Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

The Second and Last Death of Capitalism

—We study history in order to better understand what is going on now, to be better able to look into the future. — The Great Depression was a manifestation of the utter and complete failure of capitalism. Social Security, unemployment, and Welfare were implicit admissions of this failure. Capitalism had spectacularly failed to provide for […]

World Covid 19 Vaccination

I am mainly linking to this fairly important article by Dan Diamond in The Washington Post. Diamond quotes many people arguing that the US really should do more to get everyone in the world who is willing to take the vaccine vaccinated. I am going to move on quickly to how this could be done, […]

‘When crazy comes a knocking at the door, slam it shut’

Gov. Chris Sununu (R-NH) responds to Senator Ron Johnson’s telling people to gargle with mouthwash to kill Covid. Mr. Johnson: “Standard gargle, mouthwash, has been proven to kill the coronavirus (according to an audio recording of his remarks). If you get it, you may reduce viral replication. Why not try all these things?” Why not? […]

How to track the Omicron variant in close to real time

How to track the Omicron variant in close to real time No economic data today, and Covid information is pretty useless because of lack of reporting over the weekend. I drafted a long piece about the state of the American consumer, which I’ve decided to put up at Seeking Alpha, since, hey!, why shouldn’t I […]

The Future of Medicare and Advantage Plans

This post comes by way of Joel Eissenberg’s Facebook blog and is an edited recital of Juan Cole’s presentation at Informed Comment. “Stop Wall Street from Grabbing Traditional Medicare,” F. Douglas Stephenson __________ I am going to add to Joel’s depiction of the future as I too had heard of the coming attempt to force […]

“Farmers Markets Are Too Expensive”

Farmer and Agricultural Economic Michal Smith I hear this from time to time both at the market and also from the general public even in the agricultural community. It elicits a response longer than what I can usually muster as I pull my quill of sharpened microeconomic arrows of defense around to meet my macroeconomic […]

Immune Memory

One non horrible effect of the Covid 19 epidemic is that people have become interested in immunology. I am pleased by this, but have the sense that journalists over-simplify. Roughly they act as if the immune system consists of circulating antibodies and killer t-cells. I think this post might be of some interest to some […]

Get A Booster shot

Many months and many mutations ago, I argued that one shot of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was enough to protect against the original Sars Cov2. Since then delta. It doesn’t especially evade, but is more generally fit and I thought (and probably didn’t post) that two shots are needed given delta. Now omicron. Pfizer just claimed […]

The Biden Administration had better come up with a ‘Plan B’

Coronavirus dashboard for December 7: since further mass vaccination could only happen at gunpoint, the Biden Administration had better come up with a ‘Plan B, New Deal democrat No significant economic news today, so let’s catch up a little bit with Covid. There are still distortions in the 7 day average data, as States did […]

A Day of Days

Wednesday, 1 December 2021, the state of Mississippi argued before the US Supreme Court that the 1973 Roe vs Wade decision [410 U.S. 113 (1973)] giving women a constitutional right to have an abortion was in error; that it should be overturned. During Wednesday’s oral arguments, Justice Sotomayor asked Mississippi’s Solicitor Stewart whether Mississippi’s challenge […]