“With bloated bureaucracies and top marginal tax rates at 70% when he entered office, President Reagan also carried in his mind a basic script about overreach of the federal government that resonated with Americans after a decade of stagflation and presidential scandals.”
“It is a win-win situation—not the zero-sum world of Marx’s gloomy dystopia. Institutions that reduce transaction costs and enforce well-defined property rights provide an environment in which incentives to economic initiative can thrive.”
“The analyses attempting to quantify reparations, cited above, will likely encounter strong and ongoing resistance, if only based on the price tag alone.”
“What accounts for the gap between scholars and activists who advocate reparations and broad public resistance to the idea?”
“Without the notion of socially necessary labor time, nothing in Marx’s value form or overall theory of exploitation makes sense.”
“As a matter of economics, scarcity is the source of all value, even if it is a combination of ‘manufactured’ scarcity via monopoly control and relative scarcity due to the costliness of extraction and the preferences of consumers.”
“Kennedy no doubt considered his relations with Khrushchev in making his decision. He had been groomed by his father to be a ruthless competitor.”
“Kennedy proved his mettle in response to a Soviet breach of the Monroe Doctrine, defusing a crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster.”
“In financial markets, the basic unit of cost is risk.”
“While I am happy to endorse some of President Trump’s policies, I am not willing to endorse his self-serving legal maneuvering simply for the sake of these policies I support.”
“In short, Kendi’s consequentialist view of racism as rooted in policy (which, however unpredictably and unintentionally, results in racial disparities) does not explain everything.”
“For Kendi, it is policy first and racism second. Debatable? That is a racist question. Maybe a presentist interpretation of history? Also racist.”
“Why is this important? Because grammar shows that Crenshaw’s distinction between identity politics and liberal universalism is artificial.”
“The history which preceded the magazine’s shutdown and resurgence involved a controversy sufficient for the Red and Blue to be ‘expelled from the Student Activities Council (SAC)’ and to have ‘archives…trashed by the University.'”
“It probably also guarantees he will not be standing anytime soon, given that these are highly charged social issues which are deeply complex and are probably not going to be ‘fixed’ in the foreseeable future.”
