Your Mattress or Your Life
EDITOR'S NOTE: This guest post is a companion to the recently published Robbing Mattresses. I'm sure you've heard the narrative. The wealthy just get wealthier, and the poor just get poorer. Without massive government intervention, perhaps even a revolution, the "have...
The Popular Vote and Unintended Consequences
Democrats, apparently still raging over Clinton's stunning loss to the Untethered Orange Id, narrowly missed on adding Nevada to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (the Democratic governor vetoed it), an initiative wherein states commit their electors in...
Plastic Bags and Virtue Signals
Many people loooove to scold other people, and many politicians loooove to hop on bandwagons that involve scolding. And, when ideas about controlling scoldable behavior arise, they, like lies, run twice around the world before corresponding truths even get out of the...
Robbing Mattresses
Other People's Money (OPM) is a wonderful thing, especially when those Other People have a lot of it and you have a lot of ideas as to how it should be spent. Progressive economics, distilled down to its essence, brings us to that simple conclusion. One problem with...
Game of Thrones and the All-Wise Ruler
It's right there in the opening credits. The mechanisms of power, the institutions, the gears, are everything. By the time Game of Thrones (GoT) wound down, it was quite clear that the "wheel," which Daenerys Targaryen devoted her life to breaking, was never to be...
Corporate Politics Duality
Would it surprise you to learn that the phrase "virtue signaling" entered the public vernacular less than five years ago? The underlying behavior has always existed, but it only achieved a level of ubiquity and visibility wide enough to warrant its own sobriquet after...
OPM, Restaurant Edition
Know that tip you leave for your servers at your favorite restaurant? It's become the apple of someone's eye. Many someones, actually. There's been a movement afoot for a number of years to change how workers in traditionally tip-compensated jobs get paid. Before I...
The Art of Shutting Up
SPOILER WARNING: Below are some Game of Thrones commentary and decontextualized quotes, though no specific plot point divulgence. Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 4 continued its uneven and, in some ways, hurried denouement of George R.R. Martin's sprawling tale of...
The Global Warming Doomsday Cult
The other day, in comments on a Facebook post about climate change and science denial, I concurred with someone who noted that "CO2 emissions have an impact on climate is established science. The belief this will cause cataclysmic disasters is not," by asserting that...
Where’s The Omelet?
The title of this essay, attributed to both George Orwell and a reformed Bolshevik writer named Panait Istrati, addresses the socialist-apologists' assertion that, in order to make an omelet, you have break a few eggs. Thus were Stalin's brutalities justified in the...
Housing Six-Figure Hobos
In my work as a paramedic I have seen how managing the homeless creates incessant overuse of the emergency services. Most of these cases are the "syndrome of homelessness", i.e. ineligibility for housing and employment because of criminality, substance addiction, and...
Picking Winners and Losers
We are well into the second year of Trump's trade war, which has produced a volatile but flat stock market (The S&P 500 index sits, at this moment at 2856, almost precisely its 2873 value of January 28, 2018, just before this trade war began), and which threatens...
Borders and Colors
Yes, it's AOC time again. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, freshman congresswoman, political It-girl, and self-made voice of the Progressive Left and the Democratic Socialists, has offered up yet another interesting piece of blather. The headline, which reads "Ocasio-Cortez...
Mayor Pete and Thomas Jefferson
Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, democratic Presidential aspirant, and momentary favorite of a subset of the Left's taste-making machine, sought to grab some spotlight back from Joe Biden and his meteoric rise up the candidacy rankings by offering up his...
Looming Green Thuggery
New York State, helmed by a governor hell-bent on demonstrating his progressive-green bona fides, is propelling itself head-long into a wholly avoidable energy crisis. Con Edison and National Grid, the suppliers of natural gas service to the city and its suburbs, have...
The Game of Thrones Finale – A Recap
Like many others, I found myself rather disappointed in the unfolding of the eighth-and-final season of Game of Thrones. But, like many others, I wasn't about to walk away after ten years and 70+ episodes, and miss out on the long-awaited reveal as to the winner of...
Israel and the Benjamins
Political anti-semitism is on the rise across the West's Left. Britain's Labor party seemingly embraces it, France's is notoriously virulent and persistent, and now the pathogen is in the USA. Minnesota's Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has made a whole series of problematic...
The Politics of a Child
Karl Marx theorized that socialism was a next evolutionary step after capitalism, intended to destroy and supplant capitalism, and set the stage for the emergence of communism. This "next step" belief suggests that socialism is a more advanced form of governance, a...
The Progressives’ Soft Socialism
Get into an argument for any length of time with a progressive on matters economic, and (in the spirit of Godwin) your probability of hearing some form of "not-real-socialism," either in dismissal of past failures or in disconnect from the formal...
My Body, My Choice!
One of the fine folks at the superb Volokh Conspiracy (now hosted by Reason) did a yeoman's job elucidating the libertarian position regarding the liberal/pro-abortion mantra "My Body, My Choice!" I've summarized and expanded on that list here. In summary, if you...
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