I’ve seen conservatives circulating this YouTube clip, in which Andrea Mitchell, discussing polling numbers showing low support for Obama’s health care reforms, notes in an aside that opponents “may not know what’s good for them.” This incredibly tone-deaf choice of words, naturally, prompts cries of “elitism” and “arrogance.”  Insofar as “elitism” has recently been used […]

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Via Doug Bandow, Theodore Dalrymple makes an argument against a right to health care—though it applies to positive or welfare rights more generally—that I used to find persuasive, and now find less so: Where does the right to health care come from? Did it exist in, say, 250 B.C., or in A.D. 1750? If it […]

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Via Peter Suderman, I find Tyler Cowen indulging his inner David Brooks with a brief taxonomy of libertarians: 1. Cato-influenced (for lack of a better word).  There is an orthodox reading of what “being libertarian” means, defined by the troika of free markets, non-interventionism, and civil liberties.  It is based on individual rights but does […]

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An interesting point from Ezra, summarizing Brad Plumer: Brad Plumer has a very nice post on why the Congressional Budget Office has, historically, predicted that pollution regulations would cost much more than they actually did. When Congress went to create a cap-and-trade plan for sulfur dioxide in the early ’90s, the CBO figured that permits […]

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I’m assuming most of the folks who would find this amusing have already seen it, but I’d been meaning to post this and kept forgetting. It is, I hope, not necessary to explain why this is funny, but not actually a good argument.

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Earlier this afternoon: Rachel: do the libertarian wonks supporting seasteading intend to continue their wonkery once they move to the sea colony? or would they have to like, build stuff for the first few years? Julian: Build stuff? Don’t be silly.  The Market will provide Rachel: So the equilibrium is a place populated partly by […]

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Via Brad Plumer, I see Cato’s Jerry Taylor is riled at responses to an open letter ad the Institute published in which a group of scientists signed off on a statement questioning the strength of the case for catastrophic climate change. I’m broadly sympathetic with his irritation at the proportion of ad hominem attacks in […]

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Kerry Howley points out that people who treat “libertarian” and “feminist” as antonyms are, by and large, really fucking dumb: For some reason, various libertarian-leaning men are only capable of acknowledging the limiting nature of social norms when those norms result from recent political action. We all worry that universal surveillance breeds passive adults with […]

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I’m late to the ball here, but there have been an enormous amount of silly things written about redistribution in the past week or two. First, we have the claim that Barack Obama’s agenda is “socialist,” which is just sloppy. Words mean things, and “socialism” is about centralized economic planning and state control of the […]

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