Monthly Archives: December 2014

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

A Code Word for Tyranny

University of Chicago economist John Cochrane has written one of the most unique and insightful perspectives on inequality in his blog, The Grumpy Economist.  Read Why and how we care about inequality in its entirety.  It is about 6 pages long. excerpts:

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Is Inequality Always Bad?

University of Chicago economist John Cochrane has written one of the most unique and insightful perspectives on inequality in his blog, The Grumpy Economist.  Read Why and how we care about inequality in its entirety.  It is about 6 pages long. excerpts:

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Financial Bloat

A black hole for our best and brightest by Frank Tankersley at The Washington Post Excerpts: It’s not that finance is inherently bad — on the contrary, a well-functioning financial system is critical to a market economy. The problem is,

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The Laffer Curve at 40

From Bloomberg Businessweek Haley Griffin writes The Napkin Doodle That Launched the Supply-Side Revolution How would you classify the Laffer Curve today? Laffer: It’s the same as always. It works. It’s not Republican, it’s not Democratic, it’s not conservative, it’s not liberal,

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A Warrior for the Cause

From Jonah Goldberg in Townhall,  Jonathan Gruber Should’ve Been Time’s Person of the Year For similar reasons, I think Time missed an opportunity in not putting Gruber on the cover. Tea partiers and Wall Street occupiers disagree on a great

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The Politics of Nostalgia

William Galston writes Populism Rises on a Wave of Frustration in The Wall Street Journal excerpts: Populism offers many satisfactions. Its narrative is clear and easy to understand. It identifies villains—corrupt officials, unresponsive bureaucracies, arrogant elites, large corporations, giant banks,

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The Ends-justifying-the-means Way of Governance

Victor David Hanson writes Epitaph for Hope and Change in The National Review excerpts: At home, a natural recovery after a deep recession was aborted by massive government borrowing that was wasted on abetting crony capitalists and shoring up collapsing union and

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Mutated Progressivism

Our progressive history has mutated from a desire to protect the public from big business to such a highly regulated state that it serves to protect big business at the expense of new job creation (competitors). This is especially true

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The Capital of Incarceration

Conrad Black writes Eric Garner’s America in The National Review. Excerpts: The United States has six to twelve times as many incarcerated people per capita as other prosperous democracies: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. This appalling state of

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Undermining Cherished Narratives

Jeff Jacoby writes in The Boston Globe, When ‘justice’ trumps accuracy, journalism loses Excerpts: But Rolling Stone’s blockbuster has imploded, undone by independent reporting at The Washington Post that found glaring contradictions and irregularities with the story, and egregious failures in the

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Gruber’s Conflict of Interest

from Gruber’s Pathetic Congressional Testimony in The National Review by John Fund: Despite his constant memory lapses, what can we fairly deduce from the role of Jonathan Gruber in Obamacare? A person who advised the Congressional Budget Office in a formal capacity

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The Gini Distortion

In The Wall Street Journal Phil Gramm and Michael Solon write How to Distort Income Inequality- The Piketty-Saez data ignore changes in tax law and fail to count noncash compensation and Social Security benefits. excerpt: An equally extraordinary distortion in the

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A Chance for a Coalition

  Conrad Black writes Eric Garner’s America in The National Review. Excerpts: African Americans must not imagine that, even though they may be the principal and most frequent victims of the police and prosecution and court and prison systems of

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Cocooned from Independent Thought

From National Review Matthew Continetti writes Liberalism is a Hoax. Excerpts: What are the apocalyptic predictions of climate alarmists but Sorelian myths intended to shape legislation, regulation, and the culture in the radicals’ favor? To merely profess agnosticism on the subject of global warming is

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The Transformation is Unvieled

Victor Davis Hanson writes in The National Review, Liberalism in Ruins Excerpts: Obamism did not even deliver on its extravagant promises of a new ethos of ending crony capitalism, the revolving door, lobbyists in government, and government corruption. Indeed, Obama will

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Getting Beyond the Bad Data on the ACA

Ms. Lummis’s story during the Gruber hearing about her husband’s death demonstrates a tool often used by the left that the right needs to learn.  It is not good enough to attack bad policies like Obamacare with theories and analysis

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Compassion without Results

From the October 2014 issue of Hillsdale’s Imprimis, William Voegeli writes The Case Against Liberal Compassion Excerpt: It follows, then, that the answer to the question of how liberals who profess to be anguished about other people’s suffering can be so

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An Economy of Trust

In a few previous posts I explored the dynamic of new commercial enterprises like Uber (read Uber Libertarians in American Thinker)  that defied the ability of the regulatory state to deal with the rapid development of very large commercial communities.

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Myths to Serve a Social Purpose

Victor Davis Hanson writes Lying for the Cause in The National Review.  I was considering a piece on the recent accumulation of lies befalling the progressive movement, but there is nothing I could write than could touch Hanson’s piece. Excerpts:

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