Increasingly, the renting of an apartment has become treated more and more like taking out a loan, as if to buy a house or something else. The same demands of ‘established credit’ are now made. And I have seen no […]
Economics
On the Urbanist Classic, “Crabgrass Frontier,” by Kenneth T. Jackson
One of the classic books on the history of suburbia is Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier. It came out in 1985, two years before my personal favorite, Bourgeois Utopias, by Robert Fishman. This book notice discusses Crabgrass Frontier in view of […]
Three New Testament Roots of Economic Liberty
We do not often think that Jesus Christ and the New Testament justifies capitalism. To the extent that capitalism means greed and self-indulgence, I should think not! Greed and self-indulgence are root human sins and will be manifested in any […]
Dealing with Bangladesh: A Plan for Adaptation
In the Appendixes to The Lord of the Rings, we learn that the Rohanians came from the north at a critical point to assist Gondor in one of its wars. Out of gratitude, Gondor gave them a stretch of its territory […]
An Addendum to the Manifesto: My Youth as a Deficit Hawk – Howard Ahmanson
It occurred to me that during the first period in my life that I was a conservative, which was in my youth, I was motivated mainly by deficit hawkery. I was ten in the year that Nixon ran against Kennedy, […]
The Working Class Might be Shooting Itself in the Foot by Being Anti-Free Trade
One of the explanations of the rise of Donald Trump is the concern by his working class followers about free trade, as well as immigration. After thinking of just how and where their standard of living is declining, I wonder […]
The Gasoline Tax: Charles Krauthammer Breaks with Republican Orthodoxy
Charles Krauthammer, generally regarded as a conservative writer, declared more than a year ago that he had been for a gasoline tax increase of $1 a gallon for 32 years. That would be, if I calculate right, since 1983. I’ve […]
Which Taxes to Raise – A Revision
In earlier posts I suggested that the top bracket income tax could be raised to up to 40%, as in the Clinton era, without hurting government revenues or damaging the economy. It still might not, but I have decided that […]
If We Treated Food the Way We Treated Housing
Josh Barro, an economics columnist at the New York Times who used to be at Forbes, has written an interesting column on what the food marketplace would be like if we owned lifetime resaleable futures in our food instead of […]
Agrarianism Without Agriculture?
The ever-surprising Ralph Nader has recently been reading some paleo-conservative sources, and has written a book entitled Unstoppable; the Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. In the acknowledgements at the end, he specifically thanks Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a […]