When a totalitarian regime aids and abets the rape of tens of thousands of children one would expect it to be shunned by governments and citizens alike. And any statements it might issue on matters of morality accorded no respect. Why should we make an exception when the regime is the Catholic Church? That the Roman … Read More
This is the giving season and we Americans are prodigious givers. Nearly two thirds of us donate to charities each year. This year we will send more than $225 billion to charities. More than a quarter of this giving will occur in December. Those are the bare facts. But this year, when the stark divide between … Read More
On November 2nd nearly 70 students walked out of an introductory economics class at Harvard in solidarity with the Occupy movement. The mainstream media largely ignored the protest. That’s regrettable since the economics profession has provided the intellectual framework and justification for the inequality and centralization of corporate power the Occupiers are challenging. “You can ’t … Read More
A few days ago NBC’s Meet the Press host David Gregory complained about Occupy Wall Street protestors “demonizing banks” and wondered, “Is this not a reverse tea party tactic?” Gregory is right. In many respects Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is indeed a mirror image of the Tea Party. To the Tea Party government is the enemy. … Read More
A few months ago Nassim Taleb, author of the Black Swan, an influential book about the crucial importance of unpredictable, unforeseen events on our financial system was asked whether the hundreds of thousands taking to the streets in Greece was a Black Swan event. He replied, “No. The real Black Swan event is that people are … Read More
In the next few days we may decide the future of the Post Office. The signs are not auspicious. President Obama has agreed to a plan to cut Saturday delivery. The Post Service’s management wants to close 2500 post offices immediately and up to 16,000 by 2020. Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) has introduced a bill that … Read More
A few days ago I received notice of a New America Foundation (NAF) hosted conference in Washington, D.C. called “Beyond Primacy: Rethinking American Grand Strategy and the Command of the Commons.” At the conference NAF released a formal report on the subject: Whither Command of the Commons? Choosing Security Over Control. The authors, Sameer Lalwani, Research … Read More
Two days after Standard and Poor’s downgraded US government bonds, David Llewellyn-Smith, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald noted, “We now face the ludicrous circumstance in which the United States government holds … a lower (credit) rating than Microsoft, despite issuing its own currency (the world’s reserve), being able to raise taxes when it chooses, owning … Read More
Throughout human history societies have been informed and instructed by the superstitions of their age. For thousands of years we believed a single person–a king, a pharaoh, a high priest– should have life and death power over us. Any other social structure was unthinkable. We believed the gods that brought drought could be appeased only by animal and, sometimes, human sacrifice. Today these superstitions seem ridiculous. How could thinking people ever have believed such preposterous notions?… Read More
