Apropos of these recent musings on cross-partisan perspective taking, I was recently talking to a friend about the rather open-ended recovery/12-step concept of placing yourself at the mercy of a “greater power.” As a lifelong atheist, this seems like it’s bound to present some problems if I ever develop a sufficiently bad habit, and so […]

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Sometimes I swear the Times runs articles just to make my head hurt. Consider this op-ed by one Robert X. Cringely, who does actually appear to be a fictional character dreamt up by Arthur Sulzburger (or other, darker forces) to be the instrument of my torment: Microsoft makes most of its money from two products, […]

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Oh, FireDogLake: Conservative ideologues looking to punish workers and the American middle class for auto industry failures are driven by an authoritarian worldview George Lakoff calls the strict parent model. Senate Republicans see their opposition to the rescue of Detroit as whipping the children. They are not that different from the failed father who thinks […]

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Figure I should cross-link this post at Ars, since my modal political geek reader probably cares more than my modal tech geek reader about my picking a fight with Michael Lind.

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I’m bemused at the way we’re perpetually told the fundamental cause of the ongoing meltdown is Wall Street “greed,” as though that somehow counted as an explanation. How, pray, would we describe it if mortgage lenders had rejected many more applications from lower-income folks, on the grounds that they were poor risks? Well, greed, of […]

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For the sake of balance, I’ll note that I agree with Ezra here: Expecting the government to anticipate promising new green technologies and direct dollars in the right direction is stupid and wasteful. Just penalize environmental externalities and let the market figure out the most efficient alternative. The latter policy is actually “pro-market”; the former […]

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Destroying businesses without raising any revenue is awesome, so long as nobody gets to have a yacht. Of course, high luxury taxes won’t deter the hyper-rich from living large, only make more stark the divide between the merely well-off and the ludicrously wealthy. So even if you’re trying to decrease envy-related unhappiness, it’s not clear […]

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I can’t tell whether James “PoMoCon” Poulos is appalled or just bemused by Russian nostalgia for the Soviet era, in the form of high-priced hipster tees featuring communist iconography. But while it’s a bit unsettling to see the symbols of one of history’s bloodiest regimes treated like a Thundercats logo, I’m nevertheless generally delighted to […]

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Ezra has a very weird post expressing bemusement that pundits are big fans of merit pay yet themselves immune from such accountability. Which is a clever point, except that… what!? Yes, yes, the Atlantic bloggers’ paychecks don’t shift with last week’s traffic, but is Ezra suggesting that the pay a writer or TV/radio host commands […]

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It was probably only a matter of time, but it’s still a little sad to see it go: After 36 years,Laissez Faire Books is closing down. Back in the 70s, when Amazon was just a river in South America, LFB was an indispensable resource for anyone who wanted to keep up with an obscure cluster […]

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