Why does a Civil Rights Bill forbid me to apply racial criteria when I choose an employee but allow me to apply racial criteria when I choose an employer? If I turn down a job offer, should I be required to prove that my motives were not discriminatory? … Why am I permitted to apply racial criteria when I select a spouse but not when I select a personal assistant? — Steven Landsburg, The Armchair Economist Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Politics
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to accept because, naturally, it is alien to our experience but it is true: You know far less about yourself than you feel you do. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. It is the consistency of information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern. The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion — we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than… Read more →
Whatever the Party Holds to Be the Truth
“I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.” — George Orwell, 1984 Read more →
Proud to Be a Coal Miner’s Daughter
If she is nominated and confirmed by the Senate, she would be the first coal miner’s daughter to hold the job . . . Read more →
It’s Election Season in Irvine
It’s election season . . . campaign signs dot the Irvine landscape. As I drove to lunch with co-workers, one of them pointed out a sign for Ira Glasky, who’s running for school board or city council or something. “He’s probably trying to cash in on the name recognition of Ira Glass,” he said. “Who’s Ira Glass?” I asked, and he told me but I’ve since forgotten. A person on the radio, I think. If I were a campaign manager, I wouldn’t be advising my clients to coattail on the popularity of people no one’s heard of. “Maybe he’s trying to play into the popularity of Dashiell Hammett’s 1930s crime novel The Glass Key,” I suggested. Another Irvine candidate, Lynn Schott, is in a local women’s networking group that my wife belongs to. I offered her a free campaign slogan — “Lynn-sanity!” — but she’s not using it. Read more →
Darth Vader for President
People are so fed up with the gridlock and dysfunction in Washington. Congress is unfortunately unable to even agree on the most obvious kinds of things. I think Darth Vader looks pretty good to a lot of people. — Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, on CNN, responding to poll results showing voters say they prefer Darth Vader, the fictional villain in the Star Wars films, for president over her and several other potential candidates. Are people fed up with gridlock? I’m not. I love gridlock. It’s when those meddling idiots actually do something that life gets worse for everyone. Jokes aside, I think Darth Vader would be an exceptionally good president in some respects. Imagine him, for example, in an Israel-Hamas negotiating session: “Whose trachea do I have to crush with my mind to get some peace around here?” Read more →
This Kid Made an App That Exposes Sellout Politicians
Via VICE: Yes, the algorithm is if (isPolitician(x)) { x.sellout = true; } Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
I Am Disenfranchising Myself
I was looking over my vote-by-mail ballot for the California election . . . there’s not one person on there I would trust to represent my interests above their own. It’s like voting on which gang of thieves will be allowed to break into my home and rob me. In previous elections, I’ve usually voted for all the Republican candidates because I dislike 99 percent of Democratic programs, whereas I only dislike 95 percent of Republican programs. Not much of a choice. This year, I ripped up the ballot and threw it in the trash. Read more →
A Spectacularly Bad Job of Rigging the System
If you nevertheless believe that the capitalists have been busily rigging the system in their own interest, you’ve got to admit they’ve done a spectacularly bad job of it. How else to explain the quintuple taxation of capital income, where you can invest a dollar that was taxed the day you earned it, then pay corporate income taxes, dividend taxes, capital gains taxes and inheritance taxes on the income it throws off? Surely any concern that the rich are calling the policy shots should melt away in the face of actual policy. — Steven Landsburg Read more →
The Single Greatest Source of Economic Error
But the underlying fallacy — the failure to notice that things must add up — is, in my experience, the single greatest source of economic error. Politicians routinely promise to make medical care or housing or college educations more widely available by controlling their prices; economists routinely scratch their heads and ask where the extra doctors or houses or classrooms are going to come from. You can no more speed up the line for medical care by lowering prices than you can speed up the deli line by handing out tickets. — Steve Landsburg, The Big Questions Read more →
More People I’m Sick Unto Death Of: Angela Davis
I still believe that capitalism is the most dangerous kind of future we can imagine. — Angela Davis Alternatives to capitalism have resulted in shortages, famine, mass murder and societal collapse (cf., Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, Libya, Venezuela … I could go on and on but I think we both get the point). Can anyone list a few capitalist countries where this has occurred? If not, what does the word “dangerous” mean in this context? Angela Davis is now 70 years old. Can anyone list a few well-known Angela Davis-style radicals who lived a long life in any of the aforementioned countries? Read more →
That’s Why It’s Called the Opposition Party
