Monthly Archives: February 2015

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

Untouched by Envy

Don Boudreaux reviews Edmund Phelps’s “Mass Flourishing” at Cafe Hayek Excerpts: Piketty tells of a one-dimensional, dreary, and mechanical world in which wealth grows independently of human volition and where each person is fixated on the amount of money in

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Smearing Soon

from N.Y. Times, Greenpeace Smear Warming Skeptic Dr. Willie Soon Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon is no stranger to the “art” of the media smear. A courageous scientist and outspoken critic of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming, AGW, Dr. Soon has been subjected

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Climate McCarthyism

from A Shameful Climate Witch Hunt by Rich Lowry in The Wall Street Journal Let the climate inquisition begin. The ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, Raul Grijalva of Arizona, has written to seven universities about seven researchers

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Health Care’s Privileged Status

from The New Yorker, a review on the book America’s Bitter Pill by Steven Brill.  The review is by Malcolm Gladwell. excerpt: Goldhill takes a far more radical position than the economic team at the White House does. He believes that most

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Crushing Skepticism

Though Scorned by Colleagues, a Climate-Change Skeptic Is Unbowed– from The New York Times by Michael Wines Excerpts: Dr. Christy is an outlier on what the vast majority of his colleagues consider to be a matter of consensus: that global warming

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Environmental McCarthyism

How Media Bias Censors the Debate on Climate Change -by Liz Peak at the Fiscal Times excerpts: Recently, Lennart Bengtsson, a research fellow at the University of Reading, quit the board, saying in his resignation letter, “I had not been expecting such

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Economic Ambitions Exceed Our Powers

How Can The Middle Class Be Saved? It’s Not An Easy Job- by Robert Samuelson in Investor’s Business Daily Excerpt: History teaches us that we have less control over our economic destiny than is often assumed. At every juncture in

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Reading 2015 02 25

Charge: ‘Clintons turned the State Department into a racket to line their own pockets’ How Can The Middle Class Be Saved? It’s Not An Easy Job How Media Bias Censors the Debate on Climate Change – The Secular Religion of

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Churchill’s Road to Serfdom

From National Review, Lion to the Last by Larry Arnn: Excerpts: In June 1945, a month after the Germans’ surrender, with the general-election campaign under way, Winston Churchill gave a 21-minute speech by radio. He was 70 years old. To the shock

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Getting the Causality Backwards

from The TribLive The disease that is government by Antony Davies & James R. Harrigan Getting the causality backward again, government acts as if a college degree causes, rather than results from, success. As it did in the housing market, the

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The Ethics of the Clinton Foundation

from The Wall Street Journal, The Clinton Foundation Super PAC by Kimberley Strassel: With the news this week that Mrs. Clinton—the would-be occupant of the White House—is landing tens of millions from foreign governments for her shop, it’s long past

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Clinton Commodities Trading- A Reminder

from The Shiny Object Fallacy by Kevin Williamson in National Review Online The wise political entrepreneur uses more opaque methods to make his purchases. Hillary Rodham Clinton walked away from the inquiry into her remarkably successful commodities-trading career unscathed, in

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Theological Science

Whether their views are right or wrong on a particular issue, the scientific community has taken on a partly theological character, with top scientists achieving something of the role of supreme clerics.  This approach ignores the reality that widely held

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In Sync Economics

“Capitalism succeeds 90% of the time. Central economic planning fails 90% of the time. The arduous task of our leaders is to get that 10% where central planning improves our lot in sync with the 10% failure rate of capitalism.”

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Selling the Illusion

Don Boudreaux quotes from David Mamet in his excellent blog, Cafe Hayek: Government is only a business.  Past the roads, defense, and sewers, it sells excitement and self-satisfaction to the masses, and charges them an entertainment tax, exacted in wealth and

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Middle Class Squeeze

from 15 Statistics That Destroy Liberal Narratives by John Hawkins in Townhall: Sentier Research, a firm led by former census officials, used census data to tabulate an estimate of the median household income — how much is earned by families at the

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Clarifying Science

from Nature.com, Twenty tips for interpreting scientific claims excerpts: Bias is rife. Experimental design or measuring devices may produce atypical results in a given direction. For example, determining voting behaviour by asking people on the street, at home or through the

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Trading for the Public Good

from Selfishness, Greed, and Capitalism by Christopher Snowden The observation that man can help others by helping himself is easily mistaken for a celebration of greed and selfishness. And since greed is morally objectionable, nothing good should come of it – the

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Reality of Police Threat

from 15 Statistics That Destroy Liberal Narratives by John Hawkins in Townhall: In ’92, the general sense was that New York was rotting from the inside. Now, crime feels like the exception rather than the rule. The city is the

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