Recently there have been demonstrations against Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The demonstrations began because the government was intending to demolish a park in Istanbul (not Constantinople) and replace it with a shopping mall. This relatively pedestrian protest escalated when the Turkish government removed the protesters in a violent police raid. The target of the protests has now expanded from the park to the policies of Erdogan more broadly, specifically the social conservatism of his government and its tendency to give preference to Islam in its legislation. A lot of people in the media in developed states have begun referring to this as a “Turkish Spring”, and the default reaction has been to support the protesters, assuming that they are under governments similar to those that prevailed in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and other such places. The instinct is to view Turkey as just another Middle Eastern country protesting a generically malevolent government. A poor job has been done of evaluating the Turkish situation specifically, of giving the Erdogan government a fair evaluation. Today, I’d like to contribute to rectifying that.
Author: Benjamin Studebaker
How Much Should We Soak the Rich?
There’s broad agreement among the political left in most developed states that we should raise taxes on high earners, if not now then after the economy recovers. The justifications vary somewhat, depending on how one comes at one’s leftism, but in most cases it can be boiled down to the principle of diminishing returns, which holds that the more money you have, the less utility additional money buys you. A homeless person almost always benefits more from a dollar than does a rich person, and if we are seeking to maximize welfare, it is reasonable to redistribute wealth from the rich person to the homeless person. Even some right wingers agree to this, in theory. The trouble is that there is much disagreement as to the extent to which we ought to redistribute empirically. That’s the question I’m going after today.
The Wall Street Journal v. Bicycles
New York City has recently started up a bicycle program, similar to the ones that already exist in many European cities like Paris or London. However, the Wall Street Journal is none too pleased. They made a video, which you can find here. The video makes some rather odd claims.
Erick Erickson and Women
Erick Erickson is editor-in-chief of Redstate.com, a conservative blogging website. The other day, Erickson went on FOX, where had a rather controversial reaction to the recent statistic that shows that 40% of mothers are now the highest earners in their respective households in the United States. He said this:
When you look at biology–when you look at the natural world–the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complementary role.
Europeans and Americans
Now that my undergraduate degree in England is over, I’ve started to collate my thoughts regarding the essential distinctions between the European and American variants of civilization. Why do Europeans support universal health care while Americans do not? Why are Europeans more communal? Why are they more supportive of interventionist government policies? These are the sort of things I wish to ponder about today.
Benjamin Studebaker 