In 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. [...]
Archive for the ‘Current Affairs’ category
On the Tea Party Opposition to Obamacare and the Libertarian Opposition to Global Warming
April 2, 2010More 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 [...]
Waging a war on terror in a liberal democracy
January 6, 2010President Obama’s future in elective politics may well depend on how well he can make his countrymen understand and accept his view that terrorists prior to their capture are the legitimate objects of all the deadly forces (in particular the Predator Missiles that have been so effective in killing their leaders) that we can muster [...]
At West Point the President allies himself with Karl Rove
December 3, 2009What has happened that President Obama finds himself allied with Karl Rove (and the Republican leaders in the U.S. Congress) on the hawkish side of the debate regarding the U.S. role in Afghanistan, while, for example, nearly the entire gamut of NYTimes op ed writers from left to right (not to mention myriad liberal voices [...]
Talk the talk, but not yet walk the walk
November 22, 2009Are there still people in the world today who speak the truth to those in power who lie? This might seem a not unreasonable conclusion from two recent articles in the Times. First, the Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a widely respected founding member of the present Iranian religious hierarchy, is mounting his own verbal [...]
