There seems to be a lot of confusion out there between “moderation” and “compromise”. On the one hand, people assume that those who are either extremely liberal or extremely conservative are unable to compromise. On the other hand, there is an assumption that moderates want compromise. In fact, neither of these things are necessarily true.
Continue reading »
Jun 202008
Energy policy is one of those tough topics to talk about intelligently. The problem is that everybody knows what the problems are (fossil fuels are bad for the environment and have a finite supply), everybody agrees what the ultimate solution has to be (we need to find new sources of cheap, plentiful energy), and no one has the slightest clue how to get from here to there. But because politicians don’t get elected by saying “I don’t know”, they make stuff up, and end up sounding vague, clueless, or both.
So my goal for today is to have a reasonably intelligent discussion of energy policy. Continue reading »
When Al Gore ran for president in 2000, he told us that experience matters. After all, he had twenty years of Washington experience to build on. George W. Bush, on the other hand, had been a politician for exactly six years, all of it as Governor of Texas, and before that the highlight of his resume was convincing the citizens of Arlington, TX to spend their tax dollars building a state-of-the-art baseball stadium for the Rangers. Of course, the Republican Party insisted that experience didn’t matter. Moral character mattered; leadership mattered; being in touch with the American people mattered. Experience, we were told, was just another word for “Washington insider”, and we needed something new and different.
Continue reading »
Jun 162008
Due to illness and work, I’ve been reading quite a lot of history lately: Guns, Germs, and Steel; a book on the Vikings; and another on the Hapsburgs. And it occurs to me that one of the great fallacies of mankind is that we always think that time is slowing down and that we are living at the end of history But there is no reason to believe this to be true. In fact, the only real guesses we can make about the future is that it will happen, and it will be unpredictable.
Continue reading »
Jun 132008
As a libertarian, I’m of course against this policy, but I nonetheless find it interesting. Japan has recently set legal limits on waistlines. (I thought it would be fun to post on Japan, because our resident expert on Japanese culture has absolutely nothing else that she should be devoting her time to these days aside from leftfielder…)
Aside from the obvious civil liberty issue (if I decide I’d rather live a shorter life, but enjoy it through chocolate cake, what right has the government to deny me that choice?) I find this policy odd in other ways. Most notably, smoking in Japan is rampant, and obesity is not. What an odd choice of unhealthy behavior for the Japanese to target (the article speaks to this as well).
Recent Comments