Daniel Kuehn: Documents on Koch intentions on FSU econ department hiring here. Note, this is an internal memo…

…about the Koch’s expectations. Because of the outrage this caused (even in the absence of these documents) the advisory group was eventually restricted in how much they could impact these decisions. This is really not good for anyone that cares about economics as an objective science and people who receive Koch money (which is not inherently bad at all of course), should be saying that.

Must- and Shall-Reads:

• Richard Mayhew: Healthcare 2020
• Barry Eichengreen: Restructuring Debt Restructuring
• Kahn-Rich Productivity Model Update (August 2014)
• Bill McBride: Calculated Risk FOMC Preview

1. Dylan Matthews: Rethinking Economics Conference on Livestream:

2. **Nick Rowe: What’s special about monetary coordination failures?: “This is a response to Brad DeLong’s and David Glasner’s good posts… [that] forced me to think…. Apples and bananas are perishable, but gold lasts forever. One apple tree produces 100 apples per year, regardless. One banana tree produces 100 bananas per year, regardless. Trees cannot be produced. Gold cannot be produced. Gold is the medium of account. Apples and bananas are priced in gold. Those prices may be sticky…. There are two parallel economies… a barter economy… a monetary exchange economy…. For the second shock (a change in preferences away from apples towards bananas), we get the same reduction in the volume of trade whether we are in a barter or a monetary economy. Monetary coordination failures play no role in this sort of ‘recession’. But would we call that a ‘recession’? Well, it doesn’t look like a normal recession, because there is an excess demand for bananas. For both the first and third shocks, we get a reduction in the volume of trade in a monetary economy, and none in the barter economy. Monetary coordination failures play a decisive role in these sorts of recessions, even though the third shock that caused the recession was not a monetary shock. It was simply… because agents became more patient. And these sorts of recessions do look like recessions, because there is an excess supply of both apples and bananas…. P.S.: I think this is all in Benassy, somewhere. P.P.S.: If you said ‘this is all ISLM, only ISLM with and without barter’, you would be basically right…”

3. Dietz Vollrath: Taxes and Growth: “William Gale and Andy Samwick have a new Brookings paper out on the relationship of tax rates and economic growth…. They do not identify any change in the trend growth rate of real GDP per capita with changes in marginal income tax rates, capital gains tax rates, or any changes in federal tax rules…. Stokey and Rebelo (1995)…. You can see that the introduction of very high tax rates during WWII, which effectively became permanent features of the economy after that, did not change the trend growth rate of GDP per capita in the slightest. The only difference after 1940 in the lower panel is that the fluctuations in the economy are less severe…. Taxes as a percent of GDP don’t appear to have any relevant relationship to growth rates…. Hungerford (2012)… looks at whether the fluctuations in top marginal tax rates (on either income or capital gains) are related to growth rates. You can see in the figure that they are not. If anything, higher capital gains rates are associated with faster growth…. There is no evidence that you can change the growth rate of the economy–up or down–by changing tax rates–up or down. Their conclusion is more coherent than anything I could gin up, so here goes: ‘The argument that income tax cuts raise growth is repeated so often that it is sometimes taken as gospel. However, theory, evidence, and simulation studies tell a different and more complicated story. Tax cuts offer the potential to raise economic growth by improving incentives to work, save, and invest. But they also create income effects that reduce the need to engage in productive economic activity, and they may subsidize old capital, which provides windfall gains to asset holders that undermine incentives for new activity.'”

4. American Progress on Twitter: “.@EconomicPolicy sets the record straight on who would benefit if we #RaiseTheWage http://t.co/5sIQL2GXIU

Should Be Aware of:

• Richard Layard: The Importance of Mental Health

1. Chris Morran (2013): On 5-Year Anniversary Of Mortgage Meltdown, Those Responsible Are Doing Just Fine “Former Lehman CEO Richard Fuld… with several hundred million dollars in his pocket… has got homes in Connecticut, Florida, and Idaho, and he’s now running his own consulting firm, Matrix Advisors…. Former Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne isn’t working as hard as Fuld… is holed up in the Plaza Hotel with Heloise, playing in online bridge tournaments…. Merrill Lynch lost $8 billion under the leadership of Stanley O’Neal…. He took his $165 million golden parachute and traded it for aluminum, landing a seat on the board of Alcoa. Ken Lewis’s hubris… Bank of America snatching up Countrywide and Merrill Lynch… didn’t really do his due diligence… walked away with around a quarter of a billion dollars…. Countrywide… Stanford Kurland… second in command…. Kurland bailed on Countrywide in 2006… cashed in $200 million… quietly forming a Countrywide clone called PennyMac…”

