It seems to have become my full-time job to correct this kind of thing. As for the notion that the new space policy “ends human spaceflight,” I feel like I’ve been playing whack-a-mole with that nonsense since February.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Egalitarian Policies
…that caused the economic disaster:
This does not strike me as a story about how income inequality caused the financial crisis. Rather, this is a story about how policies intended to reduce inequality had the unintended consequence of precipitating America’s worst economic slump since the Depression. It’s very important that we’re straight on what the story is, since different stories may have very different implications for policy. If the story is that the level of inequality itself—and not our ideas about or political reactions to it—indirectly caused the crisis, then we may think that narrowing the gap is a matter of urgent necessity. But if the story is that an ill-conceived political attempt to reduce inequality—and not the fact of inequality itself—led to apocalyptic economic devastation, then we may well conclude that it is better to refrain from equalising initiatives unless we are quite certain they will not backfire.
Darn those pesky unintended consequences.
Hyperinflation
What will it look like?
Oh, joy. With a bonus history of Chile.
Triage
The Dems don’t have enough campaign funds to go around. What, you mean they’re not going to pour all their money into Alvin Greene?
A Future History
How the US solved the Middle-East problem. You could almost say it was a final solution.
We Treat Them Too Well
Thoughts from Frank J. on the vermin that perennially infest the nation’s capital:
Anyway, I guess the whole idea for how our country would work was that we’d basically govern ourselves and hire some people — our representative and senators — to represent us in the federal government, as none of us have time for that. And since we’d all elect them together out of our entire population, we’d pick only the best people to do it.
But here’s the problem. Who are the people who tend to run for political office? Political office is hard to get and takes a lot of effort, so only ambitious people seek it. That wouldn’t be so bad if we got smart/ambitious — and the useful kind of smart, not the pointless write-a-doctoral-thesis-on-transgender-Native-American-pottery “smart.”
But what do ambitious, capable people do in this country? They start their own businesses and lead successful lives comfortably away from the fickleness of the ballot box. So that just leaves the people who are ambitious but useless and just love the thought of being able to meddle in all the useful things everyone else is doing. And then the whole election process, where the politicians constantly lie and change their positions on issues to keep their jobs, tends to weed out the people who aren’t also sociopaths. So the system we have has basically set us up to be governed by ambitious, useless sociopaths who love to meddle in everything actual contributors to society are doing. So lawyers, for the most part.
And when you put these people in charge, of course they’re going to just try to grab more power so they can interfere even more, hence the steady bloating of government we’ve seen throughout American history. So what do we do? Change the system to make sure we get good, qualified people who aren’t arrogant weirdos to be our legislators?
Good luck with that. Fortunately, he has a better solution. They won’t like it, though.
Alan Simpson
…didn’t need to apologize. This is even stupider than the Larry Summers flap at Harvard.
Some Questions
…for the bigots at ABC News. Did they ever do this at an anti-war rally?
This Is Getting Insane
Where in the world do police and prosecutors get the nutty notion that the cops are entitled to privacy while carrying out their public duties? When did this happen? Does it go back to Rodney King?
The Space-Based Weapons Scare
So, I was reading comments at this post from yesterday, and Ed Wright mentioned some of von Braun’s death-bed regrets. Curious, I did a little searching, but all I came up with (so far) was this bit of lunacy from Carol Rosin.