Everyone agrees that we need to create more jobs. Tens of millions of Americans who want to work are not working and this is not good. So far, however, no one seems to know how to do this, although proposals for doing so are out there, for example: —from Paul Krugman who says more stimulus [...]
Archive for the ‘Current Affairs’ category
How to create jobs and put people to work
August 9, 2011Jeb Bush, Common Sense on Immigration
January 17, 2011The Republican Party continues to support expensive and mostly futile efforts to stop both the flow of drugs and illegals into our country whereas the country, in particular large numbers of its citizens, continues to welcome both. Our own history tells us, has told us over and over again, that drug use, no more than [...]
Sharp words of Marty Peretz on his TNR Blog, The Spine
October 1, 2010Last weekend during an event at Harvard, where he was to be honored by his former students of some 50 years of teaching in the Social Studies Department, Martin Peretz, TNR editor-in-chief and creator of the Blog, The Spine, was loudly lambasted for his Blog entry of September 5. There following his widely shared and [...]
On the Tea Party Opposition to Obamacare and the Libertarian Opposition to Global Warming
April 2, 2010In regard to the first of these, the Senate health care reform bill, Atul Gawande writes, in the New Yorker of April 5, “The major engine of opposition remains the insistence that health-care reform is unaffordable….In 1965, health care consumed just six per cent of U.S. economic output; today, the figure is eighteen per cent. [...]
More on Public Goods
March 30, 2010I’ve had one comment in response to my previous Blog, “Making too much of and from a public good.” It’s from Alex, who says, “Leonhardt’s statement begs the question, conflating free markets (read capitalism) with anarchy. This is nonsense. Implicit in Capitalism is the social contract, and that includes things like police, courts, defense.” The [...]
Making too much of and from a “public good.”
March 27, 2010David Leonhardt, in this Sunday’s NYTimes Magazine says: “A public good is something that the free market tends not to provide on its own, to the detriment of society. Pollution laws and police departments are classic examples.” Elsewhere, in the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal I read: “In Vallejo, CA compensation packages for [...]
On the Opinion Pages of the New York Times
March 24, 2010How do I begin my day? Well like so many other members of my tribe of (idle) idea mongers, I begin it with coffee and the Internet Times, still posted there on the Web, free for the taking. After a brief glance at the principal news stories, and when there’s nothing on the first page [...]
Obama needs to turn his back on the Congress and begin to lead the country
February 19, 2010Barack Obama was sworn in as this country’s 44th president on January 20, 2009. What happened on that day was something that I hadn’t believed possible, at least in my lifetime, that a “Black” would be living in the White House. Even if he never did anything else as president this in itself, I thought, [...]
Is this what we’re now confronting, both in Europe and the United States?
February 17, 2010From The Wall Street Journal’s Review and Outlook today: “The central contradiction in modern liberal politics is that Otto von Bismarck’s entitlement state* for cradle to grave financial security is no longer affordable. The model has reached the limit of its ability to tax private income and still allow enough economic growth to finance its [...]
How do the terrorists see themselves?
January 6, 2010Probably not as terrorists. Certainly not as the embodiment of evil out to destroy the good. We actually know a lot about how they see themselves. They speak often of the validity, the rightness if not the goodness of their cause. Here are two examples. One from the Pakistani Five. Do you remember, those five [...]
