Utopia, you are standing in it!

Andrew Carnegie
by David Nasaw
878 pages
Penguin Books
Published: October 2006

“Andrew Carnegie” by Davis Nasaw was published in 2006 and was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at City University of New York. Among his most widely-read books are biographies of Joseph P.Kennedy (which I read and reviewed last year) and William Randolph Hearst.

The ideal biography requires several crucial ingredients. Among them are an intriguing biographical subject, a skilled writer, a robust supply of primary source material and an author capable of diligent and determined research. This scholarly and often gripping biography of Andrew Carnegie provides each of these items in abundance.

Using sources not available to earlier biographers, Nasaw skillfully stitches together a seamless and comprehensive narrative which explores his subject’s entire life.  In these 801 pages of text, Nasaw…

I don’t really follow Twitter, but sometimes it makes news when a prominent person deletes a tweet, as when Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times’s 1619 project deleted several tweets, including one drawing a distinction between being “politically black” and “racially black.” That made news, as did the tweet below issued about two weeks ago by Steve Pinker and then deleted. This puzzled me as I didn’t really see anything wrong with the tweet itself, though I didn’t read the linked Washington Post article.

I found out about the deleted tweet from reader Ginger K., who sent me this article from the respectable-sounding American Council on Science and Health (click on screenshot to read), which says it’s a nonprofit advocacy group but, according to sources cited in its Wikipedia article, is heavily funded by corporations, and takes some bizarre stands that align with corporate sponsorship.

At any rate, the…

England, 878

The final chapter in the Viking saga unfolded as a decades-long competition among kings for control of England amidst a royal rivalry for the north. Though most of the key players were of Scandinavian descent, sea power played only a supporting role. Perhaps because the Northmen still dominated the northern seas, the only naval battles of any significance were fought between Scandinavian adversaries in Scandinavian waters.

The battle for England began with the mysterious murder of King Edward at Corfe Castle in March 978, because this event brought to the throne Æthelred the Unready (or more correctly ‘the ill-advised’). Alfred’s strong line of successors had dissipated and Æthelred, barely twelve at the time of his accession, was ill-equipped to deal with the renewed Viking assault from the sea. Raids on the south and west coasts of England, taking advantage of the perceived weakness, began coming as early as…

Back in 2016, I shared an image that showed how the welfare state punishes both the poor and rich.

Rich people are hurt for the obvious reason. They get hit with the highest statutory tax rates, and also bear the brunt of the double taxation (the extra layers of tax on saving and investment resulting from capital gains taxes, double taxes on dividends, death taxes, etc).

But I also pointed out that the poor are penalized because they get trapped in dependency.

In large part, this is because they face bad incentives when they work and try to become self sufficient. Not only do they get hit by federal and state taxes, but they also can lose access to various redistribution programs. And the combination of those two factors can produce very high implicit marginal tax rates.

I cited an astounding example of this phenomenon in 2012…

Late in his life, Napoleon summed up how wars are won and lost. It was, he said, three parts moral. One part physical. Throughout his campaign for the English throne, William had relentlessly maintained the moral high ground, from his manipulation of Harold’s oath, through his dealings with the Vatican, to (according to William of Poitiers) his careful arrangement around his neck on the morning of the battle of the bones of the saints on which he maintained Harold had sworn. It has frequently been asserted that in the final analysis he had outgeneralled his opponent, but it was on the moral high ground that he most conspicuously did so. It was a considerable achievement for a man whose conquest lacked any moral or legal justification.

He lost no time in exploiting…

George III (George William Frederick; June 4, 1738 – January 29, 1820) was King of Great Britain and King of Ireland from his accession on October 25, 1760 until the union of the two countries on January 1, 1801, after which he was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until his death in 1820. He was concurrently Duke and Prince-Elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg (“Hanover”) in the Holy Roman Empire before becoming King of Hanover on October 12, 1814. He was a monarch of the House of Hanover, but unlike his two predecessors, he was born in Great Britain, spoke English as his first language, and never visited Hanover.

George III, King of the United King of Great Britain and Ireland. King of Hanover

Family

George was born in London at Norfolk House in St James’s Square. As he was born two months prematurely and thought unlikely to…

A revised and enlarged edition of Thomas Sowell’s Discrimination and Disparities, first published last year, has been published. This is not a full review. My review of that first edition see “Poisoned by Welfare”, The Salisbury Review, vol. 37 no. 1, pp. 49-51, Autumn 2018. The main changes are the addition of two new chapters (nos. five and seven), though there are other changes throughout. This edition of 308pp compares to the 179pp of the first edition, although the second edition has marginally larger font. We should recap Sowell’s arguments.

Sowell describes how discrimination can be interpreted two ways. The first is the exercise of general prejudice; the other is as informed judgment. Sowell’s point is that these are variations of the same function: discerning differences. The question is merely the accuracy and detail of these assessments. He sorts discrimination into judgment at an individual level and at…