Why I Read Bryan Caplan
I know I often disagree with him. But then there’s stuff like this: “What’s stopping Warren Buffett from paying more taxes?” is a red herring. The fundamental question is: “Why is government’s share of...
Tagged: money
It Seems Appropriate…
…That on April 20, of all days, I should come across a post discussing the wording of an effort to enact a repeal of Citizens United by way of amending the United States Constitution....
Tax Credits and Subsidies
My former colleague Will Wilkinson offers some insightful comments on our intuitions regarding taxes, subsidies, and fiscal policy. To wit: I think the assumption on the right is that first we work to make...
Idiots and Maniacs
Tony Comstock, writing about his “Sputnik Moment“: Okay, I pretty much wonder “What the fish have I done with my life?” every time I have a set major back (which is pretty much...
Eating Peas
Fellow Ordinaries Elias Isquith and Mike Dwyer have fired the opening shots in our discussion about the latest budget proposal from that fiscal firebrand from Janesville, Paul Ryan, and Tod Kelly (who has just been...
The Future Is Now: The Birth Of The American Wasteland
A really interesting piece from the Times‘ Binyamin Appelbaum focuses on how parts of the country where the housing bubble was the most pronounced — and where there was historically nowhere near the same...
You Have Carbonite Sickness, But Your Sight Will Return Shortly – or, why Limbaugh didn’t really kill Carbonite, and the Left hasn’t really killed Limbaugh
Over at Not a Potted Plant, Will has been commenting one of the newer internet political memes: Carbonite. Carbonite is a publicly traded stock company that asked it’s advertising agency to pull ads from...
The Rich Buddha (Slight Return)
“The hard part of freedom is that you always have a chance of getting it wrong, which is why, we tend to point people to cheaper rather than expensive options… Buy a Columbia 34...
Self-Publishing is Over
Alan Jacobs, writing at TheAtlantic.com: [O]ne of the illusions most common to writers — an illusion that may make the long slow slog of writing possible, for many people — is that an enormous...
Normalizing the Upper-Middle-Class in Movies and Television
Alyssa Rosenberg worries that the introduction of characters like Ashton Kutcher’s Walden Schmidt – the replacement for Charlie Sheen’s character on Two and a Half Men – could ‘normalize’ the very wealthy: The thing...
Think Tank Wars
Over at Balloon Juice, I have a long post up about money in politics, pointing out that the much-dreaded Koch brothers are but two among many political donors, and that think tanks and political...
memories & happiness
This post from Jonah Lehrer is interesting, but I also wonder if it’s entirely correct: Why don’t things make us happy? The answer, I think, has to do with a fundamental feature of neurons:...
