What's New: another 30 links and indexes.

NEW 11/02/2013: Market Failure and Government Failure [More...]

How a combination of market failure and government failure brought about the housing bubble. And how fixing the government failure can alleviate the market failure.[more...]

NEW 11/02/2013: Government Failure

Generally used as a distraction from arguments about market failure -- an invalid demand for perfection from government. What matters is what combination of government and/or market is optimal. [more...]

NEW 11/02/2013: Smith's word [More...]

Smithian soundbites misrepresent the larger picture he portrayed in his major works. "[...] evidence suggests that Smith had a more complex view of human action than most people give him credit for." [more...]

The Worlds Smallest Political Quiz

"The Quiz", as it is popularly known, is a carefully planned piece of recruiting propaganda. It qualifies people not as libertarians, but as people susceptible to becoming libertarians (a MUCH larger class, containing people of many different viewpoints.) [more...]

Edmund Burke, Welfare King [More...]

Edmund Burke, considered a philosophical founder of modern conservatism and a representative of classical liberalism took a huge government handout while opposing government help for poor laborers. [more...]

The US is a republic, not a democracy.

This libertarian/conservative meme is an equivocation fallacy, intended to disrupt statements by their opposition. It is indisputable that the US is a republic. It is also indisputable that the US is a nation with democratic elections, making it a type of democracy. [more...]

Disrupting Arguments

Libertarians have a large number of disrupting arguments that are used as a way to start interjecting libertarian views into unrelated discussions or to sidetrack discussions from views of their opponents. You've seen these over and over. [more...]

Scourge of the Libertarians: Interview with Mike Huben [More...]

Hyperbolic title, but a wide-ranging interview about libertarianism's place in the world. How it relates to religion, anarchism, epistemology, atheism, skepticism, conservatism, the Republican party, isolationism, liberty, civil rights, other values, the UN and Pax Americana. [more...]

The Fossil Fuels and Petrochemical Industry

A mighty industry whose bought legislators have showered it with enormously profitable tax favors and sheltered it from environmental regulations. Much of the Koch wealthcomes from this industry, which is why libertarian propaganda promotes fossil fuels and denigrates regulation, environmentalism and renewables. [more...]

The Tobacco Industry

The tobacco industry is notorious for its enormous public relations battle to preserve its ability to addict new generations of children. Science denialism, suppressed and secret research, legislative blockages, avoiding FDA oversight, and other tactics result in an industry that is still responsible for 300,000 US deaths per year and 5 million worldwide (growing rapidly.) [more...]

The Lead Industry

The lead industry obstructed government regulation of lead in paint and gasoline for more than 50 years after it was discovered to cause retardation. This resulted in millions of children poisoned by lead, a process that is still continuing because of ubiquitous lead paint in older houses. [more...]

California Officials Announce Record Settlement In Dark Money Case [More...]

The Fair Political Practices Commission called the Center to Protect Patient Rights (CPPR) and Americans for Responsible Leadership (ARL) parts of the "Koch Brothers' Network" of dark money organizations. They were fined $1 million for aa $11 million donation. [more...]

Capitalist Corruption Of Government

Government corruption by capitalists has long been pervasive. Campaign funding and advertising, a revolving door between the public and private sectors of the influential and other sorts of payoffs for politicians, their staffs and other government employees are a worldwide problem. Government exists to serve the populace, not primarily capitalists. [more...]

The Myth of Charter Schools [More...]

A scathing review of the propagandistic nature of Waiting for Superman and its endorsement of charter schools. It details the big-business and plutocratic tie-ins to charter schools. [more...]

Charter Schools

Charter Schools are a strategy for undermining teacher's unions, privatizing public education and shifting and cutting education expenses from business and the community at the expense of the poor and the working class. They do not produce better results, let alone the extraordinary results cherry-picked by their advocates. They are primarily prometed by plutocrats, and serve to distract from the real causes of low achievement: especially poverty. The rich do not want to spend on fixing poverty. [more...]

