Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.
The New York Times has a long article about Edward Conard, a former Bains partner, who makes the case — a compelling one, I believe — that in America, the wealthy aren’t parasites, they’re economically useful. In a stagnant, agrarian class society, the wealthy simply live at the top, feeding
Continue readingAce manages to summarize in one short paragraph everything that’s wrong with the Obama administration’s approach to technology: I prefer the “Old” approach to emerging technology: We adopt new technology when it is better and cheaper than the old technology, not when it is worse and more expensive, with a government demanding
Continue readingThe SF Comical sounds surprised by the fact that the Facebook IPO did not end California’s financial problems. I think someone needs to watch Bill Whittle’s video, made roughly a year ago, but clearly pertinent today:
Continue readingThere’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
Continue readingDoes 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
Continue readingHere’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
Continue readingJohn 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
Continue readingWhat 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
Continue readingA 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
Continue readingI’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
Continue readingA 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
Continue readingThis 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?
Continue readingIt’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
Continue readingFor 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
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