Author Archive
Impertinent Questions: Why Take Elections Seriously?
Posted by: | CommentsThere’s really no reason to take elections seriously.
I’m not talking about voters. We need to take them very seriously indeed. A large portion of our lives has come under political control. Voting the wrong way can cause the industry you work for to be bankrupted, or nationalized. The damage caused by a poor choice of President in 2008 will take many years to undo.
I mean politicians don’t need to take election law seriously. Vote fraud and other irregularities have become staples of our elections. Like most crimes, they are perpetrated on a rational basis, by people who have measured risk against reward. The risk of punishment for election tampering is minimal, while the rewards are huge. There is virtually no chance a major race will be invalidated due to ballot or financial irregularities. The winners of elections gain control over the very agencies that would investigate their campaigns. Once victory is secured, the worst consequences awaiting dirty politicians are fines, which deep-pocketed contributors will be happy to help them repay.
Impertinent Questions: Who Owns Our Money?
Posted by: | CommentsTalk of tax cuts fills the air, which means the Left is getting fidgety. They’ve been forced to change from delirious big spenders who see a billion dollars as a rounding error, into flinty-eyed deficit hawks who insist raising taxes to reduce our massive budget deficit is the only responsible course of action. The speed of this transformation has left them dizzy. Consider these quotes from President Obama’s town hall meeting last Monday: Read More→
Whistling Past The JournoList Graveyard
Posted by: | CommentsLeftist writers and pundits have been trying to stroll past the crater left by the Daily Caller’s JournoList bombshell, hands stuffed in their pockets and eyes rigidly forward. Over at the Caller, Jim Treacher provides a roundup of reaction from across the blogosphere (look for a familiar name!) He includes a few gems from liberals, including David Corn of Mother Jones asking, “And this is the best they can do?”
Taylor Marsh grins through the flop-sweat to assure us conspiracy to defraud the dwindling audience of the dinosaur media, and slander innocent people as racists, is no big deal when “avowed and openly progressive reporters” do it. I guess we’re supposed to take it as a given that all progressives are liars and smear artists, so we’ve got no right to complain when they’re caught lying and smearing people. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, progressives gotta try throwing a white sheet over Fred Barnes to save Obama from a scandal that should have finished off his campaign.
The symphony of whistles from the Left as they try to creep past the JournoList graveyard is deafening. It’s not going to work, comrades. This scandal is going to draw blood. Here are a few reasons why the wounds won’t be closing any time soon:
How To Be Poor
Posted by: | CommentsExtreme poverty is not a difficult condition to reach. All you have to do is remove yourself to a desolate wilderness area, and exert the minimum effort necessary to feed and shelter yourself. Any increase in activity, or human interaction, will make you less poor.
It’s more difficult to become poor if you start off with the advantages of modern technology, surrounded by the incredible human resources of a capitalist republic. Here are some techniques that both individuals, and nations, find equally reliable for impoverishing themselves:
The Dreadful Equation
Posted by: | CommentsWhat is money? It’s a medium of exchange – you use it to make purchases. To the average individual, money is also a means of cooperation. It transforms the value of your labor into a very efficient form of communication.
Suppose you’re a skilled chef who knows very little about carpentry. You could spend many hours struggling to make a bookshelf, producing a rickety and unlovely piece of furniture. It would be better to find a skilled carpenter and offer to trade your gourmet cooking for a well-constructed bookshelf.
Money makes this transaction vastly more efficient – you can choose from many different carpenters and compare their prices. Great companies have formed to produce mass quantities of bookshelves, which is much more effective than hiring out individual carpenters to construct shelves on demand, resulting in much lower prices to the consumer. You don’t have to spend time finding a carpenter you can trust, then waste more time haggling over the relative value of stuffed pheasant versus six feet of shelving. The value of your cooking skill is converted into money, and so is the value of the bookshelf. This is much better than bartering. Money is a swift, versatile, and precise vehicle for cooperative effort.
A Word to the Weary
Posted by: | CommentsI get a lot of email from people who ask if the final degeneration from capitalism to collectivism is now inevitable. Entitlements are never repealed, after all, and we just got saddled with a back-breaking entitlement, piled atop a national debt that was already crushing us. It seems like it would take a miracle just to undo the damage Barack Obama has done in a single year… and that would just get us back to where George Bush left us. Dependency, unemployment, economic contraction, and socialist politics are a perpetual-motion engine of national decline.
I also hear from people who wonder just how bad things really are. If they’re so awful, we should be thinking about unthinkable alternatives. If not, maybe we should follow David Frum’s advice, and work out reasonable terms of surrender with our new socialist overlords. After all, Obama’s not the first guy to wipe his feet with the tattered “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. Perhaps none of the wounds from 2009 and 2010 are all that deep, and we’re just a few elections away from Bush-era prosperity again.
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