The Red White and Blue Pill
Why Is Indiana’s Religious Freedom Law Different From All Other Religious Freedom Laws?
the Indiana law explicitly allows any for-profit business to assert a right to “the free exercise of religion.” The federal RFRA doesn’t contain such language, and neither does any of the state RFRAs except South Carolina’s; in fact, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, explicitly exclude for-profit businesses from the protection of their RFRAs.
Welcome to a world where peices of paper are granted Religious Freedom.
A Strong Welfare State Produces More Entrepreneurs
The mechanism in each case is the same: publicly funded insurance lowers the risk of starting a business, since entrepreneurs needn’t fear financial ruin. (This same logic explains why more forgiving bankruptcy laws are associated with more entrepreneurship.)
Completely sensible argument that leaves me wondering why GEDI statistics seem to show little to no correlation between welfare state expenditures and entrepreneurship. But WMF stats show a correlation between time and cost to start a business and entrepreneurship.
Why I’m pissed off at rednecks like you
responding to even the hint that we might expect you to be a responsible gun-owners with threats to shoot people like me is precisely the issue — you think your guns are a way to solve your problems.
What Conservatives Willfully Ignore When They Cry ‘Tyranny’
One of the regular features of our contemporary political life is conservative complaints about being victims of “government oppression.” You know what I mean: having to pay taxes to help “losers” is an outrage. Having to buy health insurance is tyranny. Not being allowed to discriminate against gay people is a denial of religious liberty. …
The 50th anniversary of the violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, should have served as a graphic reminder of what real “government oppression” looks like: police dogs; fire hoses; truncheons; deputized thugs. An entire state mobilized to deny the rights of free speech and peaceful assembly, in the broader aim of denying the right to vote.
This came to mind after reading some of the polemics directed at the Ferguson protests.
The ‘decline’ of marriage isn’t a problem
If every poor adult in America married another poor adult, in other words, we would see a significant drop in the poverty rate. Nobody’s actual income would have increased, of course, but through the magic of statistics we would achieve a significant win in the war on poverty.
John Kerry Bashes Florida’s Reported Ban On Term Climate Change
Maybe discussion of climate change needs a trigger warning so the climate change deniers can avoid the discussion?
World thinkers 2015: the results | Prospect Magazine
I’m going to assume that Prospect printed its April fool’s day issue a few days early because there is no other reasonible explanation for including Russell Brand on its World Thinkers 2015 list.
Liberals, Conservatives, and Jobs
If creating “millions” of jobs means adding 2 million or more in a given year, then we did that in three of Jimmy Carter’s four years in office, and 13 times since Reagan left the White House — 8 times under Bill Clinton, twice under George W. Bush, and three times so far under Barack Obama. Actually, the only times we haven’t added millions of jobs under Democrats have been in the aftermath of severe shocks — the oil shock of 1979 and the financial crisis of 2008. Am I claiming that Democratic presidents were responsible for all this job creation? No, not at all, nor do I need to. The point, instead, is that their policies didn’t prevent a lot of employment growth. That is, what you learn from both national experience and the California story is that you can raise taxes on the rich and expand access to health care without killing the economy.
Sometimes the Self-Made Can Be Worse Than the Blue Bloods
when “meritocracy” is simply plutocracy, it often devolves into a kakistocracy: rule by the worst elements of society, the ones whose single-minded pursuit of profit leads them to believe that those who don’t share their twisted vision of human value shouldn’t have the dignity of a decent social safety net.
This is why you shouldn’t believe that exciting new medical study
It’s a fact that all studies are biased and flawed in their own unique ways. The truth usually lies somewhere in a flurry of research on the same question. This means real insights don’t come by way of miraculous, one-off findings or divinely ordained eureka moments; they happen after a long, plodding process of vetting and repeating tests, and peer-to-peer discussion. The aim is to make sure findings are accurate and not the result of a quirk in one experiment or the biased crusade of a lone researcher.