Month: August 2010

culture

Atlas did not shrug

The cathedral has pursued a policy of compromising with and absorbing competing elites – thus it both allowed the big banks to capture the regulators (resulting in financial crisis, but consolidating the elite’s power over ordinary Americans) and allowed the Soviet Union to infiltrate the US government (thus causing wars and communist victories, but consolidating …

economics

The cost of government

Fleischer explains why he is not hiring. He must spend $74,000 to provide Sally with an $59,000 salary, of which after tax she gets $44,000 plus $12,000 in benefits. Plus he faces large uncertainty that these costs may be arbitrarily and unpredictably increased. The recent substantial increases in the cost of employing people have not …

economics

Rush Limbaugh – smarter than ten thousand ecology PhDs

Back when BP’s oil was spouting into the gulf of Mexico, Rush told us: “The beach will fix itself” “More oil spilled every year in Africa, in Nigeria, than so far in the Gulf, so it’s not unique. It’s not exceptional. It’s not the largest. Mexico had a spill that larger than this, nobody talks …

culture

A solution to the gay marriage and the covenant marriage problem

The Other McCain agrees.  Get the government out of the marriage business. Let each church decide for itself what marriage is, which views the government should ignore, and let people draw up what contracts they choose for living together. You have the right to contract.  Let us have gay nuptial contracts, not gay marriages. And …

economics

Palin Power

According to polls, Palin’s Support for a Candidate Doesn’t Matter or Is Mostly Negative, yet we observe that  in practice that when Palin endorses a candidate that is way behind, that candidate shoots up in the polls, and quite often wins. There are several possible explanations of this People tend to give politically correct replies …