Timothy Egan’s Op-Ed piece in The New York Times, of March 15, 2014, entitled “Paul Ryan’s Irish Amnesia”, tries to link 19th century English complicity in the Irish potato famine to Paul Ryan’s concerns about creating multi-generational government dependency in America. It is so full of salacious inferences and strident ideology masquerading as facts that I don’t know where to begin. But I’ll try. And please recall that I am much more a Libertarian than a Conservative, but Egan’s...
I’m beginning a series on common sense truths which are real, and which therefore have negative consequences when we ignore them or try to pretend that they don’t exist. The following is written with two assumptions in mind: The vast majority of women and men in the military do their jobs extremely well. Individual tours of duty can be very positive. In any large population of people, there are the ten percent at each end of the bell curve who significantly over- or under- perform everyone...
In recognition of President Obama's State of the Union address, I'd like to share with you the very different approach of President William Harrison in my novel, The President, written almost twenty years ago. Enjoy. State of the Union Preamble
This post originally appeared as a guest post by Parker Hudson at MichaelYoussef.com on December 16, 2013. It is particularly relevant to the fictional story told in Enemy In The Room. Since I am occasionally critical of our President’s foreign policies, I have recently been asked whether I think that the world was somehow more pristine before 2008. Wasn’t the U.S. actually a worse actor in previous years, caroming around the globe and interfering in other nations’ internal affairs? My answer...
It’s a benefit I’m giving to you. And I’m doing good stuff for millions of other folks, too. It’s all free, paid for by your parents and the huge insurance companies. Feels great, doesn’t it! Well, yes, we actually did have to cancel your parents’ plan. It wasn’t good enough for them, or for you, so we cancelled it. And I guess that means neither you nor your parents have any health insurance, but that's one of the small costs of being progressive. I’ve discovered that buying health...
I knew that getting older there would be challenges, but I had not anticipated this one. Today I had to estimate how many incandescent light bulbs to buy so that we can read in bed and light our den until we croak. The NannyState has outlawed them. So, being optimistic about life on this side, we now have quite a horde of bulbs. We’ve decided that for as long as we can manage it, we’re too old for cheap wine or non-incandescent reading lights. But the way things are going, once we’ve departed...
The healthcare delivery and payment debacle of the previous decades, brought to a head with the passage and current dismantling of Obamacare, lead us to find an alternative that might actually work. As neither a doctor nor a politician, but as a student of economics, let me take a stab. Basic economic theory predicts that if a good or service is producible by the free market, it is better for everyone if the market actually produces it, and that the government then purchases it, rather than...
One guaranteed way to win an argument is to insure that your opponent never has any input into the debate. The secular lock-out of religious input into the public square has been gaining strength for decades, but now the pace of this discrimination is rapidly increasing. I have written previously on Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1836 observation that America’s unique strength was how Judeo-Christian faith and values were woven deeply and inexorably into the multi-faceted quilt of our society. ...
When the next major terrorist attack, natural disaster, or widespread power/water failure occurs—and at least one certainly will in the foreseeable future—effective command and control will be crucial for fighting back and implementing countermeasures. The terrible alternative to effective communication will be increased destruction and increased loss of life. A hundred years ago, command and control was not so important or so complex. Individuals and communities were much more...
Henry Hazlitt was a great Economist. As I first mentioned nine months ago, Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson in 1946, then updated in 1978. It reads like today’s news, because it is filled with economic truth, not political or editorial wishful thinking. Members of Congress, the President, and practicing journalists should all be required to memorize the following excerpt from Chapter 15: “In studying the effects of any given economic proposal we must trace not merely the immediate...
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