Yearly Archives: 2013

Archive of posts published in the specified Year

Small Man’s Sin

Kevin Williamson writes in The National Review, The Age of Envy: Excerpts: Wrath and pride are the sins of great (but not good) men. Envy is the affliction of the insignificant. It is the small man’s sin. Which brings us

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The Right to Be Left Alone

Daniel Greenfield writes in Sultan Knish, The Redistribution of Freedom. Excerpts: Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called the right to be left alone the “most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by a free people.” It would even

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Reading 2013 12 16

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/366382/age-envy-kevin-d-williamson http://www.nationalreview.com/article/366208/lefts-reality-problem-rich-lowry  

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Minimum Wage Ideology

In The Washington Post Online, George Will writes Raise minimum wage? It’s iffy. Excerpts: If you think it is irrelevant that most minimum-wage earners are not poor. Most minimum-wage workers are not heads of households. More than half are students or other

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Israeli Health Care System

From ObamaCare Should Take Lessons from Israel in American Thinker: Health care services in Israel account for 7.7% of GDP (the overall average in OECD countries is 9.5%); the difference partly reflects the relatively youthful population (27.9% under 15) compared with the

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Obsession with Debt

“Nothing is more advantageous to the socialists in our midst than a futile and confusing preoccupation with debt. Thomas Babington Macaulay provides some useful historical perspective in his discussion of Britain’s fiscal straits at the end of the twelve-year War

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Best of Rebel Yid 2013 Part II

Capitalism is not as much about the channeling of greed as it is about the competition of ideas. Government and bureaucracy thwart ideas. Capitalism works best when knowledge and power converge.  Hundreds of financial regulatory agencies failed to avert the economic

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Reading 2013 12 12

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/12/who_the_democrats_really_are.html    

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Free to Think

“People cannot think unless they are free to think. Government rules and regulations literally prevent thought and prevent experimentation. A free market is a massive experiment in competing ideas, the most productive of which win out. Most of the experiments

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A Wealth Distribution Machine

From Investor’s Business Daily, How Much Wealth Distribution is Enough? The CBO study breaks down the country by income into five equal groups, or quintiles. It found the top 40% paid more than 100% of all the income taxes, while

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Category IV Health Care

Jeffery Singer writes in Reason Online, Health Care’s Third-Party Spending Trap: Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman, in his masterpiece “Free to Choose,” wrote of four ways to spend money: Category I—You spend your money on something for yourself. Here you are

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Reading the Right, Wrongly

From Dennis Preager at National Review Online, Learning the Wrong Lessons from Nazism: The first lesson was that the Right is evil, not merely wrong. Because Nazism has been successfully labelled right wing, virtually every right-wing position and leader has

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Inevitably Empty

From Sultan Knish, The Inevitable Hillary: The more you listen to Hillary, the more you realize that she doesn’t have  ideas, she has cliches. String together a bunch of cliches and you have a  Hillary speech. String together a bunch

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Who Are the Unemployed?

  At a business meeting we had an economist  share his views of the economy.  One comment he made was that only a minuscule portion of the unemployed were on government assistance.  I found this comment curious and certainly counterintuitive.

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Cheap and Unavailable Health Care

“And while there is some concern nationally about the number of doctors in the general profession, there is acute concern about the number of doctors who are willing to see patients enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, and other government-run programs. Medicare

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Rebel Yid Best of 2013 Part I

Just as blind optimism blunts our awareness of risk, excessive pessimism blunts our awareness of opportunity.  Once an institution or bureaucracy is formed to combat a social problem then the actual solution becomes a threat to that institution.  The employees

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The Real Cost of Regulation

“A fourth threat – especially apparent in the United States – is the mounting cost of the law. By this I do not mean the $94.5 billion a year that the US federal government spends on law making, law interpretation

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The Poverty Industry

Charles Martin writes in Pajamas Media, The End of Poverty in America: In any case, though, this seems to be a solution in search of a problem, because there is no poverty in America, and I can prove it. According

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Addicted to Bad Ideas

From the National Review Editors  The Minimum Wages of Politics: In any case, the main problem facing poor families is not a low minimum wage, but high unemployment. While the president likes to cite poorly understood income figures (which tell

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Convenient Inequality

James Pethokoukis writes Obama’s big inequality speech: short on facts and vision in the AEIdeas: excerpt: Here’s the bottom line: America’s pro-market turn some three decades ago reversed what then seemed like unstoppable national decline. (Nations that didn’t make that

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