By Henry Oliner The life force of the swamp is the tax system.  It has grown monumentally complex from the thousands of lobbyist swamp creatures and the thousands of special interests who have learned how to thrive in the hazardous

from Gene Epstein’s departing column at Barron’s- Keep Asking the Big Questions: I often paraphrase Winston Churchill on democracy when confronting a critic of the financial markets: They’re the worst way to allocate capital investment, except for all the others. The

THE DISCONNECT BETWEEN LIBERAL ASPIRATIONS AND LIBERAL HOUSING POLICY IS KILLING COASTAL U.S. CITIES Why your alarmism over Trump is dangerous for democracy HOW SILICON VALLEY DIVIDED SOCIETY AND MADE EVERYONE RAGING MAD Democrats should be terrified by this governor’s

None of us can escape our own hypocrisy, but how can Hillary blame misogyny for her loss when she was married to a serial abuser (whom she enabled), her assistant’s husband was convicted of predatory behavior, and one of her

Jeff Sessions Restores the Rule of Law  It must be confusing for an authoritarian like Trump to be so criticized for moving authority back to Congress. Trump Was Right to End Unconstitutional Obamacare Subsidies Technocrats of all ideological stripes consistently

I have no intention of re-entering the gun debate after the tragedy in Las Vegas. All the points have been made before and politicizing it again is just offensive. I am interested if machine learning and artificial intelligence can predict

From Kevin Williamson in NR, From Ritual to Bromance The United States of America is a big, diverse, complex modern country with big, diverse, complex modern problems. The most significant of those problems are never going to be “solved” because they

from Liberalism’s Summer of ’17 by Daniel Henninger at The WSJ Economists for Citigroup have called cities like New York and San Francisco “plutonomies”—urban economies propped up by a plutocratic minority, which is to say, young professionals inured to both taxes and nearby

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in The Twenty First Century, has spawned a cottage industry of dissent.  Piketty uses masses of data to illuminate a growth in inequality, that he surmises is an inevitable result of capitalism and can only be resolved

from Selena Zito,  Why the generation after millennials will vote Republican “Politically, Generation Z is liberal-moderate with social issues, like support for marriage equality and civil rights, and moderate-conservative with fiscal and security issues,” said Brauer. “While many are not connected

Inequality is a core political controversy, usually referring to inequality in wealth or income, concepts which are not synonymous.  We tend to equate inequality in income with inequality in power, but that does not always hold true.  If it was

Kathy Griffin’s offensive display with a fake severed head of President Trump was made even more pathetic by her whining victimhood display afterwards. She tried to blame those white men who keep oppressing women like her. How dare you be

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

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

I have spent some time contemplating the possible effects of AI and machine learning.  We could be facing a future where not only truck drivers and cab drivers are replaced by autonomous vehicles but technical thinking jobs can be replaced