America’s fifty governors and 535 members of Congress seem to constitute the worst possible pool from which to select a president. Their collective record of corruption, incompetence, scandal, etc. is probably an order of magnitude worse than the record of any 585 randomly selected regular Americans.
Tag: corruption
Words Poorly Used #126 — Duly Elected
I’m listening to the audiobook by Matt Kibbe, Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff. It is an excellent book, but my feathers ruffled just a bit when I heard the phrase, “duly elected.” Due in what sense? In the real world, natural phenomena are due to natural events. What goes up, must come…
Discussion with a Cop Supporter
Here is a discussion I had with a supporter of cops a while back. It may be educational to see the lengths people will go to when they are desperate to excuse the inexcusable and justify that which can’t be justified.
James O’Keefe versus the Cardinal Rule of “Gotcha” Journalism
“O’Keefe’s team seems less interested in what’s true than in making the media look bad,” writes Friedersdorf. The indictment is harsh but it seems to be true. And that’s a problem.
International Adoption: The Personal Side
To take the case of international adoption: We’re paranoid about the microscopic risk of accidentally snatching a poor family’s wanted baby – and barely cognizant of the fantastic opportunity regulation snatches from the hands of orphans around the world.
Voluntary Provision of a So-called Public Good
This is the trouble with neoclassical welfare economics, amigos: it’s not a decent theory, but it’s a dandy rationale for government to coerce people right and left ostensibly in order to supply valuable public goods, many of which are mere boondoggles for government contractors and magnets for corruption of the legislators and bureaucrats who impose the projects on an often-unwilling public.
Mongoose
In Hawaii, in the late 19th Century, Mongooses were imported to rid the sugar cane fields of rats. Now the mongooses are overwhelming, reducing populations of birds and turtles, and domestic cats! The mongoose tale is still a bit exotic, but the story is most often demonstrated where government is the mongoose.
A Poor Politician
In truth, the only way to curb political corruption is to drastically reduce the scope of government. Only when the politicians have nothing with which to be corrupt will they stop being corrupt.
Hard Questions About the Protestant Reformation
It’s tempting for libertarians to celebrate this time in history as a great victory for freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but the Reformation’s main fruit was over a century of horrifying warfare.
Hillary Clinton: Cold Creepiness with a Side of Corruption
Was Clinton’s latest lunge at Assange and WikiLeaks a preemptive strike? An attempt, perhaps, to get ahead of extreme ugliness in the coming news cycle?