Noted "moderate conservative" Megan McArdle writes that we should never lose friends to politics, because: Politics is not the most important thing in the world. It’s just the one people talk about the most. ... So keep some perspective about politics. It doesn’t matter as much as the real people around you, and the real … Continue reading Politics is Policy, Policy Matters

When people can't afford expensive care get life-threateningly sick, we can either: 1) Give them care and have somebody else pay for it 2) Let them die. That's it. Those are the choices. So, whenever somebody says "as a country, we can't afford to pay for health insurance for all these poor people," what they're … Continue reading Healthcare Made Simple

I'm commuting up to Davis today, and I'm sharing a table on the train with a lobbyist, who is opposed to a cap-and-trade bill that's being discussed in the state senate. Here's the thing though: She shouldn't give me any substantive information about the bill, or CA cap and trade policy in general. She literally … Continue reading The funny dynamics of political lobbying

Earlier I posted about neoliberalism, and offered a full-throated defense of it, so consider this post as a critique meant to nibble around the edges of implementation, not an attack on the core concept.  My opinion of the core concept still starts and ends with the roughly 1 billion east asian people lifted out of extreme … Continue reading Neoliberalism and rent control

Neoliberalism is fundamentally the idea that if two people would like to make a deal that does not directly affect anybody else, we should let them. It is opposed both to regulation and cartels, and the neoliberal agenda can take credit the de-regulation (and union cartel breaking) that allowed for containerization of global shipping, as well as … Continue reading The neoliberal agenda, or modern loaves and fishes

Over at Meisselspot (deep in the archives at this point), Yonah Meisselman has a thought-provoking piece on gentrification.  The whole post is worth reading (really, go click through and read it), but the core takeaway is this: like "capitalism" and "essays I wrote in high school," I find "gentrification" to be a rather incoherent mess … Continue reading Gentrification, or a series of barely coherent thoughts

Looking back at the protests of the first 10 days of Trump's presidency, I realize the fundamental miscalculation that he's made.  Cultural identity matters, and the core of the American identity is that, like Captain America, we fight tooth and nail against injustice. Obviously this is an ideal that we often fall short of, but in the … Continue reading Trump Underestimated Captain America

This is just something I want to write down now, when the memory is fresh, before the collective gaslighing sets in: President Trump's campaign ran on undeniable racist themes, and the voters saw the bigotry as a feature and not a bug. When Clinton called half of his supporters bigoted, there was no wave of "oh no, … Continue reading Remember the Deplorables