First they coddled the white supremacists with false equivalency, and I didn’t resign from the Trump Evangelical Council because those protesting the white supremacists didn’t have a permit…

Who knew that neo-Nazi, KKK white supremacists and Trump supporters were liars, cry-babies AND hypocrites? The reasons for secession by the states of the Confederacy were not complex or ambiguous. They are not a mystery. They were proudly proclaimed by the Confederate states. The cornerstone of the Confederacy was slavery and the conviction of the […]

Jeet Heer has posted a timely and excellent essay at New Republic titled “Trump’s Racism and the Cultural Marxism Myth.” In his essay, Heer recounts much of the background to the Higgins memo that I have documented here, here and here. Heer credits William S. Lind as the major popularizer of the myth, as have […]

The word ‘narrative’ appears 41 times in the infamous Higgins memo, “POTUS and Political Warfare.” Guys, it’s time for some narrative critique. The narrative Higgins is most concerned about is something he calls “cultural Marxism,” which he defines in a paragraph at the top of page four of the memo: As used in this discussion, […]

Atlantic: An NSC Staffer Is Forced Out Over a Controversial Memo Esquire: This Is Pure, Unadulterated American Crazy Foreign Policy: Here’s the Memo that Blew Up the NSC Mother Jones:You Should Read the “Maoist Insurgency” Memo. It’s Bananas Wonkette: Of Course Trump Loves This Fucking Bonkers NSC Memo Calling For Civil War Back in 2011 after mass murderer Anders […]

More Feargus O’Connor (1844) on labour’s objections to machinery: And now, sir, let me state my principal objections to the unrestricted use of machinery. First, it places man in an artificial state, over which the best workman, the wisest man and most moral person, has no control. Secondly, while it leads to the almost certain […]

Crowding Out and the Social Overhead Costs of Labor Another strange twist in the convoluted lump-of-labor saga. Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor refuted the “Treasury View” — aka “crowding out” — in 1844. O’Connor’s tract is long-winded and sentimentalized an idyllic past but it also contains some cogent analysis of why workers were (and should still […]

Here’s a little economics lesson: supply and demand. You put the supply out there, and demand will follow. — Rick Perry, U.S. Secretary of Energy While the media is having fun at the expense of Secretary Perry’s asinine “economics lesson” it is worth pointing out that the very same publications that ridicule Perry perpetually peddle […]

Sandwichman in the FT Financial Times: “The minimum wage wars are heating up: A new study fails to prove its claim that Seattle wage floor hurts workers” by Martin Sandbu, at Free Lunch on FT Alphaville First, the numerical result struggles to pass an intuitive “smell test”. As the Angry Bear blog [cross posted at […]

There has been a lot of very good critique of the methodology of the University of Washington’s study of the minimum wage increase in Seattle. However, I want to repeat and emphasize a very simple point that jumps out. A static low-wage cutoff point, whether it be $19 or $100, automatically reduces the size of the […]