Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
By any measure, 2020 was not a very good year for human freedom. By now everyone is very familiar with the assaults on liberty stemming from measures ostensibly in the name of stopping the spread of covid and the way in which such measures have threatened the very existence of the social order. Beyond such … Read more
New York City taxi drivers – who were committing suicide left and right before the pandemic – are in bad shape. After years competing with Uber and Lyft drivers for razor-thin margins, while maintaining an average debt of $450,000 on taxi medallions now worth $75,000 – $100,000, ridership is down 80-90% since March due to … Read more
Wednesday’s mob assault on Capitol Hill was shocking and brazen: Hundreds of MAGA-hat-wearing rioters broke into the seat of American democracy. They stormed the halls, looting property and assaulting law enforcers, all in service of an absurd political demand: reversing the outcome of an election. Now where had I witnessed such scenes before? The answer: … Read more
Twitter has banned some conservatives like Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell, while letting human-rights violators like Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei continue to tweet. Facebook recently removed the conservative WalkAway page, along with hundreds of thousands of videos and followers. Donald Trump has been banned from Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. The First Amendment only restricts what the … Read more
Encouraging a mob to target his own allies and disrupt the rule of law, the president has ended his tenure disgracefully—and emboldened the Left. . . . Pragmatist Trump supporters made the calculation that he was the lesser of two evils. His vindictiveness and narcissism had to be balanced against the alternative of an increasingly … Read more
In the past eight months, two Capitol Hills have fallen. Two shocking events symbolize the abdication of authority by America’s ruling class, an abdication that has led to what can be described, not without exaggeration, as the slow-motion disintegration of the United States of America in its present form. The first occurred on June 8, … Read more
The mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday was engaged in nothing less than a seditious insurrection. Everyone who participated in the violence and lawlessness acted disgracefully. Officials who set the tone for the sedition, especially President Trump, acted even more disgracefully, as they are expected to know better, indeed to lead. Political violence … Read more
Up from the Rubble, Up from the Rabble There is some truth to the cliché holding that liars think everybody lies, that cheaters think everybody cheats, that thieves think everybody else steals, etc. Understood as an emotional self-defense strategy, that has a great deal of explanatory power: We may talk about having the “fear of … Read more
It’s always worthwhile to share the ideas of liberty with young people, but right now, during widespread government lockdowns, it is more important than ever. In some places in the US, individuals are prohibited from inviting friends or family members over to their private homes or, if they are granted that privilege, attendance is capped. … Read more
Since the world’s first CCTV camera was installed in Germany in 1942, the number of surveillance cameras around the world has grown immensely. In fact, as Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop notes, it only took us 79 years to go from one camera to nearly one billion of these devices. In the above interactive graphic, Surfshark … Read more
Late in 2019, a real-estate website predicted that Chicago’s housing market would be one of the nation’s worst over the next year. Chicago-area home prices, among the slowest to recover from the 2009 housing recession, were being suppressed by various factors, including escalating property taxes. Now it’s clear from a new study just how much … Read more
When we said President Trump might destroy the Republican Party and the conservative movement, this is what we were talking about. Trump lobbied Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to overturn the election results in that state, citing only bad logic and conspiracy theories. It’s a power grab of the sort that normally would best be … Read more
Liberals cheered the news this week that a statue of Abraham Lincoln had been taken down in Boston. The statue depicted Lincoln holding his hand benevolently over a liberated slave. Though paternalistic themselves, liberals had no patience for the statue, which they pronounced “harmful.” That freed slaves had helped pay for the statue didn’t impress … Read more
The expression, “unintended consequences,” is a charitable dodge. It is what old-fashioned, polite, civic-minded people say about the fallout from progressive social policies. It implies that their authors have overlooked something, or made some innocent mistake. For unfortunately, the policies do the exact opposite of what was promised. Surely the “reformers” didn’t mean to force … Read more
Tom here identifies yet another danger posed by state obstruction of peaceful activities. People are not pawns on a chessboard which, when moved from here to there by the visible hand, remain obediently in place until moved again by the visible hand. Instead, each of us has desires that we wish to fulfill and, when … Read more
When I write an everything-you-need-to-know column, I’m inevitably guilty of hyperbole. All that I’m really doing is highlighting a very compelling example of how politicians make a mess of just about anything they touch. That’s even true in the rare cases when they’re trying to enact policies I prefer. The crux of the problem is … Read more
In the summer of 2016, I went into a bookstore in Maine looking for a book that I thought my wife would like to read — a memoir about growing up as the heir to rural Appalachian culture and passing from that world into the gilded precincts of the meritocracy, written by a guy I … Read more
Malcolm Kyeyune writes, for some time now, the West has been using a massive expansion of higher education to create a new class of functionaries—”knowledge-workers” and would-be managers—in numbers far in excess of what the labor market can or could absorb. Yet, it is only just now that we are seeing, with clear eyes, that … Read more
It probably goes without saying at this point that Democrat governors have overreached in their response to the Wuhan coronavirus. Democrat leaders’ draconian, illogical, unsupportable, contradictory, and just plain stupid lockdown decisions are coming home to roost. Not only is California governor Gavin “Rules for thee, but not for me” Newsom facing an increasingly viable … Read more
In October 2018, rebutting the specious argument that abortion can be justified as a so-called “solution” to the problem of a crisis pregnancy, Pope Francis famously stated, “Is it right to take a human life to solve a problem? It’s like hiring a hitman.” By that same standard of comparison, it’s fair to assert that … Read more
Progressives are all too happy for Americans of more modest means to subsidize relatively high-income Democratic households. One of Joe Biden’s first tests in office will be the urgent question of giving a big pile of money to rich people. Biden wants a little welfare for the affluent in the form of a $10,000 college-loan … Read more
3 Reasons Trump is Wrong to Oppose Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Since I’m an economist specializing in public finance, I get very upset about punitive tax policy and wasteful government spending. But what really gets my blood boiling is reading about the horrific policy of civil asset forfeiture, which literally allows government to … Read more
The pandemic exposes the error of equating ‘merit’ with cognitive ability. In a new book, David Goodhart advocates a rebalancing of dignity and status. . . . The over-rewarding of cognitive merit at the expense of the wider spectrum of human ability is, in a way, one cause of our populist moment. But in another … Read more
The 74 million men and women who voted for Donald Trump had thousands of different reasons for their votes and fit a million different demographic profiles. But the most important voter to Trump was the one who had no interest in politics before 2015 and would not have otherwise gone to the polls. This was … Read more
Amtrak ridership is down by 87 percent, so Amtrak needs a $2.9 billion rescue from Congress, the company’s executive vice president, Stephen Gardner, told a congressional subcommittee yesterday. Transit ridership is down 70 to 90 percent, added American Public Transportation Association president Paul Skoutelas, so the transit industry wants a $32 billion bailout from Congress. … Read more