…is the American way. Michael Barone reviews Megan McArdle’s new book
[Update a couple minutes later]
This bit is interesting:
Her advice is to avoid enterprises that are in long-term decline, such as General Motors starting in the 1970s. In business and public policy, try to learn from well-conducted experiments — but recognize that successful trials can’t always be replicated on a large scale.
I think that also applies to NASA human spaceflight as practiced for the past fifty years.
Marcia Smith has a good description of the highlights, including the discussion on space safety on Tuesday afternoon, at which I felt like the elephant in the room that no one talked about. It was an excellent conference.
Every generation has its foolish adherents to Marxism, ignorant of or unable to learn from history. It is, sadly, a seductive idea to the weak of mind and those incapable of critical thinking.
California environmentalists may not be very happy with Jerry Brown and his high-speed train to nowhere.
Will it finally be lifted?
It was always an economically idiotic policy.
The billionaires are starting to line up behind Hillary.
Of course, it’s not necessarily stupid. There’s no intrinsic reason that plutocrats would give a damn about the country.
Traditional capital flows from nonprofits to investment banking are being disintermediated. People, causes and businesses that need capital have access through the internet, social media and crowdfunding platforms to capital that they simply could not access before. As this trend grows, crowds will demonstrate a different sort of wisdom, sometimes funding causes that foundations wouldn’t or entrepreneurs that VCs wouldn’t.
The JOBS bill was one of the few bi-partisan things that Congress had done recently that will actually help the economy and provide more opportunities for true wealth and job creation.
Time to make it taxable.
I agree.
On Tuesday, the president of these United States called for an end to the “rancorous argument over the proper size of the federal government,” so that he might move forward with his economic agenda uninhibited by “stale political arguments.” It was an interesting moment. The president’s childlike faith in his own ability to direct resources according to his own vision is almost touching in its way, though when the actual costs are accounted for it is terrifying. The president’s understanding of how the economy works is about as sophisticated as was my understanding of anatomy and nutrition at the age of four: Lean this way and we’ll strengthen the middle class, lean that way and we’ll nourish the working poor. He doesn’t even understand the debate that he wants to preempt: It is not only a question of the size of government but a question of what government does.
He only knows what he knows.
The questions we habitually ask —“Is the government spending too much? Is it spending enough?” — are without meaning in and of themselves. It matters what the government is spending on. Spending X percent of GDP to defeat Hitler is one thing, spending it to subsidize Solyndra is another. Government must always be recalibrated in light of current conditions: war or peace, boom or bust, expansion or decay. The debate about the size and scope of government can be “stale” only if you fail to understand that its relevance is constant and eternal.
It will never end, because there will always be those who want to expand it far beyond its abilities to exercise power over others.
…will he continue it tonight?
Yes. Next question?