Posted in History on Jul 2nd, 2021
Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 July 1776, “Had a Declaration…” Page 1View larger image Philadelphia July 3d. 1776 Had a Declaration of Independency been made seven Months ago, it would have been attended with many great and glorious Effects . . . . We might before this Hour, have formed Alliances with […]
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Posted in History on Jan 26th, 2021
1937 New Dealers Edition. Seems like FDR was off his rocker. In the midst of these defeats, and the rising unemployment, Roosevelt became more explicit in describing a conspiracy of businessmen trying to undermine his administration. They were still avoiding taxes and refusing to invest in economic development. Morgenthau received first news of this conspiracy […]
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Posted in History on Jan 25th, 2021
Oh, I meant 1937: I was impressed as never before by the utter lack of logic of the man, the scantiness of his precise knowledge of things that he was talking about, by the gross inaccuracies in his statements, by the almost pathological lack of sequence in his discussion, by the complete rectitude that he […]
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Posted in Caring, History, Tribalism on Nov 18th, 2020
In my house, we celebrate Thanksgiving, we celebrate Martin Luther King Day, we love the Fourth of July. We revere Veterans Day and celebrate May 8. We recognize and respect and learn from all of our mistakes and achievements, and believe that the American IDEA is an idea worth fighting for, worth preserving and protecting. […]
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I have written this a zillion times before … but I have been in and around economics since 1993, and never in my entire career have I had a teacher or article or book teach me about “trickle down” economics. This is a perjorative term conjured from the ether by anti-market proponents, and the strawiest […]
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Today I reprint a slightly edited piece I put together several years ago. I’d change a lot of it, from the content to the tone, if I were to do it over – but one must live with one’s younger self. Happy Thanksgiving to all. Four centuries after the celebration of the first Thanksgiving, there […]
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I was in the midst of my high school formative years when a couple of watershed moments in world history happened, and these had fantastically powerful and lasting impacts on me. I grew up in New York City during the Cold War, and there were nuclear fallout shelters in our little Catholic school, and the […]
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Posted in ethical foundations, History on Feb 2nd, 2017
It is surely the case that Mr. Bentham’s lifetime utility is much larger than would have otherwise been the case. How much should his satisfaction be weighted in the global social utility function? I most certainly love it when my students tell me that they are visiting London or planning to study abroad at UCL […]
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See this gate? … Well, every night trucks stacked with bodies came back here and dumped them in a heap. They’d already been shot in the back of the head – you bleed less that way … They stacked the bodies in old wooden ammunition crates. The workers stoked up the underground ovens – right […]
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Posted in Central Planning, History on Dec 14th, 2016
I am a big fan of harp-guitar players and one of my favorites is Stephen Bennett. Here is one of my favorites from him, entitled Merry Christmas Mr. Gorbachev. It’s a happy sounding song, as it should be. I imagine he wrote it as a reference to the (in)famous Christmas night in 1991 when Soviet […]
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