by Henry Oliner I find the principles, theories, and ideologies of economics and political power fascinating, but I suffer no illusion that most voters weigh such topics when they vote. I also do not contend that every voter is only
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Andrew Cline at National Review reminds us of one of the side benefits of a Trump presidency – that the left will rediscover the genius of the constitutional limits on executive power -in The Real Hero of the Trump Resistance? James
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from The Weekly Standard, Camille Paglia: On Trump, Democrats, Transgenderism, and Islamist Terror by Jonathan Last In summary: to have any hope of retaking the White House, Democrats must get off their high horse, lose the rabid rhetoric, and reorient themselves
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from the FEE, Foundation for Economic Education, Be Wary of the Orwellian “Enlightened” Classby Robin Koerner Scientism is science stripped of its epistemological core, which is the knowledge that we don’t know. Those who practice it think they are “being scientific”
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Every time a snarky comedian confuses cynicism with wit, rage with concern, and smugness with intelligence…. Samantha Bee, Bill Maher, Steven Colbert……. Every time their hypocrisy is lit up like a Las Vegas billboard, with audio track loud enough to
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Kevin Williamson is one of the best economics writers around, especially for a non economist. His style follows in the tradition of Henry Hazlitt and his classic Economics In One Lesson, bringing economic theory into common experiences. This is from
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from Victor Davis Hanson at National Review, It’s the Hypocrisy, Stupid Americans neither hate nor envy meritocratic elites. Here in one of the poorer areas of the nation in rural southwestern Fresno County, the poor admire the skilled surgeons who
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from Thomas Donlan at Barron’s, Ignorance is Not Bliss German Chancellor Angela Merkel has had the chance to take Trump’s measure in the recent NATO and G-7 meetings, and her reading was not good. She reported this to her citizens: “The
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by Henry Oliner The concept of a guaranteed income resurfaces, most recently in the face of recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning and the approaching horizon of an economy that can advance without the need of human input.
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from the archives of A Part of the Truth is More Misleading than All of Lie: from Marginal Revolution The New York Times wrote Amid ‘Trump Effect’ Fear, 40% of Colleges See Dip in Foreign Applicants the rest of the story:
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Kevin Williamson is one of the best economics writers around, especially for a non economist. His style follows in the tradition of Henry Hazlitt and his classic Economics In One Lesson, bringing economic theory into common experiences. This is from the
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from Thomas Donlan at Barron’s, Ignorance is Not Bliss Our trade deficit—the amount that imports exceed exports—with Germany last year was about $65 billion, or some 13% of the U.S. total 2016 trade deficit. It’s big because Germany is a big
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from The New Yorker, EVERYBODY’S AN EXPERT by Louis Menand Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more
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by Henry Oliner I sense an exhaustion with all things political. Too much to absorb, analyze and understand. In the hail of information, data and events we resort more to our previous beliefs to make sense of it, and in
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from Why Elites Hate by William McGurn in the WSJ No small part of the attraction of identity politics is its usefulness in silencing those who do not hew to progressive orthodoxy. This dynamic is most visible on campuses, where
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from The New Yorker, EVERYBODY’S AN EXPERT by Louis Menand Also, people tend to see the future as indeterminate and the past as inevitable. If you look backward, the dots that lead up to Hitler or the fall of the Soviet Union
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from Thomas Donlan at Barron’s, Ignorance is Not Bliss “Tech writer Bruce Sterling commented in 2007 that using Twitter for ‘literate communication’ is ‘about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite The Iliad.’ The
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political conversations led me to these: “The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie–deliberate, contrived and dishonest–but the myth–persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts
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An old axiom of progress is that technology renders scarcity obsolete. I would add that technology renders large systemic political solutions not only obsolete but counter productive. Whenever a institution is conceived, staffed, and funded to solve a problem then
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by Henry Oliner Law professor and blogger Glenn Harland Reynolds posits an axiom of politics “that the more a government wants to run its citizens’ lives, the worse job it will do at the most basic tasks of government.” I
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