2. Martin Longman: The Very Serious Rand Paul: “Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said on Thursday that if he became president he would repeal all previous executive orders. ‘I think the first executive order that I would issue would be to repeal all previous executive orders’, he said, according to Breitbart News. Isn’t that a great idea? ‘Repealing all executive orders has the potential to undo a large amount of policy. Executive orders, for example, ban assassinations by the United States and organize intelligence agencies under the Director of National Intelligence.’ Hmm. Maybe it’s not such a great idea. ‘”Senator Paul’s statement was meant to emphasize this president’s overt and unconstitutional executive orders, it was not meant to be taken literally”, Paul spokesman Sergio Gor wrote in an email.’ Alrighty then. Never mind. I take it that this falls in the same category as serial plagiarism. It doesn’t matter if you said it or pretended to write it because it wasn’t intended to be taken seriously.”

Dietz Vollrath: Taxes and Growth: “William Gale and Andy Samwick have a new Brookings paper out…

…on the relationship of tax rates and economic growth…. They do not identify any change in the trend growth rate of real GDP per capita with changes in marginal income tax rates, capital gains tax rates, or any changes in federal tax rules…. Stokey and Rebelo (1995)…. You can see that the introduction of very high tax rates during WWII, which effectively became permanent features of the economy after that, did not change the trend growth rate of GDP per capita in the slightest. The only difference after 1940 in the lower panel is that the fluctuations in the economy are less severe…. Taxes as a percent of GDP don’t appear to have any relevant relationship to growth rates…. Hungerford (2012)… looks at whether the fluctuations in top marginal tax rates (on either income or capital gains) are related to growth rates. You can see in the figure that they are not. If anything, higher capital gains rates are associated with faster growth…. There is no evidence that you can change the growth rate of the economy–up or down–by changing tax rates–up or down. Their conclusion is more coherent than anything I could gin up, so here goes: ‘The argument that income tax cuts raise growth is repeated so often that it is sometimes taken as gospel. However, theory, evidence, and simulation studies tell a different and more complicated story. Tax cuts offer the potential to raise economic growth by improving incentives to work, save, and invest. But they also create income effects that reduce the need to engage in productive economic activity, and they may subsidize old capital, which provides windfall gains to asset holders that undermine incentives for new activity.'”

Nick Rowe produces an explanation of his point of view with which I have only linguistic quibbles:

**Nick Rowe: What’s special about monetary coordination failures?: “This is a response to Brad DeLong’s and David Glasner’s good posts…

…[that] forced me to think…. Apples and bananas are perishable, but gold lasts forever. One apple tree produces 100 apples per year, regardless. One banana tree produces 100 bananas per year, regardless. Trees cannot be produced. Gold cannot be produced. Gold is the medium of account. Apples and bananas are priced in gold. Those prices may be sticky…. There are two parallel economies… a barter economy… a monetary exchange economy….

I am now going to hit both economies with some shocks. 1. Increased demand for gold (g increases), holding prices fixed…. In the barter economy, absolutely nothing happens to the allocation of resources…. There is an excess demand for gold and an excess supply of apples in the apple/gold market. There is an excess demand for gold and an excess supply of bananas in the banana/gold market. But that affects nothing. Agents want to buy gold with apples and bananas, but they can’t…. In the monetary economy there is a recession…. There is an excess demand for gold and an excess supply of apples in the apple/gold market. There is an excess demand for gold and an excess supply of bananas in the banana/gold market. And that affects everything…. Sales of apples and bananas fall until the stock of gold is willingly held…. 2. A switch in demand from apples to bananas… holding prices fixed. In both barter and monetary economies, we get exactly the same result. Banana producers can sell as many bananas as they want, and buy as many apples as they want. Apple producers will be unable to sell as many apples as they want, and unable to buy as many bananas as they want…. 3. An increased demand for fruit trees relative to current consumption of apples and bananas (r falls)…. In the monetary economy, there is a recession. The price of fruit trees rises…. This lowers the rate of return on owning a fruit tree, and this lowers the opportunity cost of holding gold, which increases the demand for gold. It’s exactly the same as… my first case…. In the barter economy, nothing happens to the allocation of resources….

