Someone on Facebook recently asked people to tell the most important thing they learned from their father. Here’s the one I came up with and it was really 2 things I learned. From an early age, I was told by my father that none of my possessions was as important as my life and so if there were ever a…
A Jule 23 Economist article about how “Generous Unemployment Benefits Are Not Keeping Americans from Work” is not easy to understand. “[T]here is little evidence,” it claims, “to suggest that the extra $600 a week [from the federal government] is slowing down the labour-market recovery.” One would think that paying more in benefits to non-working workers…
I suspect it is, at least in the sense of WEIRD as a now trendy acronym for western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. One criticism of utilitarianism is that it implies that we should value the welfare of far away people just as much as we value the welfare of our own family and friends. This, it is argued,…
I was on Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News Channel Thursday night to discuss my op/ed in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. I would give highlights but the interview lasts only 4 minutes. We hit the main themes of my WSJ op/ed. One point I was hoping we would get to is my point that I made in the WSJ…
In his 1987 book Crisis and Leviathan, economic historian Robert Higgs argued that in the 20th century, the U.S. federal government grew mainly as a result of three crises: World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. During those crises, the feds raised taxes, introduced more spending programs, and took on more regulatory power. While much of the…
At Grove City College in the 1980s we had required courses which were dubbed “Key Courses” – you had to take survey courses in Religion and Philosophy, Social Science and History, Science, and the Creative Arts. My Religion and Philosophy course was a year long, and the professor, Professor Reed Davis (now at Seattle Pacific University) — taught us…
Somehow I missed this 9-minute video at the time. It’s fantastic. (0 COMMENTS)…
Review of First Cow (2020), Dir. Kelly Reichardt, starring John Magaro and Orion Lee First Cow is a quiet movie. Set mostly in the woods and a small trading post in the Oregon territory, and focusing almost exclusively on two characters, it is also a small movie. There’s no epic sweep here, of story or of scenery. But…
The second quarter of this year saw what is probably the biggest fiscal stimulus in American history, in terms of increase in the budget deficit. And today we see the results: nominal GDP fell by 34.3% at an annual rate. That means the fiscal stimulus prevented a much bigger fall in GDP—right? Well, that might be true, but how would…
I know as little about biology and medicine as the typical public health expert knows about economics and the scientific study of society. I don’t know if hydroxychloroquine is effective against Covid-19 or under which conditions. However, I believe I know something about, or I have the analytical tools to understand, a social system where politicians or public health pontiffs…