How should we approach the upcoming mid-term elections? With a focus on today’s 24/7 headlines, or with a longer term perspective? Are the elections, as President Trump claims, all about him, or larger issues? As a Christian conservative with strong libertarian leanings, what are my guiding principles for voting? And, by the way, I know that there is only one true Savior, and he is not any politician, party or government. The founding document for our nation, the Declaration of Independence,...
This week in August marks the Fiftieth Anniversary of two events in the tumultuous year of 1968 which had a lasting impact on my life: The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 21st, and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on August 26th. I had just graduated from UNC and turned 21. What follows is a personal post, using mostly my own photos. The Warsaw Pact countries invaded Prague that week because the Czech leadership had dared to give their citizens a few freedoms...
This post is part of my series on Black Swans and the crucial need to keep real Margin built into our lives. Upcoming is the Tenth Anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, the largest such filing in U.S. history and the trigger for the devastating Great Recession. In time for it is the publication of Laurence Ball’s new book, The Fed and Lehman Brothers. There have been many books and articles written on the Financial Crisis of 2007-2011, but Ball’s book focuses on the...
Bill Gates calls Steven Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, “My new favorite book of all time.” Pinker’s work is a 453 page, incredibly well researched tour de force on every aspect of life across the globe since The Enlightenment. And almost every page explores the incomparable progress we humans have made during the last 250 years to beat back death, extend life, multiply productivity, equalize rights, increase leisure, and add to...
A nation that fractures along identity politics boundaries is almost certainly doomed. When Lenin and Trotsky started their rebellion against the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky in St. Petersburg, Russia in November, 1917, they expected to be arrested and sent into exile, as had always happened before. Instead, a few days later, much to their surprise, they were in control of the capital and, soon, the nation. What happened? The Bolsheviks were prepared to use violence to get...
Veteran readers in this space will know that one of my favorite books is Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson. See my post from 2013 entitled What We Don’t See is Killing Us for a reminder. And I will again quote several sentences from Chapter 15 which capture Hazlitt’s special insight, and which all policy makers should memorize: “In studying the effects of any given economic proposal we must trace not merely the immediate results but the results in the long run, not merely the primary...
I was just in Seattle, and the rumor there is that amazon.com will choose Toronto, Canada for its highly-sought after second headquarters, to poke the President in the eye for his immigration and trade policies. I hope that won't happen, but if it turns out to be true, it will be the latest in the list of counterproductive results from our President’s unfortunate words, tweets and actions. A year ago, worried about the election, I wrote that we had a terrible choice. Separating the choice...
I suspect that this post will make some readers angry. That's not my intent, but it's probably inevitable, because I want to ask some politically incorrect questions which no one seems to be willing to take on. This year in the Pacific Fleet there have been three collisions and a grounding of combatant ships, a terrible record previously unmatched by the U.S. Navy. A quick search online will bring up several articles about the details of each incident. The two recent, tragic collisions at sea...
Michael Schuman’s reminder in a recent BusinessWeek article is one of the clearest high level observations I’ve read on the perverse and unpredictable nature of too much debt in the short run, never mind the long term requirement to repay it; he focuses on the mounting problem in China, though the same analysis could apply to Illinois, Puerto Rico and other heavy borrowers. It reminds me of the last days of the Soviet Union when factories built widgets that no one wanted and just stacked them...
As many of you know, I recently spent several days in London with a group of wonderful Believers who are originally from Nigeria, at an event for Joshua's Army. We were joined by a pastor from Lagos, Nigeria, and by a pastor in the Nigerian community in London, both strong men of God. Our weekend discussion was about how husbands and fathers can better model Christ with our wives and children. While there were many beautiful facets to the weekend together, the one I want to focus on for this...
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