Manhattan Contrarian To Debate At The Soho Forum July 22

/

  • If you follow my announcements of upcoming events of interest in the sidebar at the right, you will have seen that I will be participating in a debate hosted by the Soho Forum this coming Wednesday, July 22, at 6 PM. This is an online debate, via Zoom, so anyone can participate without having to show up in person.

  • The subject of the debate is which candidate in the upcoming presidential election should get the support of libertarians. There will be three speakers, one (Ilya Somin) giving reasons why libertarians should support Biden; another (Angela McArdle) giving reasons why libertarians should support Jo Jorgensen (who is the candidate of the Libertarian Party); and then I will be giving the reasons to support President Trump.

  • If I do say so myself, I think that my arguments are compelling. . . .

Read More

A Potential Worthy Successor To Thomas Sowell?

/

  • In Monday’s post on the subject of the futility of attempting to use government coercion and spending programs to equalize economic outcomes between and among ethnic groups, I referred to some of the work of Thomas Sowell on that issue. Readers will not be surprised to learn that I would put Sowell right at the top among the greatest economists of my lifetime. He’s not only highly insightful, but also extraordinarily prolific.

  • Until his “retirement,” Sowell had a syndicated column that appeared frequently in hundreds of newspapers. One of the things he was best known for in the columns was rummaging around in government statistics to come up with various data to puncture holes in the notion that all differences in economic outcomes among ethnic groups must be blamed solely on privilege, racism or oppression. Examples included things like the economic success of Japanese Americans in the face of overt discrimination against them; or the huge over-representation of Jews among doctors and lawyers; or the predominance of African Americans among highly-paid professional athletes.

  • So now that Sowell has moved on, at least for the moment, to the charter school issue, who is going to pick up the job of searching through the statistics to see whether they really support — versus contradict — the narrative of racism and oppression? . . .

  • In the opinion section of the New York Post from Sunday there appears a piece occupying two full pages with the headline “The Fallacy of White Privilege.” The author is Rav Arora. . . .

Read More

On The Foolish Quest For Cosmic Justice Through Government Coercion

/

  • A couple of days ago a reader sent me a personal email (not a comment on the blog) responding to my June 30 post with the title “Reminder: How Progressive ‘Programs’ Keep African Americans Down.” The post discussed issues including that African Americans in the United States have lower recorded average incomes and wealth than the averages of other ethnic groups.

  • The key point made in the responsive email was this (paraphrase): “You are full of criticisms for all the attempts to solve these problems, yet you never propose any solutions yourself.”

  • That is correct. I have not proposed “solutions” to these “problems.” And there is a reason for that. The reason is that no “solutions” to these “problems” exist; at least, no solutions exist if the concept of an acceptable solution consists of some government spending program or order or command issued to the people.

Read More

New York City Rent Regulated Tenants Are About To Face A Reckoning

/

  • In New York City, the residential real estate market is subject to an almost infinitely complex tangle of rent regulations. Of about 2 million rental apartments in the City, approximately half, or one million, are subject to the regulations.

  • The rent regulations are one of the principal devices by which our politicians seek to achieve perfect justice and fairness for their constituents through government command. Is your rent too high? We’ll order it frozen! And indeed, in three of Bill de Blasio’s now seven years as Mayor, the “Rent Guidelines Board” that he controls, and that oversees the regulated apartments, has ordered freezes of the rents under its jurisdiction, the third such freeze having just been ordered on June 17.

  • So, as a tenant, which would you prefer: (1) the benevolent protection of the rent regulation system and the Rent Guidelines Board to assure that your landlord can only ever raise your rent in tiny annual increments, if at all? or (2) take your chances with the hurly burly of the free market?

Read More

Energy Production And Consumption: The Seen And The Unseen

/

  • Over the past several days, you have probably seen multiple articles reporting on reverses suffered in the U.S. courts by developers of pipelines to transport oil and natural gas. In one case, a Federal District Court even ordered an existing, operational pipeline to shut down pending further environmental review. The multiple court decisions have been covered in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CNN, and every other large news source that you can think of.

  • Meanwhile, on June 19 the BP oil company issued its annual Report titled “Statistical Review of World Energy,” this version covering the year 2019. I’ll bet you haven’t seen anything in the news about that one. I make that bet because, aside from one article in Forbes magazine, every piece that I can find covering the BP Report appears in some sort of specialized or industry publication.

  • If you just read what appears before you in your news feed, you could be forgiven for getting the impression that producers of fossil fuels are on the run and will shortly be driven from the scene. But if you take the time to look, you can find the real picture in the BP Report. . . .

Read More

Every Day Brings Another New Low For American Journalism

/
Every Day Brings Another New Low For American Journalism

  • President Trump calls it the “fake news.” I’ve tried to steer mostly clear of that term, but it just gets harder and harder. You keep thinking that it must be possible to turn to some newspaper or TV news channel for just some basic information on what is going on in the world. But it turns out that the desperate effort to come up with something, anything that will defeat the Republicans or the President requires distorting or suppressing even the most basic facts of what is happening.

  • There were three years of the Russia, Russia, Russia collusion hoax. Has any media outlet that promoted that fraud ever issued any sort of apology or correction? If so, I have never seen it. Ditto for the Ukraine “quid pro quo” that wasn’t. Just this past weekend, Trump gave what I thought was a very decent and unifying patriotic speech at Mt. Rushmore. Here is the text. For every major left-wing media outlet, it was “dark” and “divisive.” Try reading the text and see if you can find that. Could they really think that nobody would read the text?

  • But then, the significance of Trump’s speech is a matter of opinion. Let’s consider a matter much closer to simple fact: the number of daily cases and deaths from the Covid-19 virus in the U.S. . . .

Read More