The TL;DR on COVID-19: Panic, not science, continues to drive the public policy discussion.
Tag: history
Unfortunately, Voters Aren’t “the Adults in the Room”
On Election Day, 1976, I was eight days away from turning 10 years old. As my morning school bus passed the lone polling place in my tiny town, I leaned out the window and yelled, at the top of my lungs, “Vote for Carter!” If you plan to vote this November, please consider growing up first.
Is Home Ownership Really the “American Dream?”
Is home ownership the embodiment of the “American Dream?” Are Trump and Biden trying, in their own ways, to deliver the goods for you? Or are they just beholden to special interests whose members make larger campaign contributions than you do — for example, realtors, developers, and mortgage lenders?
If You Don’t Want a Biden ‘1619 Commission,’ You Should Oppose Trump’s ‘1776 Commission’
Truly patriotic education can only be achieved in a constitutional, and therefore patriotic, manner.
Supreme Court: Playing for Time vs. Advise and Consent
These days, far more is both knowable and known about prospective Supreme Court nominees well in advance of their nominations. Yet the process has mutated from “advise and consent” to “multi-month political campaign.”
Politicians vs. Small Businesses
It’s bad enough when politicians kill businesses with COVID-19 shutdowns. It’s worse if they kill a business because the owner won’t give money to their friends.
I Watched Cuties so You Wouldn’t Have to (But You Should)
A brigade of pearl-clutching, virtue-signaling, cancel-culture keyboard warriors wants you to know that Cuties (Mignonnes — it’s actually a French film) is a bad, bad movie that no one should watch and that Netflix should immediately remove from its lineup.
Public Choice: The Normative Core
The economic analysis of politics goes by many names: political economy, rational choice theory, formal political theory, social choice, economics of governance, endogenous policy theory, and public choice. Each of these labels picks out a subtly different intellectual tradition. Each tradition expands our understanding of the world. My favorite, though, remains public choice.
No One is “Mentally Fit” to be President
“Most voters in six 2020 swing states,” an early September CNBC/Change Research poll finds, “do not consider either President Donald Trump or Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden mentally fit to be president.”
Silence Is Not Consent in Politics, Either
When you undergo a medical procedure or volunteer for a research study, you’re presented with forms to sign, outlining what’s going to happen (and what bad things could happen), and expressly consenting to have those things happen. If you’re accused of rape, “he or she didn’t physically resist” isn’t an acceptable defense. In fact, express consent is the emerging standard, sometimes to seemingly ridiculous degrees (i.e. re-requesting consent at each stage of an encounter). Consent, I think we can agree, is a big deal in America today.