I’ve written many times about how Americans are much richer than Europeans. And I’ve also written many times that the U.S. economy has been growing faster (which shouldn’t happen according to convergence theory). There’s a simple reason for America’s superior performance. The U.S. is burdened by a medium-sized welfare state and a bad tax system […]
A guest post by Lucy Rogers: Today (as of the time of writing) I saw Associate Professor Michael Mawson of the theology faculty at Auckland University advertise on Facebook an event hosting Professor Miguel De La Torre, a Cuban academic specialising in liberation theology. The event is to be held at the Maclaurin Chapel at […]
Bob Edlin writes – Historian and former Labour Government cabinet minister Michael Bassett, in an article posted here earlier today, said those who spend time on the web examining the Treaty of Waitangi will find claims there are four or even five articles when officially there have never been more than three. Bassett went on […]
The recipe for economic growth is not complicated. You can put it in very simple terms, as Adam Smith did a few hundred years ago. Or you can develop and utilize data-heavy indexes like the ones published by the Fraser Institute and Heritage Foundation. In either case, the result will be the same. If you […]
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has introduced the “No Kings Act” with great fanfare and the support of most of his Democratic colleagues. Liberal groups have heralded the measure to legislatively reverse the ruling in Trump v. United States. It is obviously popular with the press and pundits. It is also entirely unconstitutional in […]
I met Yale Law’s David Schleicher when he was still a law professor at GMU. Back then, we argued about the best model of non-rigged one-party democracy, often seen in major cities… and Singapore. Since then, David’s become a powerful academic voice for YIMBY. Last month, David joined me for another Fast Take on Build,…
The Miami Herald reports: A stunning 10% of Cuba’s population — more than a million people — left the island between 2022 and 2023, the head of the country’s national statistics office said during a National Assembly session Friday, the largest migration wave in Cuban history. Isn’t it such a weird coincidence that the queue […]
Texas won a big victory in the United States Court of Appeals in the long struggle over floating buoy barriers in the Rio Grande River to help block unlawful migration. In United States v. Abbott, the court ruled 11-7 in an en banc decision against the Biden Administration over the barrier. It is an interesting decision […]
See Socialists, Knowledge of History and Agency. These are letters to the editor of The WSJ in response to an article about socialism by Joseph Epstein. The one below reminded me of a 1992 article by Robert Samuelson in Newsweek. “Joseph Epstein’s “Socialists Don’t Know History” (op-ed, May 30, 2019) on the abysmal historical knowledge…
Justice Joe Williams in his 2013 paper Lex Aoteoroa made a case for Māori tikanga being recognized as New Zealand’s “first law”. Tikanga existed prior to New Zealand’s development of a legal system based on the British model. Without written language pre-European Māori tikanga is not well documented. However, its customs and norms governed, for […]
This video, professionally made and showing Kiri Tamihere-Waititi doing what can only be called ranting about her oppression and that of the Māori people, and then winding up by calling for the overthrow of the New Zealand, has caused a stir in that country. I am told that Tamihere-Waititi is a powerful member of Te […]
The outcome of the French assembly election of 2024 appears to have set up a situation that could be described as the “ideal” way that semi-presidential systems are meant to operate, based on how such governance models were articulated by their original theorists.
Below is my column in The Hill on the latest calls to protect democracy with distinctly undemocratic measures. Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton insisted that the 2024 election was our D-Day, suggesting that voters would have to fight the GOP like the Nazis in World War II. Clinton previously called on Europe to censor American […]
Just as trend lines are important for fiscal policy, they are perhaps even more important when looking at economic performance. Even small difference in annual growth rates, for instance, can lead to big changes in prosperity within a couple of decades. And enormous changes over longer periods of time. All of which explains why I’m […]
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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