For the second shock… monetary coordination failures play no role in this sort of ‘recession’. But would we call that a “recession”?… There is an excess demand for bananas. For both the first and third shocks, we get a reduction in the volume of trade in a monetary economy, and none in the barter economy. Monetary coordination failures play a decisive role in these sorts of recessions, even though the third shock that caused the recession was… simply an increased demand for fruit trees because agents became more patient. And these sorts of recessions do look like recessions, because there is an excess supply of both apples and bananas…. I think this is all in Benassy, somewhere…. If you said ‘this is all ISLM, only ISLM with and without barter’, you would be basically right…

In my lifetime, I have seen people claim that recessions have been caused by:

1. A decrease (relative to expectations) in the supply of liquid cash money.

2. An increase in the desire to hold liquid cash money.

3. An increase in desired holdings of long-term savings vehicles to transfer wealth from the present into the future

4. An increase in the desire to hold assets that are safe stores of nominal value in the short run–the flip side of a desire to deleverage.

5. A recognition that previous expectations that roundabout methods of production were not as profitable as had been believed, and a consequent increase in the demand for more direct relative to more roundabout methods of production.

6. A belief that the Kenyan Muslim Socialist is about to make owning capital and engaging in enterprise unprofitable.

7. A belief that the Kenyan Muslim Socialist is about to alter incentives to make taking a Great Vacation extremely attractive.

8. A sudden forgetting of the most productive methods of transforming factors of production into useful commodities.

9. A sudden recognition that the supply of a key factor of production will be significantly lower than had been anticipated and that we need to massively shift resources to sectors that use that factor less intensively.

10. A sudden fall in the perceived value of the productive skills possessed by a substantial part of the labor force.

Now my (1) and (2) are Nick Rowe’s (1), and my (3) and (4) are Nick Rowe’s (3). But my Bagehot-Minsky-Kindleberger (4) is not really in IS-LM. And Hayekians say–vociferously and angrily–that (5) is not (3), that their recessions are not simply adverse Keynesian IS-shocks. And there are (6) through (10)…

Presumably Nick would say that (6) through (10) are all versions of his (2), and that people should not call them “recessions” because in each case there is not a general glut but rather the flip-side of an excess supply of (most) currently-produced goods and services is an excess demand–for leisure by entrepreneurs, for leisure by workers, for leisure by everybody, for capital that uses the now-scarce factor efficiently, or for leisure by the now structurally-unemployed workers.

Now it seems to me that Nick and I could make two kinds of arguments against those who claim that (5) through (10) are important.

Our first set of arguments is that they have valid boxes, but that these analytical boxes are empty: that it is possible to envision a recession along their lines, but when you dig deeper you find that in the real world the real macroeconomically-significant market failure that caused the decline in aggregate output relative to potential was some version of my (1) through (4) and his (1) and (2).

Our second set of arguments is that whether or not their boxes are empty in the empirical world, their boxes are not analytically macroeconomic ones–that they need to go find some other name than “recession” to describe what they think the result of their problem is.

I suspect that the first set of arguments is the better one to make–the second set smells a little too much to me like linguistic quibbling, and presupposes a bright line that may be hard to maintain if we ever shift from a pure fiat money system back to a system in which liquid cash requires costly resources to produce and can be produced (i.e., gold standard, silver standard, BitCoin mining).

I do indeed think that Nick Rowe’s thought is 100% correct here–with perhaps the proviso that other people might not like his definition of what a ‘recession’ is…

**Nick Rowe: What’s special about monetary coordination failures?: “This is a response to Brad DeLong’s and David Glasner’s good posts…

…[that] forced me to think…. Apples and bananas are perishable, but gold lasts forever. One apple tree produces 100 apples per year, regardless. One banana tree produces 100 bananas per year, regardless. Trees cannot be produced. Gold cannot be produced. Gold is the medium of account. Apples and bananas are priced in gold. Those prices may be sticky….

There are two parallel economies… a barter economy… a monetary exchange economy…. For the second shock (a change in preferences away from apples towards bananas), we get the same reduction in the volume of trade whether we are in a barter or a monetary economy. Monetary coordination failures play no role in this sort of ‘recession’. But would we call that a ‘recession’? Well, it doesn’t look like a normal recession, because there is an excess demand for bananas. For both the first and third shocks, we get a reduction in the volume of trade in a monetary economy, and none in the barter economy. Monetary coordination failures play a decisive role in these sorts of recessions, even though the third shock that caused the recession was not a monetary shock. It was simply… because agents became more patient. And these sorts of recessions do look like recessions, because there is an excess supply of both apples and bananas….

