A couple of hundred years ago, the conventional wisdom was that democracy with broad voter participation was unstable, violent, ruinous, and short lived. A hundred years or so ago the world moved to mass democracy, universal franchise. Many people predicted that this would result in the masses trying to vote themselves rich, resulting in social …
Author: Jim
The end is in sight
For the last hundred years or so, people have been predicting that the welfare and affirmative action state would collapse eventually. Well, it seems that “eventually†is getting close. Arnold Kling has a list of links showing that all the welfare state social democracies are going to hell in a handbasket, with everyone else in …
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 …
Treasury committed to supporting too big to fail
Government lacks the will to allow to big to fail firms to fail, and the will and competence to regulate them. If a firm is too big to fail, it will take advantage of that fact, leading to crisis and massive tax payer losses.
Seventy percent taxes coming eventually.
In Greece, payroll tax, value added tax, and income tax adds up to around seventy percent. It is perfectly clear that this is far above the Laffer limit – the private sector in Greece is largely underground and not quite cash, like a third world country. If someone is employed by the state he pays …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
Pajamas media has found an excellent quote from Richard Feynman, which skewers every global warmer: “The Pleasure of Finding things out†by Richard Feynman, page 187 We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations and they make lists and they do statistics, but they do not thereby become established science, …