Disarm: The Lesson of the Georgia Fiasco

George Bush, with the clock ticking down the last months of his presidency, nearly started yet another war that might have escalated in the manner of World War I: a diplomatic failure backed by arms that resulted in a superpower clash. It is a wonder that the world has survived his “war on terror,” which turned out to be a war on American liberty and anyone in the world who got on his nerves. His confrontation with Russia in defense of a belligerent little client state of the United States could have sealed his fate and ours too.

Fill-in-the-Blank Article About Price-Gouging Laws

As surely as summer follows spring, natural disasters are followed by saber rattling about “price gouging,” which is usually defined very lucidly and clearly as an “unconscionable” increase in the price of a necessity. These tend to follow a formula, so I thought that instead of writing a new article discussing the unintended consequences of every price-gouging law that goes into effect after a natural disaster, it would be useful to write a universal, fill-in-the-blank article discussing the economics of price-gouging laws.

Troll Tracker Lands Job Fighting Patent Trolls!

In previous posts (Troll Tracker’s Identity Revealed :( and Troll Tracker [Why People Hate Lawyers]), I discussed threats and bounties put up by patent attorney Ray Niro against the then-anonymous Troll Tracker (who repeatedly highlighted various patent lawsuits Niro was filing), which finally resulted in Troll Tracker being exposed as an in-house patent attorney at Cisco, Rick Frenkel.

What Belongs to Caesar?

Despite the title of the book, Archbishop Chaput leaves the reader without any argument as to why the state has a right to rule over us, why we have a moral obligation to submit to such domination, or why the state possesses the moral authority to extract money from us at the point of a gun. Put in even simpler terms, Archbishop Chaput offers no compelling arguments against those of us who happen to be, in Jerome Tuccille’s words, “sane, moderate, middle-of-the-road anarchist[s].”

Sex, Violence, and the Culture War

One of the fundamental problems in the social sciences is that correlation is not necessarily causation. Unfortunately, correlations are often reported and causality is inferred based on the predispositions of the analyst without adequately accounting for alternative hypotheses. There is nothing intellectually dishonest about this; indeed, empirical research is extremely difficult. However, it should cause us to view claims about causal relationships with some skepticism.

The Downturn Is Good News

Sometimes the bad news is the good news. So it is with the report that retail sales are down by 0.1 percent in July, the sharpest drop in many months.

Why good news? It means that consumers are starting to cut back. They could be going into less debt. They might be saving more. They are being more careful about long-term plans pending short-term trends.

Going for the Heart

The heart of the modern state is the central bank. By heart I mean the very thing that makes it work, and without which the modern state would quickly wither and die. It is the thing that makes the money. As such, it purports to be our stabilizer, our source of employment, the fuel behind the economic growth that brings us technology.

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