Today’s headline reads that A recent spike in the price of oil has many wondering how high it will go, and what the fallout could be to a vulnerable recovery in the United States. While I’m all in favor of self serving navel gazing in…
American conservatives are half right: America is in decline today due to a broad failure of personal responsibility. However, they’re wrong on a very important detail. While it’s important to take responsibility for yourself – I think it’s equally important to develop a sense of…
There’s a lot of back and forth in the news about the appropriate size, shape, and funding sources for government. At least … that’s what I see when I choose to pretend that people are talking and thinking about what’s good for the nation rather…
A lot of people in America are uncomfortable with the cultural changes that are coming. As a nation, we are becoming more ethnically diverse. In pretty short order no particular race will have a clear majority. English will continue to lose its exclusive lock as…
For the record: My law of idiot inclusion: Any sufficiently large group of people will include some truly awful idiots. Merely finding an idiot in the group with whom you disagree is not sufficient to damn that entire group as idiots. One should also consider…
On reflection, there’s more complexity to inflation and deflation than the simplistic few paragraphs that I wrote a couple of days ago. However, there’s no reason to jump all the way to “just trust Paul Krugman,” yet. As I think about this stuff, I become…
I’m reading a bunch of articles about how the US economy is failing to thrive this year – how the Fed is arguing amongst themselves about raising vs. lowering interest rates – how there’s the “risk” of deflation, as opposed to the “risk” of inflation.…
As usual Paul Krugman puts it better than me: I’m sure that in his own mind Rand Paul sees himself as a principled libertarian, applying the same standard of personal responsibility to everyone. In practice, however, it’s only the poor and powerless who get held…
I would like to present a small proposal to get the world economy back on track. First, history: Some companies choose to “publicly” trade shares of themselves. The chief benefit to a fledgeling company in going public is that it enables the company to raise…
Since it’s come up again, here’s my take on citizenship. I know that this is not how it *is*. I’m writing about how it *ought* to be. Citizenship should not be automatic. It should certainly not be automatically based on two things over which you…