Charlie Crist, former Republican and currently Democratic candidate for governor in Florida, on why he changed parties: I couldn’t be consistent with myself and my core beliefs, and stay with a party that was so unfriendly toward the African-American president. I’ll just go there. I was a Republican and I saw the activists and what they were doing, it was intolerable to me. It was so intolerable that Crist left the GOP in 2010 — four years ago — and he’s just bringing this up now? Has anyone asked this fool why Republicans have been unfriendly to all other Democratic presidents? Or why Democrats have been unfriendly to all GOP presidents? What is his theory on that? Is he really this stupid or is he counting on his target audience being this stupid? I suspect the latter . . . Read more →
The War on Poverty is 50 Years Old
The New York Times has an update from McDowell County, West Virginia, on how the War on Poverty is going after 50 years . . . Of West Virginia’s 55 counties, McDowell has the lowest median household income, $22,000; the worst childhood obesity rate; and the highest teenage birthrate. It is also reeling from prescription drug abuse. The death rate from overdoses is more than eight times the national average. Of the 115 babies born in 2011 at Welch Community Hospital, over 40 had been exposed to drugs. . . . Many in McDowell County acknowledge that depending on government benefits has become a way of life, passed from generation to generation. Nearly 47 percent of personal income in the county is from Social Security, disability insurance, food stamps and other federal programs. . . . The poverty rate, 50 percent in 1960, declined – partly as a result of… Read more →
Childish Economics
I have a very difficult time imagining the economic ‘theory’ that motivates proposals such as this one by Pres. Obama [to “streamline” the Fair Labor Standards Act so that more white-collar employees would be eligible for overtime pay]. The best that I can do is to imagine how a two-year-old child would respond if asked to propose a way to raise workers incomes. — Don Boudreaux Read more →
The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic. — H. L. Mencken
More People I’m Sick Unto Death Of
The mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, said this the other day: “Some of the monies that will come from that will go to other parts of the city too that connect in with that . . .” OK, that’s out of context and it doesn’t make any sense, but — “monies”?! “Hi, I’m Eric Garcetti. I have a dollar bill so I have a money. If you give me another dollar, I’ll have some monies.” No. You can have a dollar or a billion dollars. One word covers all the possibilities and that word is “money.” “Monies” is a word used by politicians and academians and other posturing pricks who’d like you to think that they’re doing the Lord’s work and not soiling their hands with anything as grubby as “money.” Read more →
Unconstrained Thinkers
Unconstrained thinkers either do not recognize, or refuse to come to grips with, the fact that not everything that is good is worth the cost of its achievement — and that not everything that is bad is worth the cost of its obliteration. Unconstrained thinkers are also typically gripped by romantically unrealistic notions of the abilities of people wielding power, as well as of the trustworthiness of such people. Unconstrained thinkers, because they can imagine people with power exercising that power for the greater good and only for the greater good, are unwilling to suffer any imperfections in reality –- for why suffer such imperfections if a Great and Good Leader (or Great and Good Council) can possibly make the world a better place? — Don Boudreaux Read more →
IRS Refunds $4 Billion to Identity Thieves
The Internal Revenue Service issued $4 billion in fraudulent tax refunds last year to people using stolen identities, with some of the money going to addresses in Bulgaria, Lithuania and Ireland, according to an inspector general’s report released Thursday. The IRS sent a total of 655 tax refunds to a single address in Lithuania, and 343 refunds went to a lone address in Shanghai. In the U.S., more fraudulent returns went to Miami than any other city. Other top destinations were Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta and Houston. — Associated Press Hmmm . . . aren’t there some sort of sanity checks built into the IRS system? Doesn’t a warning bell go off when 655 tax refunds are sent to a single address in Lithuania? Does this erode your confidence in the federal government’s ability to manage complex systems and gigantic sums of money? I’m sure they’ll do a much better job… Read more →
Another Smoking Gun on “Keep Your Coverage”
The conversation below took place more than four years ago — June 23, 2009 — at a congressional hearing on Obamacare. The topic was the keep-your-coverage promise, and the participants were Christina Romer, then chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Rep. Tom Price, who is also a doctor. The conversation plays out like one of those word puzzles where you start out with one word and change one letter at a time to get a completely different word. Watch Romer’s responses on keeping your coverage go from “Absolutely” to a stammering “I’d have to look at the specifics.” It’s also yet another reminder of what a pig in a poke Obamacare was. Even the people advocating for it had no idea what was in it. REP. PRICE: You also mentioned, as other folks have, that the president’s goal — and it’s reiterated over and over and over —… Read more →
Great Moments in Presidential Prevarication
“I am not a crook.” — Richard Nixon “Read my lips: no new taxes.” — George H.W. Bush “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” — Bill Clinton “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” — Barack Obama Read more →