Bookworm Room

There’s a famous story about Milton Friedman’s response when confronted with make-work projects: While traveling by car during one of his many overseas travels, Professor Milton Friedman spotted scores of road builders moving earth with shovels instead of modern machinery. When he asked why powerful equipment wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his host [...]

9 Comments »

Does history repeat itself? I fervently hope not. Ok, I have grudgingly thrown my support behind Mitt Romney. It’s not that I am excited about Romney as a candidate, but I am genuinely excited about the need to get Obama out of office before he does irreversible damage to this country. But, here is where [...]

17 Comments »

Here’s a Robert Samuelson article, “bye bye Keynes” that should give us all pause: the arguments he uses to write Keynes’ obituary are arguments that we all posited in our own excoriation of Keynes in years past, in response to a string of commentators, ranging from A to Z. I’ve been reviewing our last few [...]

3 Comments »

John Hawkins has pulled together some excellent Milton Friedman quotations.  I’m embarrassed to admit that, growing up in my Left wing, liberal arts enclave, I’d never heard of Friedman.  I wonder if early exposure to his ideas (and his charm) would have lifted me out of the darkness sooner. My favorite quotation from the Hawkins [...]

2 Comments »

What the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protestors don’t realize (yet) is that they have been suckered into becoming the agents of their own enslavement. Orwell had it so right in defining the Left because he was a man of the Left. The term “Orwellian” now refers to the Left’s use of terms to mean the [...]

19 Comments »

A friend sent this: This helps to understand the US debt: • U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000 • Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000 • New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000 • National debt: $14,271,000,000,000 • Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000 Let’s remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget. • Annual family income: $21,700 • Money the family spent: [...]

16 Comments »

I’ve periodically mentioned here a visit I made many years ago to the Tenement Museum in New York.  Every time I mention it, I make the same point:  the museum demonstrates America’s social mobility because census records show that the tenement’s descendents all moved upwards economically.  Grandpa Guiseppe or Grandma Sadie might have had a [...]

7 Comments »

A short time ago, my priest gave a sermon that addressed the deep sorrow and sense of worthlessness internalized by our parishioners that were unemployed. The point of the sermon, actually, was how the unemployed felt “useless” and demeaned for being unable to provide for their families, but that nobody in God’s family should ever [...]

34 Comments »

This picture showed up on my liberal friends’ posts at Facebook today: As for me, over the past two years, I’ve been spending my time looking at this picture, or ones very similar: The first image is about debt and the second is about deficit.  Is that the only difference?  Can someone please explain to [...]

23 Comments »

It’s been a few days since Obama’s ridiculous “Pass this bill now” moment before Congress, but he’s taken the show on the road, so Mark Steyn still has lots to say on the subject: On Thursday night, the president told a Democratic fundraiser in Washington that the Pass My Jobs Bill bill would create 1.9 [...]

3 Comments »

For those readers under 40 (and I know I have at least one), let me open this post by explaining what a Potemkin Village is.  The story goes (and it is a story) that when Catherine the Great traveled through late 18th century Russia, her lover and go-to guy Prince Gregori Potemkin would hasten to [...]

18 Comments »

Do you feel the need to be depressed today?  You do?  Good, because I’ve got just the thing for you (h/t Ricochet): Bottom line:  it’s the end of the world as we know it, and no matter who we elect (Obama or someone else), it’s not going to matter. Now please explain to me why [...]

17 Comments »

On the heels of Bookworm’s excellent, hard-hitting essay on narcissism comes a nice coda on man-made global warming that is emblematic of Bookworm’s theme. Because of major discoveries involving the interaction of atmospheric aerosols and cosmic radiation, “climate models will have to be revised,” stated a communication from CERN that promises to completely overhaul scientific [...]

12 Comments »

A Liberal friend had an epiphany of sorts, recently. She recounted to me how she saw a townhall meeting of senior citizens furiously protesting plans to cut back on their (state) health care insurance benefits. One speaker tried to point out to these senior citizens that they had pretty much collected everything that they themselves [...]

17 Comments »

Having done a flying visit through the Mediterranean, I’m scarcely in any position to make far reaching comments about the towns or countries I visited.  Nevertheless, I do feel competent to offer two very specific comments, one about Greece and one about Italy. Throughout our visit to Greece, there was a nationwide taxi strike taking [...]

6 Comments »

My favorite entry from Power Line People’s Choice awards: You should check them all out.

No Comments »

Here I am, sneaking in one last post before I head off.  (I’ve also set the blog up for some random Open Threads.)  Over at Salon, an unabashedly liberal webzine, an article examines the dreaded possibility that Obama might be a one-term president.  I found the article a little bit confusing, as it concedes that [...]

18 Comments »

Jeremy Fordham wrote me and asked if I would consider publishing a guest post. I said that, provided I got to be judge, jury and execution (meaning I could accept or reject a submission at will), I would be interested. Jeremy was willing to live with those terms, and submitted the following post, which I [...]

8 Comments »

The increasing disconnect between reality and Paul Krugman’s New York Times opinion articles was one of the things that led me to examine conservativism more closely.  In addition to disliking Krugman’s ideas, I’ve come to dislike Krugman himself, as his anger, embittered, accusatory, demonizing style is the antithesis of reasoned thinking and argument.  Peter Foster [...]

8 Comments »

We have an odd family friend. Fundamentally, she is a nice person and sports a very unconventional view of the world that occasionally emotes great insights into the human condition. She has a major flaw, however, one that she admits as a character flaw: she is an unabashed hater. Despite her husband, kids and friends [...]

40 Comments »

Oh dear, it appears the CBO has turned a tad pessimistic about its earlier prognostications on the economy, stimulus and ObamaCare, heralded as dogma and chiseled in stone tablets on the alters of the Left’s Temple of Orthodoxy.   Drinks all around for the Bookworm Room denizens that correctly anticipated the outcomes cited herein. It [...]

20 Comments »

Do you ever listen to Frank Caliendo?  He’s a talented impressionist who spends much of his time ragging on John Madden.  One of the things Caliendo claims that Madden does is restate his premise as if it’s a different conclusion, i.e., “Here’s a guy with mud on his jersey.  When you mix dirt and water, [...]

21 Comments »

Clear and funny.  I wish everyone would watch these short videos:

43 Comments »

We political junkies know this.  Are ordinary voters catching on? And as you read that, you might want to read this, which looks as the overreaching EPA and the wall it seems to have it.

45 Comments »

Since my detailed knowledge of economics is small, I’m wondering if this SF Chronicle article that tries to put this endless recession into an ordinary pattern, rather than treating it as an American anomaly, is spin or accurate?  All I know is that we bounced back faced under Reagan, and we bounced back fast under [...]

46 Comments »