I have written on this blog before about the importance of the liberal arts, but I now have an interesting negative example of how universities have been marginalizing not only the liberal arts but also American civilization in particular. Let me begin with a quote from this article by Ian Tuttle in the National Review […]
Archives
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Arrival is the Best Film I’ve Seen This Year
26 Dec 2016
Director Dennis Villeneuve has crafted a masterpiece, a science fiction film that turns its gaze from the stars and into the corners of the human condition. Arrival deserves to stand alongside the best of the genre, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, Interstellar, Contact, and Blade Runner. As I’ve written before, science fiction is at its […]
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A Real-Life Story of Bureaucratic Dysfunction
21 Dec 2016
If you want to read a classic insider narrative of the degeneration and dysfunction of a large and powerful (and unlimited) federal bureaucracy, read here: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443227/consumer-financial-protection-bureau-tragic-failures. The article chronicles the work of one highly placed lawyer in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before it was slapped hard by the Federal courts. I have frequently written about […]
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Bureaucracy and the New President
20 Dec 2016
I was reading an interesting article in Reason today that directly addressed one of the major issues I have raised before and frequently alluded to (see http://reason.com/archives/2016/12/19/trump-versus-the-we-bes, December 20, 2016). It has to do with the theme of “Trump versus the bureaucracy.” One could substitute any president’s name in that slogan since the 1930s at […]
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Are all sins the same?
19 Dec 2016
And if not, are there any implications for us in a political economy blog? Michael Kruger over at The Gospel Coalition asks the question of whether all sins are the same, and answers no. He notes that both people who take sin serious and those that don’t can come to this conclusion. For the person who […]
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This blog is generally about current policies or issues in the news or that are still current to a degree in the realm of political economy, politics, and economics. I have been reading a really interesting book by Jonathan Wight, entitled Ethics in Economics: An Introduction to Moral Frameworks (Stanford University Press, 2015). Wight addresses […]
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In an article from CNS News dated December 16, 2016, we have the new but predictable Census Bureau statistics on median income for households in counties of the United States. The first four richest counties are, …, you guessed it, all in the Washington, DC area, and range from about $99,000 per year to $122, […]
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Trump’s Trumps
15 Dec 2016
A new controversy–well, not really new, just renewed–has now taken the stage regarding President-Elect Donald Trump’s transition. This one concerns the “flavor” of his cabinet choices, taken collectively. The media and Democrats are trying to figure out (1) what they tell us about Trump and (2) what the supporter–stakeholders think about the choices. Those are […]
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Non-Fake Update on Fake News
13 Dec 2016
This is getting a bit confusing. Now we see fake news writers excoriating what they call fake news. Moreover, we now have a battle of alleged fake news going. In the past few days the allegation that Russia was hacking the Democratic National Committee website has been a major theme of the Left in DC. […]
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Saudi America Wins! OPEC Waves the White Flag!
13 Dec 2016
One of the bright spots in the U.S. economy over the last decade was the incredible technology revolution in the energy sector with hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The U.S. energy revolution drove the nail through the heart of economic pessimists claiming that we’d hit “peak oil,” and were doomed to run out of cheap fossil […]