Apr 17, 2015
America fought a war for 14 years, all the while binding herself with conditions and goals that made the war impossible to win.
Apr 2, 2015
Is anger is automatically triggered by the nature of an offense, or is anger a result of conditioning? Is anger uncontrollable or can it be suppressed?
Mar 23, 2015
The movement to purge offensive language has gone into overdrive. But who defines what is offensive?
Apr 14, 2013
America follows the path of late Rome: Fortunes no longer arise from creating new wealth, but via exploiting privileged relations with the state.
Jan 20, 2013
The underclass degenerates. The plebs get squeezed. The rat-racers run to stand still. The rentiers thrive.
Feb 4, 2012
Every year the slums around Rio, Johannesburg, Lagos, Kolkatta, Mexico City, and dozens of other cities grow larger. More people cram into tightly packed, noisy, polluted conditions.
Jan 29, 2012
From 1950 to 1990 the great American cities fell into ruins. Homicide rates rose 1,000%. Great buildings were left abandoned, crumbling.
Apr 3, 2011
Sorting out muddled thinking about of the nature of states, refuting anarchism, condemning the Orwellian use of the words "public" and "private."
Sep 16, 2010
Because the dollar is a fiat currency, and the national debt is denominated fully in a currency the government controls, the "debt" is not really debt.
Jul 27, 2010
Formalism is not a political ideology, but rather a collection of practical wisdom, gleaned from the study of past and present polities.
Aug 31, 2016
Here is my challenge to intellectually curious progressives: for six months integrate Counter Search into your reading habits.
Jun 10, 2016
Once intended to name-and-shame those who foster tribal hatreds, the word racism has itself become a hate-word in the right-versus-left tribal war.
May 24, 2016
Today, I condemn two additional economic indicators: manufacturing output indices and productivity indices.
May 18, 2016
Do startup founders acquire riches by creating wealth? Or by winning zero-sum games? A response to Paul Graham.
Apr 7, 2016
A living-wage job for everyone, with no increased taxes. Here's how to do it.
Mar 24, 2016
Is it unfair to compare the Black Panthers to the KKK? Not if you look at their history.
Nov 12, 2015
A collection of books that helped broaden my own perspective beyond the mainstream zeitgeist
Sep 17, 2015
The Gross Domestic Product and Consumer Price Index numbers are a hodgepodge of subjective judgements. The numbers are worthless for virtually all use cases.
Aug 5, 2015
American ideology divides the world into democracies and authoritarian regimes. This distinction is not based on reason or reality, but based on classic us-versus-them ideological thinking.
Jul 23, 2015
We are already far down the slipperly slope. The narrowing of acceptable discourse has already had devastating real world consequences.
These posts are of less enduring interest. They remain on the site because I do not like to delete old posts. Posts are put here for reasons such as: they were written as part of a specific discussion, I no longer agree with what I originally wrote, they were just too verbose, they were poorly written, or they had some other weakness.
Jun 25, 2015
Conspiracy theories are usually false. But the same theory rewritten as a bureaucracy theory is often true.
Apr 21, 2015
The Fed cannot raise nominal interest rates, because the rates have been too low, for too long. Raising the rates will be like quitting heroin.
Feb 27, 2012
Nominal tax revenue does not matter. Growth of purchasing power is what matters.
Dec 20, 2011
Europe cloned the banking system of a unified nation, and mistakenly applied it to a confederation of sovereign states.
Aug 4, 2011
Drugs should be just legal enough to avoid generating a black market.
Jul 26, 2011
Barzini was on the ground in Europe during its most tumultuous years.
Nov 11, 2010
Economic analysis and predictions from 2010.
Nov 6, 2010
Good reform should prevent systematic meltdowns, while allowing for bottom-up decision making about who gets credit.
Oct 23, 2010
Tocqueville writes: I cannot remember ever feeling my soul so full of sadness. It was the second revolution I had seen accomplish itself, before my eyes, within seventeen years!
Jun 17, 2010
This book epitomizes everything that is wrong with social science.
Mar 26, 2010
Zweig writes: I never loved that old earth more than in those last years before the First World War.
Sep 27, 2008
A list of links collected in 2008 about the crisis of that year.