I always Google my headline ideas to try to avoid the appearance of plagiarism. I was thinking of the title for this post as I was looking at a cartoon adaptation of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, originally published by Look magazine in 1945 and subsequently distributed in the 1950s as a pamphlet by the General Motors […]

Campaigns are complicated things. No one gets every piece of them right. Some candidates are great at big rallies. Some are good only at small events. Some are terrific TV communicators but bad on the stump. Some delegate well, and others don’t. Some never waver from a message, while others can’t seem to find one […]

by Mike Kimel Police Killings, Gender and Race Police killings of unarmed Black men have garnered a lot of attention lately.  Black men are killed by police in numbers disproportionate to their share of the population.  I want to put some numbers on that issue later in the post, and those numbers run counter to […]

Bernie’s speech was perfect.  Also perfect: Bill Clinton’s reaction.  He loved it. Things will be alright, folks.

Paul Waldman has a lengthy post today at the Washington Post’s Plum Line blog titled “Despite what you’ve heard, Democrats aren’t in disarray. Their party is under attack from the outside.”   He argues that the Democratic Party itself isn’t that divided, and that the divisions really are between Democrats and the outsider Sanders supporters who […]

Yesterday, I wrote about the connection between inflation and corporate profits. (link) I posted this graph. (quarterly data since 1958 to 1st quarter 2016) The graph shows how inflation drops as net corporate profits rise. Net corporate profit rate = Corporate profits/GDP – nominal interest rate The trend line (bright red curving downward) implies an […]

This is genuinely amazing (h/t @jbarro) http://observer.com/2016/07/wikileaks-dismantling-of-dnc-is-clear-attack-by-putin-on-clinton/ New York Observer is a weekly newspaper… . Since July 2006, the paper has been owned and published by the American real‑estate figure Jared Kushner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Observerqqq I quote without comment It’s no secret that the DNC was recently subject to a major hack, one which independent cybersecurity experts […]

In Doctor Strangelove, General Ripper explains to Captain Mandrake why Clemenceau’s dictum on war is now obsolete: He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither […]

Of course the big news is that Russian hackers (probably linked to the Russian government) hacked Democratic National Committee servers and leaked embarassing e-mails (and deliberately leaked social security numbers) via Wikileaks. This supports the hypothesis that Putin is trying to get Trump elected. It sounds like a fringe tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, but I […]

Or so The Brookings Institute would like us to believe. What would cause Brookings to take such a stance especially since parts of the PPACA increased costs dramatically and premiums have increased dramatically? Coverage such as: mandated guaranteed issue regardless of health status; restrictions on the ability to charge different premiums based on anything besides […]