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 and economic collapse Well guess what. The masses have been trying to vote themselves rich, …
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 even worse trouble than the US. Arnold Kling predicts a US debt crisis between 2015 …
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 the elite’s power over ordinary Americans). As Dusk tells us: look at how much regulation …
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 taxes on his income because employed by the state, but does not actually do any …
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 been reflected in substantial reductions in people’s wages, thus wages are substantially above market clearing …
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 about except apparently me†And behold: The beach has fixed itself. The reason that BP …
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 the same for heterosexual relationships: If a seventeen year old girl can contract for gigantic …
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 to polls, rather than what they genuinely believe. Republican party activists do what Palin tells …
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, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science-like the South Sea Islanders making …