In the comments on the main page about teachers unions, DensityDuck asks “why teachers—who are most surely highly-educated persons with prized skills—need to be in a union at all,” to which Burt Likko responds “[b]ecause, for the most part, they… Continue Reading
Kevin Drum wonders: to the extent that you really do believe that cognitive abilities are (a) important, and (b) strongly biologically determined, shouldn’t you also believe that the poor are more unlucky than anything else, and haven’t done anything to… Continue Reading
Blogging has been light as I’ve continued work on a major piece exposing the role of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association—the prison guards’ union—in the state’s eight-fold increase in the number of incarcerations in just three decades, proximately resulting… Continue Reading
My friend and former professor, John Eastman:
Jeff G. at Protein Wisdom responds to the old argument, recently repeated by Ezra Klein and Paul Sterne, that the Senate is undemocratic because it gives residents of less populous states greater relative voting power than residents of more populous… Continue Reading
As clear an explanation as I’ve seen: In Lopez, Morrison, and Raich, the leading Supreme Court decisions on the limits of the Commerce Clause, the Court held that the federal government could regulate minute, barely significant, actions because as a… Continue Reading
It’s easy to take an indignant moral position on a single issue. “Torture is wrong.” “Abortion is wrong.” “Coerced transactions are wrong.” Such positions aren’t rare, and thus not particularly interesting. What is rare, however, is the ability to demonstrate… Continue Reading
Matt Zwolinski on Rand Paul equating universal health care with slavery: [P]erhaps it’s inevitable that politicians are going to badly over-simplify moral arguments. And I suppose that if I had to choose, I’d much rather have a Senator who over-simplified… Continue Reading
I found this post from Adam Ozimek interesting, explaining why drastically increasing wages has consequences that are, even if unintended, not unpredictable. The response at Democracy in America complains that Mr. Ozimek’s post “doesn’t seem to be taking [the higher-wage… Continue Reading
Here’s a response to my post where I praised Dearborn Muslims for their reaction to the Terry Jones kerfluffle. Blogger “Shams” associates my post with “birtherism,” “racism,” “homophobia,” the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, the price of gasoline, American middle… Continue Reading