It seems as if the bad idea of the week always shows up on the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal. This week it’s the idea that insider trading of stocks should be legal, proffered by Henry Manne, dean emeritus of the George Mason University School of Law in an article titled “Busting Insider […]
One of the most powerful rhetorical devices is to cherry pick your criteria to get the result you want. We see a classic example of it in “The Scarcity Fallacy,” the lead essay in the Wall Street Journal’s “Review” section this week. Author Matt Ridley, a member of the British House of Lords, says that […]
Read More… from British Lord puts a happy face on environmental degradation and resource shortages
How Cliven Bundy became a hero to the right-wing is beyond me. Bundy is the rancher who has refused to pay fees to graze his cattle on public lands for more than 20 years. As the New York Times noted, 16,000 other ranchers pay the fees, which are considered fairly cheap. But even the typical […]
Michael A. Carvin, Yaakov M. Roth and Michael Saltsman have a lot in common. All three are highly educated and learned white males who work for professional services firms as knowledge workers dedicated to both written and unwritten sets of ethics and professional conduct. All three generally serve corporate clients with right-wing interests. All have […]
Read More… from WSJ opinion page is the hot spot for intellectuals who sell out to right-wing money
The latest version of the monster movie, Godzilla, will hit the screens sometime next month. As a child, I used to love the cheesy Japanese Godzilla movies, but I gave up Godzilla about the same time that I picked up Catcher in the Rye and The Red and the Black. I never go to monster, […]
Read More… from Sometimes a TV commercial is more entertaining than TV
The Obama Administration made a big mistake denying a visa to Iran’s new ambassador to the United Nations, Hamid Aboutalebi. The United States should be seeking to improve our relations with Iran so that they will cease development of nuclear weapons and help us seek peaceful ways to clean up the messes in Iraq, Syria […]
Read More… from Obama fumbles opportunity to improve relations with Iran
In rereading Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution recently, I ran across an interesting description of the contrast in the society and economy between pre-Civil War North and South. Foner references the important insight of another historian, James L. Acorn, that slavery had sharply curtailed the scope of public authority in the pre-Civil War South […]
Read More… from Differences between red and blue states predate the Civil War
I don’t mean to trivialize the injuries suffered in the knife attack perpetrated by a high school sophomore at a high school in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. It’s another in a long and seemingly endless line of incidents of mass violence at American schools. Of the 20 students and one teacher stabbed by teenaged loony Alex Hribal, […]
Read More… from Lesson from Pennsylvania knife attack: We need more gun control
From the solutions he offers to the labor challenges facing the U.S. economy in his article titled “Where Have All the Workers Give,” Glenn Hubbard must think that the problem is a lack of workers, not a lack of jobs. Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School, economic advisor to Mitt Romney and former chair of […]
Read More… from Head of Columbia business school wants to flood labor market to suppress wages
Each new day seems to bring another story predicting Democratic disaster in the November election. One day it’s statistician Nate Silver predicting gloom for the Democrats. The next day it’s an obscure pundit like David Wasserman or Pew Center director Andrew Kahut. All the overarching story lines by which media outlets try to make sense […]