P.S.: I think this is all in Benassy, somewhere. P.P.S.: If you said ‘this is all ISLM, only ISLM with and without barter’, you would be basically right…

Rethinking Economics Conference on Livestream:

Dylan Matthews: Posted in Equitablog

Must- and Shall-Reads: (MOVE UP TO BELOW “PLUS” AND BEFORE “AND OVER HERE”)

• Richard Mayhew: Healthcare 2020
• Paul Krugman: Maastricht in a Kilt
• Stephanie Kelton: Rethinking Economics
• Chris Blattman: What the Economist Should Have Read Before Suggesting That U.S. Slavery Wasn’t All That Bad

1. Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales: Monnet’s Error?: “Do partial steps toward European integration generate support for further steps or do they create a political backlash? We try to answer this question by analyzing the cross sectional and time series variation in pro-European sentiment in the EU 15 countries. The two major steps forward (the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and the 2004 enlargement) seem to have reduced the pro-Europe sentiment as does the 2010 Eurozone crisis. Yet, in spite of the worst recession in recent history, the Europeans still support the common currency. Europe seems trapped in catch-22: there is no desire to go backward, no interest in going forward, but it is economically unsustainable to stay still.”

2. Simon Wren-Lewis: Scotland and the SNP: Fooling yourselves and deceiving others: “Scotland’s fiscal position would be worse as a result of leaving the UK for two main reasons. First, demographic trends are less favourable. Second, revenues from the North Sea are expected to decline…. The SNP do not agree…. The main reason in the near term is that they have more optimistic projections for North Sea Oil…. So how do the Scottish government get more optimistic numbers? John McDermott examines the detail here, but perhaps I can paraphrase his findings: whenever there is room for doubt, assume whatever gives you a higher number…. Governments that try to borrow today in the hope of a more optimistic future are not behaving very responsibly…. Is this a knock down argument in favour of voting No? Of course not: there is nothing wrong in making a short term economic sacrifice for the hope of longer term benefits or for political goals. But that is not the SNP’s case…. I kept thinking I had seen this kind of thing before: being in denial about macroeconomic fundamentals because they interfered with a major institutional change that was driven by politics. Then I realised what it was: the formation of the Euro in 2000…. So maybe that also explains why I feel so strongly this time around. I have no political skin in this game: a certain affection for the concept of the union, but nothing strong enough to make me even tempted to distort my macroeconomics in its favour. If Scotland wants to make a short term economic sacrifice in the hope of longer term gains and political freedom that is their choice. But they should make that choice knowing what it is, and not be deceived into believing that these costs do not exist.”

3. Stephanie Aaronson et al.: Labor Force Participation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects: “More than five years after the Great Recession ended, the labor market has, by many metrics, finally shown substantial improvement. The unemployment rate is now nearly 4 percentage points below the peak reached in late 2009…. However, one lingering concern is the ongoing decline in the labor force participation rate and the concomitant absence of a significant rise in the percentage of the working-age population who are employed…. To an important extent, this decline in the labor force participation rate likely reflects the ongoing influence of the aging population…. Our overall assessment is that much–but not all–of the decline in the labor force participation rate since 2007 is structural in nature…. Policymakers can view some of the current low level of the participation rate as indicative of labor market slack beyond that indicated by the unemployment rate alone, they should not expect the participation rate to show a substantial increase from current levels as labor market conditions continue to improve…”

4. MaxSpeak: In Defense of Social Insurance: “It’s true that we have non-insurance programs providing means-tested benefits: anti-poverty programs. These programs are under attack. This is not a sea-worthy vessel you would want everyone else to board. I have urged UBI partisans to direct their attention to the atrocity of welfare reform. The biggest hole in the U.S. safety net is the misery of families with children whose wage-earners are unable, often for reasons beyond their control, to solidify an attachment to the labor market and the social insurance provided to wage-earners. In 1972 Senator George McGovern proposed a demogrant of $2,000 as part of his electoral campaign for president. He received 17 electoral votes, winning Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, to cheatin’ Dick Nixon’s 520 votes. We still live in Nixonland.”

