The "Trickle-Down" Zombie

The New York Times's Paul Krugman routinely decries what he calls “zombie ideas”—those that survive despite overwhelming contrary evidence. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D – Ma.) should take note. Her recent attack on conservative tax policy is one that has long lost its battle against facts.

On Wednesday, the senator averred:

The Republicans have a pretty simple philosophy: they say if those at the top have more — more power for Wall Street players to do whatever they want and more money for tax cuts than somehow they can be counted on to build the economy for everyone else. Well, we tried it for 30 years and it didn’t work. In fact the consequences were nearly catastrophic.

GUEST POST: Legal Strategies for Challenging Voter ID Laws

The following piece was contributed by Seattle attorney Jonathan Collins.

For (mostly) Republican-controlled State legislatures, the flavor of the last decade has been voter ID laws; 22 states have implemented strict identification requirements since 2003.  So, are these laws constitutional?  Like most legal questions, the answer is: “maybe.” Let’s take a look at three viable legal theories for challenging these laws.

The Equality Illusion

In The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Thomas Sowell raises questions concerning “equality” scarcely considered in our time: How is “equality” defined, and what are the costs of pursuing it?

“Equality” may be easy to define for concepts like numbers, as they have “only one dimension, magnitude (2 + 3 = 5),” Sowell notes. The same is not true for people. A confluence of various and often unquantifiable factors—intelligence, ability, beauty, geographic location, economic status, luck, among many others—forms multidimensional human beings.  Striving to level one human dimension—say, the economic—invariably results in the inequality of another dimension—the political—by transferring political power into the hands of those anointed to pursue economic equalizing. Determining how much economic inequality to trade for political inequality is arbitrary. “Equality,” it turns out, is an illusion.

The closing of the left-wing mind

“…Letters that have an untrue basis (for example, ones that say there's no sign humans have caused climate change) do not get printed,” The Los Angeles Times proudly announced last year. The newspaper was not alone in expressing such sentiments. Other influential news outlets, such as BBC, have asserted the same. But what explains this close-mindedness?

In The Closing of the American Mind, Professor Allan Bloom describes how the idea of “openness”—relativism and subjectivism—renders the existence of, and hence the search for, moral and philosophical truths a fiction.

Who is racist? A look at the "Southern Strategy"

I recently refuted one part of the popular civil rights myth that, following the 1960s, racist “conservative” Democrats realigned with the Republican Party. Another point perpetrating the myth is the so-called Republican “Southern Strategy.”

To be sure, there was indeed a Southern Strategy, but it differs from the popular myth. As is natural in the course of politics, Republicans desired a political strategy to capture Southern votes from Democrats. The popular myth, however, says that Republicans, beginning with Richard Nixon, abandoned their support for civil rights and deliberately appealed to Southern racists as a means to winning the South. This is proved, the argument goes, by observing both racial “code words” employed by Republicans and the fact that the GOP won the core of the South. But neither point is persuasive.

Who is racist? More myths and facts about the ‘party of white supremacy’

My last post demonstrated that, contrary to popular belief, Democrats, not Republicans, opposed virtually every civil rights advancement since the Civil War era. A related historical myth nearly as seldom examined is that, around the 1960s, liberal Democrats pushed racist “conservative” Democrats out of their party and over to the GOP, where racism has since taken its natural refuge.

Who is racist? The answer implicit in this timeline might surprise you

Little is less examined in our time than the assumption that, historically — and especially during the civil rights era — racism is a Republican affliction, while equality is a Democrat virtue. In fact, history demonstrates the reverse.

Here are some facts.

A Challenge to Minimum Wage Advocates

The only positive thing about minimum wage logic is that it is easily defeated. Common sense economics rejects it, but non-economic arguments cause it problems, too.

Here is a non-economic challenge to minimum wage proponents I have yet to hear convincingly answered (perhaps a commenter or my counterpart Tim can provide an explanation): If someone—say, John—wants to work for six dollars an hour at Company X, and Company X wants to hire John for that wage, why should that be illegal?

Why the Stimulus Failed, Part Two

I recently explained why government stimulus spending must fail. Tim contested my argument, but I will show why it stands.

The basic flaw with stimulus spending is that, in order to spend a dollar into the economy, government must remove a dollar from the economy, which renders spending a zero-sum transfer of resources.

Tim challenged these basics by asserting that not all money is contributing to economic activity, so utilizing “idle” dollars for government expenditure would avoid the zero-sum critique and raise national income. There are three reasons this is wrong.

Who Cares if People Work Less?

In a post Tim wrote partly as a reply to my piece on the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) recent revelation that Obamacare will drive Americans to work less, he asks why we should care.

While acknowledging that Obamacare will cause workers to “withdraw their labor,” Tim maintains that these workers “will also take home a proportionally smaller share of the economic pie because they will be earning less. So the question is, why do you care how much other people work?”

If people were freely making choices, conservatives would not object. After all, Milton Friedman taught that free people make the best choices for themselves given the incentives they face in the private marketplace.

Minimum Wage: Minimum Idea

Tim recently argued that raising the minimum wage is sound economics. However, doing so would hurt many poor people.

The crux of his argument is that low-wage workers are not paid their proper value for their contribution—in economic jargon, their “marginal product”—and that therefore an increase in the minimum wage would render little, if any, job loss. He further bolsters his case by stating that studies since 2000 demonstrate “little to no employment response to modest increases in the minimum wage.” In fact, he reasons, “a higher minimum wage may even save some employers money in the long term because it reduces costs associated with higher turnover and vacancies by making minimum wage jobs more desirable.”

These points do not support the case for raising the minimum wage.

Who is Ignorant?

A couple years ago, Nicholas Kristoff, a liberal writer for The New York Times, observed that conservatives know the left better than liberals know the right:

One academic study asked 2,000 Americans to fill out questionnaires about moral questions. In some cases, they were asked to fill them out as they thought a “typical liberal” or a “typical conservative” would respond. 

Moderates and conservatives were adept at guessing how liberals would answer questions. Liberals, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal,” were least able to put themselves in the minds of their adversaries and guess how conservatives would answer.

He then candidly confessed that he needed the help of a book to “demystify the right.” So why is it that conservatives understand liberals better than the reverse?

When Unemployment is Celebrated

In light of recent news that Obamacare discourages employment, the left has applauded the notion that working less is a good thing. But why should we celebrate forced unemployment?

Work disincentives have, until now, been universally recognized as negative for both individuals and society. Liberals, for instance, have agreed that unemployment benefits and food stamps may discourage work to some degree, but have maintained that, on the whole, the benefits simply outweigh the costs.