“There, There, Work With Us, And We’ll Cut You In”

Michael Lind has written a long article in Politico (where he is a contributing editor) on the future of the Republican Party. I’ll save you the trouble of reading all of it. At the end, it suggests that the rational thing for the party to do is to accept today’s “progressive” welfare state, but just try to tilt the government payments to white middle class workers and businesses, in other words the core voters and the core financiers of the party. The aim should not be to abolish today’s crony capitalist pork system, but to be sure that Republicans get more of the swill.

Life Expectancy: If Denmark Were a US State, It Would Rank Equal To or Worse Than Sixteen US States

This week, the OECD released new life-expectancy figures for member countries.

The life expectancy at birth in the US is 79 years, according to the OECD’s 2015 edition of its Better Life Index. For the OECD overall, the life expectancy is 80 years. Here are all OECD states (plus non-OECD countries Russia and Brazil) compared:

Are You Exploiting Others By Having a Job?

Somewhere along the line, Americans (and possibly others) began to suffer from the idea that starting a business and serving customers involves taking something out of the community. This likely goes back to 19th century Marxist ideas of exploitation, but in its watered-down American form, it leads to a whole host of bizarre theories in which a person is doing something wrong by working for a living or running a business in a community.

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