Robin Hanson on bike helmets. The summary, even with a great increase in helmets "Cyclist head injuries didn’t obviously fall a lot, and non-head injuries rose a lot."
Shannon Love on elite leftists. "Elitism isn’t defined by who benefits, elitism is defined by who decides."
A. Barton Hinkle on our obligation to government. His thesis seems to be that it's very difficult to come up with an explanation for our obligations.
Kevin Williamson on the legitimacy of the state: "If you’re not willing to have somebody hauled off at gunpoint over the project, then it’s probably not a legitimate concern of the state."
Jeff Jacoby has a pull-no-punches piece on public sector unions:
Total federal civilian compensation in 2008 averaged $119,982—more than twice the $59,908 in wages and benefits earned by the average private-sector employee.
... But a fourth advantage is more significant than any of these: government labor unions can reward politicians who give them what they want and punish those who don't. As a result, negotiations in the public sector have an inherent bias toward higher salaries, more lavish benefits, and more inflexible work rules. "This is because public unions can organize politically and influence elections," Lowenstein remarks in While America Aged, which is to say, they can vote their bosses out of office. This gives them direct clout over the people who determine their benefits. By contrast, the [United Auto Workers], for all its muscle, cannot vote the CEO of General Motors out of a job.
David Brooks on money in politics: "But there’s no evidence to suggest that campaign spending has the outsize role that the candidates, the consultants and the political press often imagine."
Don Boudreaux on liberal's ideas: "modern “liberalism’s” ideas are about replacing an unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas – each one individually chosen, practiced, assessed, and modified ... – with a relatively paltry set of ‘Big Ideas’ that are politically selected, centrally imposed, and enforced not by the natural give, take, and compromise of the everyday interactions of millions of people but, rather, by guns wielded by those whose overriding ‘idea’ is among the most simple-minded and antediluvian notions in history, namely, that those with the power of the sword are anointed to lord it over the rest of us."
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