Immigration & the War on Drugs
Several commenters thought I was displaying too much certainty in my immigration post yesterday. Let me first say, I think this is a reasonable reaction to that post, which didn’t go into much detail...
Author: Erik Kain
Increased border enforcement leads to more migrant deaths
Adam Serwer posts this rather grim chart: He writes: "Skeletal remains" refers to those bodies so decomposed that cause of death couldn’t be determined. Perversely, increased border enforcement seems to have the effect of...
The Economics of Enlightenment
I have a short piece [here is the pdf download link] in the current issue of Econ Journal Watch, commenting on the recent ‘economic enlightenment’ survey Daniel Klein and Zeljka Buturovic published there a...
War blogging
So, after a good deal of pushback and a good deal of thoughtful commentary on my war posts, I think I’ll have to take a step back from my plunder/defense/folly theory of war. I...
The New Culture War
Over at the Washington Examiner, I have a three–part–series on the new culture wars. In Part One I talk about the breakdown of the modern conservative movement and the Three-Legged Stool. Now, thirty years...
Intellectual honesty & obligation
Noah Millman attempts to define intellectual honesty: “Intellectually honest” means you make arguments you think are true, as opposed to making the arguments you are “supposed” to make and/or avoiding making arguments that you...
Most of the world’s countries are undereducated
Tyler Cowen has an excellent response up to this bit from Bryan Caplan on education. Here’s Bryan: The other day, Tyler Cowen challenged me to name any country that I consider under-educated. None came...
One last thought on War
Look, I don’t think all wars or even all the players involved in brewing up our wars are necessarily working with some nefarious plot in mind. But I think that war inevitably ends up...
Wars of Folly
[updated] So the pushback against my war posts is interesting and has me thinking. I suppose that if you peel back the ‘defense’ and ‘plunder’ binary you can see some other variations of war....
Capitalism, Anarchy & War Part II
A few things to follow up on my last post with, briefly. First, I agree with the larger critique of IOZ’s post that in fact the “system” has no intent – no grand conspiracy...
Capitalism, Anarchy & War
IOZ devotes a bit of time to snarking at that Karl Smith post everyone’s been linking to and talking about: When people say that the job, purpose, goal, intent, etc. of something is to...
‘Housing prices must fall, yet…housing prices must not fall’
Tyler Cowen sums up the central problem with our economy, asking “Should we let housing prices fall?” Many smart people say we should. It seems increasingly clear that we must. For how long can...
I’m doing this for the Centaurs
This is very nice of Conor to say, and his larger point is something a lot of commenters here have been saying for quite a while – labels are unimportant, they simply can’t define...
On conservatism and such
There have been a number of reactions lately to my decision to no longer consider myself a ‘conservative’. Few have been exactly favorable. Perhaps that is because I have not been clear enough or...
Beck and Obama’s radically different theologies
[updated] It is perhaps a little ironic that Beck is invoking theology so often and especially in order to demonize Obama further. Ironic because conservative and evangelical Christians probably have more in common theologically...
Liberaltarian Q & A session
Michael Drew asks some questions in the comments. And before I even begin to try and answer them, let me just admit to not having this all worked out. There are no solid answers,...
Rumors of liberaltarianism’s death are greatly exaggerated
Tim Carney thinks liberaltarianism is dead following the departure of Will Wilkinson and Brink Lindsey from Cato. He asks if there are any real life liberaltarians in politics, pointing out that the the only...
Still missing the point
Daniel Larison goes another round with Ross Douthat: On the one hand, Ross urges us not to believe that “all religious cultures are identical, or that the intellectual climate in contemporary Islam is no...
Against seasteading
This passage from Timothy B Lee is very good: If all you care about is avoiding the long arm of the law, that’s actually pretty easy to do. Buy a cabin in the woods...
