Category: Uncategorized
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Who is naive
Previously published in the People’s View. and then in the DailyKos. You know, if you care about making investments in our kids and making investments in our infrastructure and making investments in basic research then you should want our fiscal house in order so that every time we propose a…
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The Reactionary Left and Financial Market Reform
Suppose that Congress took a step to channel low cost Federal loans to small community banks and community lending institutions – like micro-lending non-profits that specifically make capital available to people shut out of the normal banking system. And suppose that reform had already increased small business lending. Or suppose…
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A modest proposal for free market bank reform
The reason we have this huge, complex, and inefficient bank regulation system is that history shows there will be bank panics. If there is bank panic in an industrial economy, the effects are devastating and long-lasting. Bank collapse triggers bank collapse in a spreading circle that, in the absence of…
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Philosophy for us rats
If we believe we came out of the universe, not it out of us, we must admit that we do not know what we are talking about when we speak of brute matter. We do know that a certain complex of energies can wag its tail and another can make…
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Low wages, social insecurity
Conservatives are now hardly bothering to disguise their political objective – destroying the middle class. Here’s Politico explaining the consensus of official Washington on Medicare. The thing to notice is that they don’t care about cutting costs – the benefits are what they want to cut. They will also tell…
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Cheery holiday thoughts
For Schopenhauer, suffering is an ineliminable feature of this worst of all possible worlds. Here the nastiness of experience makes it such that, for each of us, it would have been better not to have been born. Indeed for Schopenhauer, our world can be described quite accurately as hell, and…
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Keynes versus usury
If I am right in supposing it to be comparatively easy to make capital-goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero, this may be the most sensible way of gradually getting rid of many of the objectionable features of capitalism. For a little reflection will show what…
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Basketball metaphor updated
Suppose liberal/progressive pundits called a basketball game: Chalmers takes the ball upcourt – that’s incredibly stupid, he’s not a scorer He passes to Wade – Basketball 101: You can’t score if you don’t put the ball in the hoop, all this passing bullshit is pure cowardice. Wade in traffic, passes…
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Negotiation 101 Revisited: a primer
Here’s what happens when you make a bunch of concessions before negotiations begin: your compromised stance becomes the *baseline*. — David Roberts (@drgrist) November 8, 2012 //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js Why is it that progressive pundits are so eager to make pronouncements about things they know nothing about? Political negotiations are not like…
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Lessons Learned Obama term one: Part one
The biggest success of the anti-Obama “progressives” over the last four years has been to displace any actual Democratic critique of the Obama administration. What passes for “left” or “progressive” critique ranges from dyspeptic Libertarianism to bitter whining of old white men (and some old black men) who don’t find…
krebscycle 