…for delivering so little and sending students into a lifetime of debt.
The Occumorons were protesting in the wrong places.
Category Archives: Economics
Climate Change
…doesn’t have to be all that bad.
Of course it does. How else can they justify their collectivist power grabs?
Affirmative Action
The sad irony:
The biggest change since Grutter, though, has nothing to do with Court membership. It is the mounting empirical evidence that race preferences are doing more harm than good — even for their supposed beneficiaries. If this evidence is correct, we now have fewer African-American physicians, scientists, and engineers than we would have had using race-neutral admissions policies. We have fewer college professors and lawyers, too. Put more bluntly, affirmative action has backfired.
As do many “progressive” policies. And it’s sometimes not clear what the real intentions were.
The Ethanol Scam
It’s long past time to end it.
This by itself is reason enough to end the nonsense of letting Iowa be so crucial to nominating presidential candidates.
Better yet, of course, would be fixing the Constitution (perhaps by overturning Wickard) to end all kinds of nonsense like this.
Women In The Workplace
I liked this comment: “Liberals don’t believe in Darwin except when they’re ridiculing Christians for not believing in Darwin. If children of successful parents turn out better than children of jobless single mothers, that just proves we’re not spending enough on welfare and public schools.”
Starving People For A Green Ideology
…for a green ideology, and corporate greed:
…many worry that Guatemala’s poor are already suffering from the diversion of food to fuel. “There are pros and cons to biofuel, but not here,” said Misael Gonzáles of C.U.C., a labor union for Guatemala’s farmers. “These people don’t have enough to eat. They need food. They need land. They can’t eat biofuel, and they don’t drive cars.”
This isn’t a market failure. It’s a deliberate distortion of markets through government policy. In some sense, it’s almost as criminally egregious as the behavior of the British during The Hunger in Ireland.
Communism
One of the features that distinguished Bolshevism from Tsarism was the insistence of Lenin and his followers on the need for a complete overhaul of society. Old-fashioned despots may modernize in piecemeal fashion if doing so seems necessary to maintain their power, but they do not aim at remaking society on a new model, still less at fashioning a new type of humanity. Communist regimes engaged in mass killing in order to achieve these transformations, and paradoxically it is this essentially totalitarian ambition that has appealed to liberals. Here as elsewhere, the commonplace distinction between utopianism and meliorism is less than fundamental. In its predominant forms, liberalism has been in recent times a version of the religion of humanity, and with rare exceptions – Russell is one of the few that come to mind – liberals have seen the Communist experiment as a hyperbolic expression of their own project of improvement; if the experiment failed, its casualties were incurred for the sake of a progressive cause. To think otherwise – to admit the possibility that the millions who were judged to be less than fully human suffered and died for nothing – would be to question the idea that history is a story of continuing human advance, which for liberals today is an article of faith. That is why, despite all evidence to the contrary, so many of them continue to deny Communism’s clear affinities with Fascism. Blindness to the true nature of Communism is an inability to accept that radical evil can come from the pursuit of progress.
And like “progressive,” “progress” is in the eye of the beholder.
The College Textbook Racket
This is one of the things that’s going to implode when the higher-ed bubble pops.
Sorry, Mr. President
…but it is a spending problem.
More Critique Of The “Constitutional Law” Professor
…from Richard Epstein:
Unfortunately, Seidman has the causation reversed. The reason why the situation today is so perilous is that Congress is not strictly bound by the Constitution, just as Seidman advocates. There are currently no constitutional constraints limiting the discretion of Congress to decide what tax burden will be placed on what groups for what reasons. In fact, the only restraint on taxation is a broken-down system of public deliberation, which results in a fruitless question to find, as Seidman puts it, “a common vocabulary to express aspirations that, at the broadest level, everyone can embrace.” Otherwise, Congress is free to dispense tax favors and impose tax burdens as though there were no tomorrow.
…The older conception of public goods has been entirely rejected by all justices on the Supreme Court regardless of their political persuasion, so we have a current legal regime that is just the one Professor Seidman craves. On taxing and spending, we have a constitutional structure that is not informed by a single action or statement of James Madison or any other founder. Instead, our structure allows Congress to debate the many vexing problems of current times unhindered by constitutional principle, passing statutes whose “wisdom or fairness” is beyond the power and the competence of the courts to judge.
We need more, not less, adherence to the Madison’s Constitution. And as he notes, strictly followed, Madison’s principles would require a flat tax. A progressive one is unconstitutional.