5. Clay Shirky: Publishing and Reading “Bezos… wants to increase access to ebooks in order to make money, of course, just as the publishers want to restrict access in order to make money. Bezos doesn’t love books (something his critics never fail to note, as if selling things designed to be sold is an atrocity) but his motivations are producing better outcomes than those of the dominant cartel. If we have to pick between two corporate strategies for making money, the one offering more access is better.”

6. The Economist: Economic convergence: Headwinds Return: “NOWHERE are the consequences of different rates of growth clearer than on a trip up the Pearl River Delta…. Hong Kong… Shenzhen… Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong…. Average incomes in Guangdong are just a quarter of those in Hong Kong, equivalent to Algeria or Costa Rica. Finally… the tributaries reach across Guangxi into Yunnan…. Incomes there are but a tenth of those in Hong Kong, on a par with those in Angola or the Republic of the Congo. Over the past 15 years the currents that take people from such hinterlands of poverty to the broad open reaches of wealth have been flowing at an unprecedented rate…. This burst of growth struck an extraordinary blow against deprivation…. [But] since 2008 growth rates across the emerging world have slipped back toward those in advanced economies. When the new ICP estimates are applied, the average GDP per head in the emerging world, measured on a purchasing-power-parity (PPP) basis, grew just 2.6 percentage points faster than American GDP in 2013. If China is excluded from the calculations the difference is just 1.1 percentage points. At that pace convergence with rich-economy incomes happens over a period of time more like a century than a generation…. In 1997, just before the great catch-up got into its swing, the World Bank’s senior economist, Lant Pritchett, described a widening income gap between rich and poor countries as ‘the dominant feature of modern economic history’. Its dominance was rendered particularly galling by the fact that orthodox economics struggled to explain it…. [But] the world shifted beneath economists’ feet as growth in the developing world shot up from the end of the 1990s. A great deal of this was due to the rise of China as a manufacturing superpower, but that was far from being the whole story…. It looks like the world is now being reminded that catching up is hard to do.”

7. William G. Gale and Andrew Samwick: Effects of Income Tax Changes on Economic Growth: “The structure and financing of a tax change are critical to achieving economic growth. Tax rate cuts may encourage individuals to work, save, and invest, but if the tax cuts are not financed by immediate spending cuts they will likely also result in an increased federal budget deficit, which in the long-term will reduce national saving and raise interest rates. The net impact on growth is uncertain, but many estimates suggest it is either small or negative. Base-broadening measures can eliminate the effect of tax rate cuts on budget deficits… at the same time they also reduce the impact on labor supply, saving, and investment and thus reduce the direct impact on growth. However, they also reallocate resources across sectors… resulting in increased efficiency…. Not all tax changes will have the same impact on growth. Reforms that improve incentives, reduce existing subsidies, avoid windfall gains, and avoid deficit financing will have more auspicious effects on the long-term size of the economy, but may also create trade-offs between equity and efficiency.”

Should Be Aware of:

• Noah Smith: Don’t Be Rude, You Loser!

1. Jose Orozco and Sebastian Boyd: Venezuela Threatens Harvard Professor for Default Comment: “Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro instructed the attorney general and public prosecutor to take ‘actions’ against Harvard Professor Ricardo Hausmann, saying the economist sought to destabilize the country by suggesting the government default on its debt. Maduro lashed out at Hausmann during a televised address last night, calling him a ‘financial hitman’ and ‘outlaw’ who forms part of a campaign ‘that has been initiated around the world against Venezuela’. He didn’t specify what actions he had asked the attorney general and prosecutor to take…. Maduro’s speech was ‘the despotic diatribe of a tropical thug’, Hausmann said by phone today. ‘He uses his position as head of state to intimidate people who think differently’. The president’s office, the attorney general and the information ministry didn’t reply to e-mails seeking comment…. Born in Venezuela, Hausmann had served as planning minister in the 1990s under the president that Maduro’s mentor and predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez, tried to topple in a coup attempt…. ‘Ricardo Hausmann is without a question one of Latin America’s most distinguished thinkers’, former Chilean finance minister Andres Velasco said today by phone from Santiago. ‘Maduro’s threats are more confirmation that freedom and democracy are under threat in Venezuela. Some of the country’s best and brightest have been bullied and mistreated. This is bad news for Venezuela’.”

