politics

Koch brothers right to sue widow

Cato was controlled by four men, all of them politically libertarian: The two Koch brothers, Edward Crane, long serving President, and William Niskan. The anti libertarian right wing blog Bona Fides favorably cites the far left pro Islam blog Counterpunch, in attacking the Koch brothers. Crane and Niskan have taken an alarmingly large amount of money out of the Cato institute in the form of generous salaries and benefits, the …

economics

Warren Buffet doubts gold

Warren Buffet points out that land produces wealth, and gold does not. His argument leads to the conclusion that had a Roman in the time of Caesar invested a talent in land, or deposited some money with the money lenders to earn interest, his descendents would now be worth 1067 talents, or about one trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion dollars, whereas had that Roman buried a talent of gold …

global warming

What the DenialGate fake reveals about warmists

Peter Gleik phished some genuine files from the Heartland Institute.  The files revealed what everyone knows,  what no one has ever denied, and what the Heartland Institute has frequently announced:  That the Heartland Institute is funding science that is skeptical of global warming, though its funding is ludicrously tiny, while Peter Gleik received half a million dollars to attack skeptics and help the warming cause. He then created what he …

economics

Laffer Maximum

Britain decided to increase income tax on the top one percent of taxpayers to fifty percent.  Predictably, revenues from the top one percent of tax payers collapsed. This demonstrates the entirely unsurprising fact that a income tax of 50% plus VAT tax of 20% for an effective tax of 60%, is well above the Laffer limit. I doubt that this came as any surprise to those imposing the tax.  More …

culture

Reproduction

Pretty soon, just as heterosexuals who are having fun are no longer “gay”, heterosexuals who have committed to permanently be together will no longer be “married”.

culture

The virtuous upper class?

According to Charles Murray in  the top 20 percent of citizens in income and education exemplify the core founding of industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religious observance.  They raise their children in stable homes. This is not my observation. My observation is that the the higher the socioeconomic status of the male, the better his behavior, but the higher the socioeconomic status of the female, the worse her behavior.

economics

Inflation

Total sales are rising ten percent a year in nominal terms.    Surprise surprise, shadowstats estimates ten percent inflation per year if we use the measure of inflation that was used in the the 1980s.    Hawaiian Libertarian reports that that is pretty much what he is seeing when he puts his money down. So what is the true rate of inflation? There is no one true rate of inflation, since to …