Billionaires Carbon Bomb: The Koch Brothers and the Keystone XL Pipeline

How the Keystone XL Pipeline, global warming denialism, the Tea Party and the Citizen’s United ruling all are in the economic interests of (and have been influenced by) the second richest family in the US. Emphasis on the harms the Koch brothers are committing. [more...]

Kochtopus - Mapping the Influence of Koch Cash [More...]

A diagram showing the wide and diverse reach of Koch money influence. Very incomplete: many organizations are left out and a huge amount of money is not reported here. [more...]

Privilege

Libertarians tend to be unaware of their privilege from being male, educated, middle class, white, able, healthy, good looking or other indicators of social status. Born on third base, they assume they've hit a triple. [more...]

Lead Poisoning: The Ignored Scandal [More...]

The lead industry obstructed government regulation of lead in paint and gasoline for more than 50 years after it was discovered to cause retardation. This resulted in millions of children poisoned by lead, a process that is still continuing because of ubiquitous lead paint in older houses. [more...]

Obstructing Regulation And Regulatory Capture

Libertarians side with capitalist obstruction of harm-reducing regulations. Addictive drugs (such as tobacco), clean air, workplace safety, pollution reduction, prohibition of lead and mercury contamination, food safety, global warming, etc. They seem unaware that reducing some harmful freedoms can result in huge benefits (including freedoms) for others. [more...]

Capitalist Harms

Capitalism doesn't shy from harming people it it is profitable. Capitalism creates slavery, pollution, disease, inequality, black markets, organized crime and other harms. Even worse, it subverts efforts to regulate these harms by government. [more...]

Windsor, Shelby County, and the Demise of Originalism: A Personal Account [More...]

1980s originalism was an organizing and rhetorical device used to delegitimize progressive constitutionalism. It has since been defeated decisively in many decisions, despite Justice Scalia's adherence. [more...]

Originalism

AKA as Original Intent, this is a method of picking and choosing among the many conflicting intents of legislators in favor of modern prejudices. Originalism is a conservative propaganda ploy much favored by libertarians. [more...]

The cost of racial bias in economic decisions [More...]

"It has been suggested that race bias in economic decisions may not occur in a market where discrimination is costly, but these findings provide the first evidence that this assumption is false." In other words, markets do not deter discrimination. [more...]

When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager

"In policies as diverse as limited liability, deposit insurance, Social Security, and federal disaster relief, American lawmakers have managed a wide array of private-sector risks, transforming both the government and countless private actors into insurers of last resort... Well suited to a society suspicious of government activism, public risk management has emerged as a critical form of government intervention in the United States." [more...]

Insurance Market Failures

Many types of insurance cannot be offered privately because of a number of market failures or work poorly when they are offered. Unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, medical insurance, crop insurance, flood and other disaster insurance, etc. Then government should play a part. [more...]

Nominal wage rigidity in macro: an example of methodological failure [More...]

"Focusing on models where consistency with fairly simplistic microfoundations is all important, and consistency with empirical evidence is less of a concern, can distort the way macroeconomists think." [more...]

Microfoundations That Do Not Match Reality.

There has been a huge push to base macroeconomics on microfoundations. But the microfoundations selected do not match what is known of real human behavior and economic measurement. [more...]

Asset Forfeiture Abuse

Confiscating property "used in crimes" has been a public policy that was useful in attacking organized crime, but has been grossly abused by a number of states and localities in the US. The laws need to be revised according to the ACLU and others. [more...]

Prison Profiteers: There is a lot of money in mass incarceration [More...]

An ACLU video series profiling the powerful companies and individuals who are profiting off locking up too many people for too long. [more...]

With 2.3 Million People Incarcerated in the US, Prisons Are Big Business [More...]

Private prisons prey on families of prisoners with exorbitant phone rates (which include kickbacks), poor medical care, and poor living conditions. And because they are private, there is no public transparency. [more...]