Optimum Income Inequality

March 5, 2014

There’s an interesting op-ed on inequality from Thomas Edsall in the New York Times today. In the op-ed Mr. Edsall takes note of the work of economist Richard Freeman suggesting that there is an optimum level of economic inequality from the standpoint of economic efficiency with inequality less than the optimum or greater than the […]

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Was NATO Expansion Really That Good an Idea?

March 5, 2014

Writing in the Wall Street Journal Doug Feith makes what I think is actually a pretty good point—lots of countries on the periphery of Russia have Russian minorities to “protect”: With a victory in Ukraine under his belt, Mr. Putin might manufacture grounds for a Russian military intervention to protect the ethnic Russians in Latvia. […]

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D. O. A., the Re-run

March 5, 2014

The editors of the Wall Street Journal aren’t impressed with President Obama’s 2015 budget: Mr. Obama’s budget doesn’t make even a token outreach to the GOP, and in that regard it is at least honest. With Democrats at risk of losing the Senate, Mr. Obama views a revival of tax and spend as his party’s […]

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Who’s Crazy?

March 5, 2014

Much is being made of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s reaction to a phone call with Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin that Putin was “out of touch with reality”: US reports said Merkel phoned Barack Obama on Sunday evening after speaking to the Russian president to press him to back down from his invasion of Ukraine […]

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R2P Used to Justify Russian Intervention

March 4, 2014

Bad policies have a way of coming back to bite you. Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin is claiming a right to intervene forcefully in Ukraine as part of a right to protect: Putin said what had happened in Ukraine was an “anti-constitutional coup and armed seizure of power,” and insisted that ousted Ukrainian President Viktor […]

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Consequences

March 4, 2014

Russia is already suffering consequences as a result of its seizing of the Crimean Peninsula: It hasn’t taken long for Russian financial markets to react to developments at the weekend, when Putin won parliamentary approval for military action in Ukraine as Russian forces consolidated control over Crimea, raising the prospect of a real war with […]

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The Return of the Fourteen

March 4, 2014

For reasons not entirely clear to me Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which formed the basis of the armistice agreement that ended World War I, is receiving new attention. Over just the last few days I’ve read three different invocations of them. Here are the fourteen points, excerpted from a longer speech: 1. Open covenants of […]

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The Stupidest Advice

March 4, 2014

Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski takes to the opinion pages of the Washington Post urging action on President Obama in response to the situation in Ukraine: If Ukraine is crushed while the West is simply watching, the new freedom and security in bordering Romania, Poland and the three Baltic republics would also be […]

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Mussel Bound

March 3, 2014

Thirty years ago zebra mussels, a European native species, were introduced into the Great Lakes. These illegal aliens are believed to have arrived in the ballast water of ocean-going ships that entered the Lakes through the St. Lawrence Seaway. They form great clumps, eat the indigenous phytoplankton, and have generally been an environmental catastrophe. A […]

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The Continuing Adventures of an Insurance Company With an Army

March 3, 2014

Jeffrey Dorfman observes that barring some transcendent conversion experience large federal deficits are here to stay: Defense spending is up by $232 billion above inflation and population growth, representing about 22 percent of the inflation and population-adjusted spending increase. Obviously, we have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to thank for some of this, but […]

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