Megan McArdle says maybe not, citing the rapid growth in costs and weak job market. Justin Wolfers says of course it is, citing the much larger average wages for people with college degrees.
Category: Current Events
Everything You Need to Know About Last Week’s News #9
In reverse order of importance…
Continue reading Everything You Need to Know About Last Week’s News #9
Another Reason To Vote Libertarian
Last week the Republican establishment wanted to change some rules to make it harder for grassroots candidates like Ron Paul to gain traction in future campaigns. The power grab was stark enough to anger delegates who weren’t even Paul supporters, and the “Nays” drowned the “Ayes” on the voice vote. Nevertheless, the chair ruled “The Ayes have it” without doing an official count.
The Democratic establishment played the same game last night. Earlier this week the party had voted to remove references to God and Jerusalem from their party platform. I’m not sure whether it was the conservative heckling or the threat of losing rich Jewish donors, but the establishment realized it was a dumb move that risked alienating independent voters, so they tried to put it back in. Unfortunately, they had to break their own rules to reverse course. The chair ruled “The Ayes have it,” clearly without a two-thirds majority, resulting in Booing (about the power grab, not about God).
Reason has the relevant video clips. Both parties claim to desire the will of the people but are more than willing to subvert that when it threatens their grip on power. For all we know, this sort of arbitrary voice counting happens all the time in these parties, preserving the illusion of democracy while the leaders really call the shots (I’ve even personally experienced a fraudulent “The Ayes have it” at a local caucus). It just reinforces the notion that the establishment of both parties are corrupt, caring more about preserving their power, whether it’s closing the doors on candidates they don’t like or overriding platform decisions. If the party leaders don’t care about their own delegates’ voices, what makes you think they care any more about yours?
Why I Don’t Watch Party Convention Speeches
The primary reason I don’t watch party convention speeches is that there are a lot of them and the opportunity cost is too high for me. There have been a few occasions where the opportunity cost was low enough (for instance, I happened to be in my car and the speeches were on public radio) that I’ve given a few minutes to a few lucky speechers, and those speeches generally remind me why I don’t watch the rest of them: I don’t like most of the things they say.
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Everything You Need To Know About Last Week’s News #8
Sorry for the Labor Day delay. In reverse order of importance:
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The Fact-Checking Fallacy
The media is obsessed with subjecting the Republican National Convention speeches to “fact-checking,” which as everyone knows is a special kind of media report that contains completely helpful, accurate, objective, independent, non-partisan analyses of things candidates say, as opposed to the usual slanted reporting of things candidates say.
August Outlook For Divided Government
Earlier I explained why I’m not afraid of the fiscal cliff, which means I’m also not afraid of a gridlocked, partisan government making it happen. It actually looks like we have a good chance of getting the trifecta of divided government this November. There’s no guarantees that Obama will be re-elected and that Republicans will keep the House and reclaim the Senate, but it’s increasingly looking like the default and most likely option.
Everything You Need to Know About Last Week’s News #7
In reverse order of importance: Continue reading Everything You Need to Know About Last Week’s News #7
Obama At The Movies
I heard there’s a new documentary about Obama that interviews a plethora of people from the President’s past and purports to present his putrid philosophy and the precarious possibilities for our posterity if his previous policies are permitted to persist for four more years.
The film, titled 2016: Obama’s America, is off to a successful start, expanding to a bunch of theaters and projected to come in at #8 for the weekend. In fact, it’s already the 17th-highest grossing documentary of all time, and with a healthy per-theater average and two solid pre-election months to go, it seems guaranteed to climb higher. Maybe it’ll even dethrone Fahrenheit 9/11 from the top of the All-Time Documentary list (though I always thought it was a stretch to call that thing a documentary).
It looks like there’s a lot of money to be made in criticizing Obama. Some news articles are saying the movie is a “surprise” hit. If anything, I’m surprised it took the anti-Obama capitalists this long to turn conservative opposition into such easy profits.
But is the movie any good?
Monday Morning Cop
Yesterday morning, there was a shooting in New York City by the Empire State Building that left two dead and nine wounded. We quickly learned that one man killed a former co-worker and was then killed by police. Tim Cavanaugh at Reason speculated that some or all of the injured bystanders may have been shot by the cops, and the Associated Press is now suggesting the same thing: