer of Last Resort

So there we have it. The unicorn buyer of last resort will be the Fed. The “lender of last resort” for the financial system, the governmental guarantor for all the big banks and other “systemically important financial institutions,” the backup

Read More

The Medicis of the Ozarks

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review, House Clinton and the Wages of Corruption The money isn’t the primary issue with the Clintons and it never was. Sure, sure, they like being rich. They like flying around in private planes. They

Read More

A Blunt Instrument

“This may be too much for a blunt instrument to understand, but arrogance and self awareness seldom go hand in hand.”  “M” to Bond in Casino Royale. Trump may have used his swagger and ego to get the nomination, but

Read More

The Trickle Myth

Reich’s reasoning supposes that the point of an economy is jobs, jobs, jobs, and that spending assures jobs. The writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry calls such a view “productionist,” as against “creativist,” and admits (as I do) that in the very short

Read More

Shrink the Power of the Presidency

From Ian Tuttle at National Review Why There Is No Serious Third-Party Alternative This Year If there is any lesson to take from this present disaster, surely it is that the place of the presidency in American life has grown

Read More

The Limits of Politics

from Ron Johnson at the Wall Street Journal,  Too Many Politicians Try to Hide the Real Problem Our Founders, who fought to free themselves from dictatorial monarchies and aristocracies, understood that as government grows, freedom necessarily recedes. Because our schools

Read More

A Principal Agent Problem

From Glenn Reynold in USA Today, Who’s to blame for Hillary and Donald? And, of course, voters are to blame, too. One of the flaws of democracy is something called “rational ignorance.” Voters know that their individual vote isn’t likely

Read More

Gilded Progressives

from The Great Regression in The National Review by Victor Davis Hanson At the turn of the last century, “trust busters” of the progressive movement made the argument that the free market was imperiled by crony capitalists, who had, with

Read More

Trumping Himself

From National Review, A Landslide of His Own Making by Jim Geraghty Trump is quite different than Goldwater and McGovern in that he goes out and confirms his opponents’ caricature of him every single day. Unlike those men and Mondale,

Read More

More Than a Democracy

From National Affairs George Will writes The Limits of Majority Rule.  It is an excellent summary of the history of the court as it has moved from judicial review to activism.  The success of Progressivism has hinged on the court

Read More

Political Thoughts 2016 08 15

Did Donald Trump insinuate a call for the assassination of Hillary Clinton? No.  Get real. Did he literally claim that Obama created Isis, as if sitting at a table with the rag heads and saying, “follow me guys, I have

Read More

The New Robber Barons

From Joel Kotkin at New Geography, TODAY’S TECH OLIGARCHS ARE WORSE THAN THE ROBBER BARONS Now from San Francisco to Washington and Brussels, the tech oligarchs are something less attractive: a fearsome threat whose ambitions to control our future politics, media,

Read More

Hillary’s Trickle Down

    from the editors of The National Review, Hilary’s Disastrous Economic Plan It is economically illiterate, but Mrs. Clinton sincerely believes it, arguing that, in the same vein, raising the federal minimum wage would actually help U.S. employers by

Read More

Bridges to Stagnation

from The Clinton Plan’s Growth Deficit by John Cochrane in The Wall Street Journal America’s foremost economic problem is sclerotic growth. If the economy continues to expand at only 1% to 2% a year, instead of the historical 3% to

Read More

Deciding How to Fail

From Kevin Williamson at National Review, Thank Goodness Trump Is a Compulsive Liar With that in mind, ask yourself this question: Given that the shortfall of our total future government obligations — not the obligations themselves, just how short we

Read More

Reading 2016 08 10

Greetings Slaves This modern form of slavery would address not only the concerns of the revolutionaries by fixing job insecurity and guaranteeing retirement on a plantation basis, but also assuage the monopolists, who stay up nights worrying about preserving market share in the face of

Read More

Political Nihilism

From The Atlantic, How American Politics Went Insane by Jonathan Rauch Of course, Congress’s incompetence makes the electorate even more disgusted, which leads to even greater political volatility. In a Republican presidential debate in March, Ohio Governor John Kasich described the cycle

Read More

Maybe It’s Trump’s Fault

The intellectuals of the right have a problem with Trump.  The National Review editorial board published a rare condemnation of a Republican candidate and its best writers from Jonah Goldberg to Kevin Williamson have enumerated countless rational arguments about his

Read More

Neutralizing Political Institutions

From The Atlantic, How American Politics Went Insane by Jonathan Rauch Moreover, recent research by the political scientists Jamie L. Carson and Jason M. Roberts finds that party leaders of yore did a better job of encouraging qualified mainstream candidates to challenge

Read More