How many times have we heard this one? “Obama is a socialist”, they say, “he’s just like [insert Communist boogie man here]”. There’s an obvious thing being missed by the right when they call Obama a socialist, and that’s that there are endless variations on socialism. So that brings us to our question for today–if Obama is a socialist, what kind of socialist would he be, and who should the right be comparing him to?
Continue reading “Oversimplifications: “Obama is a Socialist””
There’s an important fight going on in the Federal Housing Finance Agency that you may not have heard about. Actually, you might not even have heard of the FHFA. They’re the guys who oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the state-run mortgage buying businesses. Here’s the trouble–Fannie and Freddie possess a lot of mortgages for which the owners of these mortgages are “underwater”. Not that there’s been any flooding, of course.
Recently New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has gotten into the business of regulating his citizens’ health choices. Two prominent recent examples come to mind:
Today I would like to discuss whether or not such regulations or “nudge” policies are within the state’s ethical purview. First, let’s look at what sort of argument opponents of these policies have at their disposal:
So Mitt Romney has chosen Paul Ryan to be his running mate in the US Presidential election. It is a very telling choice. As regular readers will know, Mitt Romney proposed a tax policy that was more or less mathematically impossible without inflicting severe tax penalties on the bottom 95% of tax payers. It just so happens that Paul Ryan is guilty of precisely the same magical thinking. Let’s explore.
Increasingly, whenever anyone tries to talk about political or economic facts, no one listens, because it is assumed that all “facts” are really opinions and that the evidence in inconclusive, with an equal amount of distortion by all sides and parties involved. However, the result of this kind of thinking is that it becomes absolutely impossible to inform people, because any factual evidence that contradicts a person’s preferred position will be assumed away as “media bias”.
Benjamin Studebaker 