A very good overview of the current state of affairs by Stewart Money over at The Space Review. It’s a mess, and it’s not going to change until we start to take more COTS-like approaches throughout, not just for NASA but DoD as well.
Category Archives: Economics
If You Can’t Learn From Detroit
You’re probably incapable of learning:
When American cities embraced the high cost, high regulation statist model two generations or so ago, they were often the richest and most dynamic places in the country. Increasingly “progressive” policies, with higher wages for unionized teachers, bigger bureaucracies enforcing tighter regulations, more “planning” by qualified technocrats and more government services and benefits to improve the quality of residents’ lives were supposed to take the American city into a new golden age.
It’s hard to think of many social experiments that have more disastrously failed. Now many of these once flourishing cities are hollowed out shells, while around them suburbs and increasingly exurbs flourish away from the deadening influence of urbanist politics. None of this affects the hold of progressive and urbanist ideology on true believers; if anything, they believe even more passionately in the cause. Obviously the problem is that we haven’t spent enough on enough tenured teachers, haven’t written enough new regulations and established enough new bureaus to enforce them, haven’t published enough white papers by enough credentialed planners, haven’t extracted enough taxes and provided enough services. If we could just tax the suburbs and exurbs more heavily and spend more of the money in the cities, all would be well.
It’s a classic case of the definition of insanity.
[Noon update]
No, it’s not just Detroit.
The Contraception Fight
Some free-market lessons. It is key that we decouple health insurance from employment. It has really screwed things up for decades. If there’s going to be a tax deduction for it, it should go to the individual, not the employer.
A New Econoblog
New to me, anyway. As a result of his unwarranted and biased persecution by the head of his university, I’ve discovered Steve Landsburg’s blog. It’s good stuff.
“Green” And Wasteful
The high cost of “clean” energy.
That’s what happens when you have scientific and economic illiterates making decisions about how to spend other peoples’ money.
The Left’s War On Science
…as exemplified by their endless fascination with electric cars.
Gas Prices
This is going to be fodder for some devastating campaign ads this fall. As I’ve said before, they should end with the tag line: “Obama got what he wanted. Did you?”
Via VDH, who has a lot more thoughts.
[Update a while later]
Sorry, link was missing originally. It’s there now.
The Corporate Income Tax
Yes, don’t play with the rate — just get rid of the whole overhead accounting structure necessary for corporations to do tax collection for Leviathan. And she’s right about the differential effects of (big business) regulations on small business as well.
The Future Will Be Better Than We Think
…if politicians don’t ruin it. Unfortunately, that’s a pretty big if. Ruining the future is what politicians generally do.
Oh, and here’s the book in question
James Q. Wilson’s Insight
…improved America. As opposed to the insight of (say) Barack Obama.
[UPdate a while later]
More (and lengthy) thoughts from Roger Kimball:
The Moral Sense is far from being anti-intellectual. But it is, in part, a cautionary tale about the dangers of taking intellectuals, especially academic intellectuals, too seriously. Given the presumption that education will broaden one’s perspective, it is curious that the chief danger is a narrowing of horizons. The peculiar combination of arrogance and despair that seems characteristic of homo academicus today breeds a remarkable obtuseness about many important questions. Wilson puts it thus: “Someone once remarked that the two great errors in moral philosophy are the belief that we know the truth and the belief that there is no truth to be known. Only people who have had the benefit of higher education seem inclined to fall into so false a choice.” It is a sobering thought that last year in the United States, some thirteen million students partook of that benefit.
Sobering indeed.