A handful of thoughts about Pres. Obama and Immigration ( Read more... )

So, yesterday, another election came and went here in the US. I honestly have very few thoughts about the outcome of the election at the moment. I'm much more interested in voting itself. So, here are a variety of voting-related topics.

(1) On "Rights to Complain"

( Read more... )

I know, I know. I should have gotten over it by now - the shutdown ended a while ago. But, I've been intending to write this up since then and just hadn't made the time.

So, here we go:

Point #1: I've becoming convinced that the Democrats were the ones who were truly to blame for the shutdown.I know, this goes against the conventional view. But, ( Read more... )

So, the shutdown continues. And my life continues to be mostly unaffected. Two exceptions: (1) the BEA shut down its website, which is inconvenient for research and teaching purposes. (2) I'm having to ignore more of my Twitter Timeline (and, to a lesser degree, Facebook News Feed) because it has turned into political drivel that really shouldn't ( Read more... )

Did you all notice how all law and order vanished when the government shutdown ( Read more... )

So, apparently, Jonathan Chait doesn't like Greg Mankiw's defense of the 1%. To be honest, I don't know who Jonathan Chait is apart from the fact that he writes for New York Magazine, and seems to really dislike Republicans. Anyway, in his article he produces a really interesting graphic about income mobility and college education. (I plan to write ( Read more... )

Apparently, this is the new tactic from some who oppose the libertarian view. They say basically this: "If libertarianism is so great, why aren't there any libertarian countries?" (The "Ha! Take THAT libertarianism!" is implied.)

But, as Tom Woods has pointed out (twice), this is exactly the question that a lot of libertarian theory answers ( Read more... )

So, Elizabeth Warren has proposed a strange piece of legislation. Looking at the bill itself [pdf], it's a very confused piece of legislation. The HuffPo covers it here.

( She gets a lot wrong... )

So, how bad is the national debt, exactly? Well, it depends what your concern is. To me, the true concern is that the debt is something that won't go away without a lot of tax revenue - and interest rates on it are really low right now ( Read more... )

Just a quick note before I head off to class...

I advise against listening to politicians in Washington describing how "catastrophic" the budget cuts from sequestration are.

( They aren't. )