Homines libenter quod volunt credunt
Posted in Religion, Taxation, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Apr 2nd, 2012
OK, so I exaggerate, but here’s the image: If virtually half of Americans pay no income taxes, then it is impossible for them to “receive the gains” from any income tax reductions. And when we have a progressive tax system, it is virtually impossible for reductions in taxes to be progressive, they have to be […]
Posted in Classical Liberalism, Religion, Socialism on Mar 4th, 2012
I no longer go to Catholic mass, yet I typically spend some time on the weekend reflecting on the Church and what has driven me from it. When I was a young kid, I used to read folks like St. Thomas Aquinas as being staunch defenders of private property who respected the sorts of things […]
Posted in Development, Religion on Nov 6th, 2011
No particularly deep point here … but I contend that if we took every single dollar of taxation and instead directed it to religious institutions, we’d be a heck of a lot poorer today than otherwise. I used to think precisely the opposite.
Posted in Public Choice, Religion on Aug 22nd, 2011
Growing up Catholic, we did not eat meat on Fridays during Lent, and we tried to not eat it on Fridays during the rest of the year as well. Like many other parts of my catholicism, I was never told why, or if I was told why, I certainly did not remember it. Thanks to […]
Posted in Education, Religion, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Jul 6th, 2011
I can (possibly) understand the concern that if we allow vouchers to proliferate at the K12 education level we would be conflating church and state. The reason of course is that many of the private alternatives that would be chosen by voucher recipients would be religious institutions. Fine. But then I have two questions: (1) […]
I comment regularly on the impacts of the government controlling 90% of America’s youth. I am a product of Catholic schooling. But this leads me to a puzzle that I really cannot resolve, and I implore my readers for their thoughts. Here goes: I get apoplectic that the government monopolization of K12 education virtually ensures […]
Posted in Government Gone Wild, Regulation, Religion on Apr 11th, 2011
When people point to a government success (don’t laugh) it usually comes with a call for more government. You might profitably think about the invocation of the “success” of deposit insurance (I disagree) being used to impose similar rules on the modern financial system. However, when government fails I usually see these failures as a […]
So, while not killing the mess that is ObamaCare, Congress managed to kill a program that actually saves money and helps poor inner-city children. But Father Hesburgh ought not focus his attention on the current Administration for their failure to fund the DC Voucher program. Instead, he ought to lash out at the looters at […]
Posted in Religion on Dec 8th, 2009
Is it me, or does it seem that the folks in the “E”nvironmental community actually WANT to see the globe get warmer and the environment get destroyed? After all, any time we show evidence of how things have been getting better, all kinds of things start getting hucked our way. And if it is in […]
Gruber and Dynarski report in a recent NBER Working Paper: The effect of vouchers on sorting between private and public schools depends upon the price elasticity of demand for private schooling. … We exploit a unique and previously undocumented source of variation in private school tuition to estimate this key parameter. A majority of Catholic […]