2. Sanjait: On “Henry Aaron, David Cutler, and Peter Orszag: Stop the Anti-Obamacare Shenanigans”: “The thing I find most strange about all this [Halbig lawsuit, etc.] is that, if the Republican argument prevails in court, then the near-term result will be that blue states, generally, have functioning health insurance markets with subsidies and Medicaid to prop up the low end, and red states, generally, will have dysfunctional markets with adverse selection spirals on their exchange and legions of uninsured. At which point they will declare a victory against the ‘monstrosity’ that is ‘Obamacare’, even while the states that embrace it are demonstrating in real time how well it works without monkey wrenches thrown in the gears. Again… that’s the outcome if they ‘win’ in court. They are suing to completely sc— themselves and make themselves look foolish.”

3. Cory Doctorow: Extreme Puritan Baby-Naming: “(2) Praise-God. Full name, Praise-God Barebone. The Barebones were a rich source of crazy names. This one was a leather-worker, member of a particularly odd Puritan group and an MP. He gave his name to the Barebones Parliament, which ruled Britain in 1653. (3) If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned. Praise-God’s son, he made a name for himself as an economist. But, for some inexplicable reason, he decided to go by the name Nicolas Barbon. (4) Fear-God. Also a Barebone…”

4. Clive Cookson and Tyler Shendruk: Evolutionary biology: Rabbit DNA Decoded: “By comparing the full DNA sequence of wild and tame rabbits, an international team of scientists has shown that domestication relies on small tweaks to gene regulation at many points throughout the genome rather than a few critical genetic changes. In rabbits, the majority of changes relate to brain development, which provides evidence that modifying behavioural traits is critical during the initial stages of domestication. While dogs were domesticated tens of thousands of years ago from wolves, tame rabbits have a much clearer origin. In the seventh century, Pope Gregory I declared that rabbits were in fact fish, which freed medieval French monks to eat their meat during Lent and triggered their domestication–first as food and only later as pets. ‘One of the really cool things about our rabbit study is that the domestication event was so recent that it has a very clear signal for a lot of the early changes’, says Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, professor in comparative genomics at Uppsala University and a senior author of the study, which is published in Science…”

Comments:

• Brad DeLong: On “Delong on Mearsheimer is Unintentionally Hilarious”: I would note that Mearsheimer is not trying to explain the behavior of Muscovy’s bureaucracy via Graham Allison Model I: Rational Actor. Mearsheimer is claiming that we have moral obligations not to interfere with the behavior of Muscovy’s bureaucracy because Muscovy has preferences, interests, and feelings. That, for me, is a bridge too far…

• Brad DeLong: On ‘Department of “Huh?!” John J. Mearsheimer Thinks the West Caused the Ukraine Crisis?: The Honest Broker for the Week of September 19, 2014’: So because the U.S. did bad things in Guatemala in the 1950s and in Chile in the 1970s, neither we nor the Europeans have a right to even call for democracy in Kiev or to complain when Russia does a bad thing in the 2010s? I don’t quite follow…

• Brad DeLong: Mearsheimer says that we should–that’s a moral claim about what we “ought” to do–not fence with Muscovy to limit its domination of Kiev and Tbilisi. I say we should fence with Muscovy to limit is domination of Luhansk, Donetsk, and Kharkiv so that we do not have to fence with Muscovy over Kiev and Tbilisi so that we do not have to fence with Muscovy over Berlin, Prague, and Bucharest so that we do not have to fence with Muscovy over London, Paris, Instanbul, and Tehran…

• Brad DeLong: I don’t think you read Mearsheimer correctly. His point is not that Russia has legitimate interests in protecting the Great Russian ethnic minority in Ukraine. His point is that Russia ought to dominate Kiev…

MaxSpeak: In Defense of Social Insurance: “It’s true that we have non-insurance programs…

…providing means-tested benefits: anti-poverty programs. These programs are under attack. This is not a sea-worthy vessel you would want everyone else to board. I have urged UBI partisans to direct their attention to the atrocity of welfare reform. The biggest hole in the U.S. safety net is the misery of families with children whose wage-earners are unable, often for reasons beyond their control, to solidify an attachment to the labor market and the social insurance provided to wage-earners. In 1972 Senator George McGovern proposed a demogrant of $2,000 as part of his electoral campaign for president. He received 17 electoral votes, winning Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, to cheatin’ Dick Nixon’s 520 votes. We still live in Nixonland.