Monthly Archives: August 2022

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

The Evolution of Republicanism

We will always have elites in a technical world and we are free to choose the elites we respect.  What has happened is a segment of elites  does not return the respect, inviting contempt.  When these elites lose respect and this leadership becomes entrenched and unaccountable, the people or the new republicanism seek clumsy tools to influence these institutions.   This is a sound warning from the author.  

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Books That Changed My Views

ronically the system that recognized the permanence of human flaws, the Lockean influence on the American Constitution, has proven far less oppressive than the systems that believed in the malleability of human nature.

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Principles and Ideology

Principles are not accountable to ideologies; ideologies are accountable to principles.

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Radical Omnipotence

“I care less about whether the top personal income-tax rate is 39 percent or 36 percent than I do about whether we can pick one and stick to it for a few decades at least, and, more generally, about ensuring that we do not undertake big and disruptive changes to the policy environment without real consensus and careful deliberation. But instead of that conservative approach, every time a party achieves a temporary majority in Congress or control of the White House, its leaders promise revolution and a radical reordering of taxes, regulations, incentives, terms of trade, and everything else they can think of. “

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Covert Spending

“Subsidized credit is the coward’s way of spending money on friends and cronies, because spending-by-lending allows you to list these subsidies as “assets” on your books rather than characterizing them as spending.”

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Why are Stock Buybacks Bad?

When a company buys back shares they buy it from shareholders who willingly sell their shares to deploy their capital elsewhere. When they sell their shares the gain is subject to taxes, so it is not like a buyback generates no tax revenues (unless the shares are sold by non taxable endowments or non profits).

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