Most Americans are used to low-density towns and suburbs and like them a lot. Many Americans have experienced unpleasant high-population-density places in America. In fact most of the high-density urban areas in the US were relatively unpleasant in recent US…
Americans waste way too much time and money preparing their taxes. There is a much more efficient information-age technology that other nations use which eliminate the entire burden for most citizens. If I’m not itemizing deductions (like 70 percent of taxpayers),…
TomDispatch has a great article about the insanity of our military’s spending priorities and the money-grubbing paranoia of the associated defense-industrial complex. It is scary. You gotta read it. At the same time, all rich nations are military allies of…
Private investors were begging governments to borrow more money in 2015. Interest rates were extremely low: Government debt cannot significantly be a significant burden when interest rates are that low. For example, when interest rates are zero, there is no…
Ian Bogost writes that Cryptocurrency Might be a Path to Authoritarianism. You should read the full article for full effect, but he says that “Extreme libertarians built blockchain to decentralize government and corporate power,” and blockchain could consolidate the control…
Americans tend to be conservatives in the sense that we tend to be risk averse. We don’t want to change our system unless there is a really good reason. In the case of our current policy towards marijuana, there is…
Markets are only efficient when they are close to perfect competition, and if they are efficient there should not be shortages and surpluses. However, there are persistently large surpluses and shortages in the book publishing industry. There is a particularly…
