Tag: WND

WND column

Romney’s Fair Warning

These days, political conventions are no longer where the two major parties select their presidential candidates. The selection process purports to be a democratic one, in which the grass roots have the opportunity to choose a candidate through the complicated series of state primaries and caucuses, although the reality is that the grass roots is usually choosing between one and three candidates preapproved by the party establishment.

While in 2008, Barack Obama did manage to upset Hillary Clinton, not even the complete lack of enthusiasm for Mitt Romney on the part of the Republican grass roots was enough to permit any of his nominal competitors for the nomination to effectively compete with him in 2012.

WND column

Does Romney want to kill Americans?

Former U.S. presidents seldom publicly criticize the current occupants of the White House. It is even more unusual for them to criticize a sitting president who belongs to their own party. But this did not prevent Jimmy Carter from criticizing Barack Obama’s policy asserting the president’s right to murder Americans at will without due process in an article he wrote for the New York Times.

WND column

Why Romney Will Win

Intrade says Romney is going to lose. Nate Silver, the expert meta-pollster of FiveThirtyEight fame, says Romney is going to lose. Rasmussen Reports has the Electoral College count at 247 to 206 in favor of Obama, with 85 votes in the toss-up category. With the exception of Gallup, most of the major polls are predicting an Obama victory in November.

I don’t think so. I think the Republican Romney/Ryan ticket is going to win in November.

WND column

Ryan is a RINO

Many Republicans are understandably pleased by Mitt Romney’s selection of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as a running mate. Unlike Marco Rubio, Ryan is a natural-born American citizen and actually eligible for the office. Unlike Tim Pawlenty, he is not a spineless coward with all the charisma of fat-free vanilla yogurt. And unlike Robert Portman, he is not a member of the extended Bush family. He is intelligent. And unlike the current presidential administration, he’s capable of actually putting a budget together, which is a talent that should not go unremarked considering that the country has been operating without one for more than three years now.

Thanks to Slurtebrautfust for the list of Ryan votes. And there was one more well worth noting: YES to Budget Control Act of 2011 that raised the debt ceiling.

WND column

Willard is Even Worse

There is no question that Barack Obama, assuming that is his real name, is a bad president, a bad American and a bad man. Unfortunately, there are a number of reasons to believe that as bad as Obama has been, the Republican alternative being offered in November, Mitt Romney, will actually be a good deal worse.

Humanity is spared

Both Drudge and Fox News remained unimpressed, so it appears humanity will be spared my adventures in biology as a consequence of the recent media experiment. However, even accounting for the obvious comments made by the members of the Dread Ilk, the ratio was worse than the 7:1 ratio I anticipated when I conceived the experiment. The actual results were:

Staking the Undead Economist: 10 comments, 11 Likes
Obama is Bad: 87 comments, 61 Likes

Ye cats.

But even as I mourn the incipient intellectual heat death of humanity, I am consoled by the fact that this beautifully sets up my next column on Captain Underoos.

WND column

Obama is Bad

Obama is bad. Not in the reverse meaning of the term, by which one indicates that an individual is actually cool or intimidating or otherwise superlative in some manner, but in the simple and straightforward negative sense. He is a bad president. He is a bad black man. He is a bad socialist. He is a bad peacemaker. He is a bad American. And most of all, he is bad for America and the world.

WND column

The Lone Gunmen

No doubt many Americans believe James Holmes acted alone in shooting up the Denver theater because they were told that was the case, despite at least one witness report that someone else appears to have been involved. While it is a remote possibility that Holmes was the individual seen opening the emergency exit prior to the entrance of the gunman, the fact that he has his hair dyed bright red tends to preclude that possibility as the witness would be expected to have remembered such an unusual attribute. And even if the man taking the phone call was Holmes, that would raise the question of who called him just prior to the attack.

Book Review: Debunking Economics

Staking the Undead Economist

After nearly three decades of reading across a broad spectrum of economic thought, the two books on the subject I would most recommend are Joseph Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis and Murray Rothbard’s An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. But now there is a third. After finishing Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? I have to assert that Keen’s book is not only an absolute masterpiece, but may, in fact, represent the most important intellectual development in economics since The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was published in 1936. And if some of Keen’s more controversial assertions hold up over time, it will be the most important contribution to the literature since The Wealth of Nations.

WND column

Who Killed Capitalism?

“For each separate calculation of the particular branches of one and the same enterprise depends exclusively on the fact that is precisely in market dealings that market prices to be taken as the bases of calculation are formed for all kinds of goods and labor employed. Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation.”,
– “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” Ludwig von Mises, 1920

Ludwig von Mises conceptually destroyed socialism in his famous paper titled, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” He did so by pointing out the central importance of prices to economic activity, which, as Adam Smith famously demonstrated, were the means by which market supply intersected with market demand. Due to the way it eliminated the natural operations of supply and demand, socialism necessarily precluded the production of price information, and thereby rendered the economic calculations required to make decisions about how many goods to produce or what price they should be sold totally inoperable.