Viewing profile — ctlby

Prosperity is causally prior to taxation, not the other way around. To quote the great Bryan Caplan, "It takes a colossal host to sustain colossal parasitism."

Your argument against minority rule is to invoke... the courts? "Majority rule is great. Except when it does stuff I don't like, in which case I'll lean on minority rule by an infi…

You seem to be positing a world where “bad” decisions are somehow kept off the ballot, leaving only a menu of “good” options for the wise majority to enact. Well, that’s not our wo…

No, not literally a smoking hole (though I believe arson was a problem for a time?) But as close to one as you’re going to get in the USA. I can’t disagree more with your majoritar…

> doesn’t suggest any useful policy All good points. Some blue cities do very well and some do very poorly. I have to conclude that the problems are mostly exogenous to policy. > b…

It's easy to change my mind on this: just provide me a decision rule that'll put rural decay data points on the "failure" side of the classification boundary while leaving urban de…

I earlier acknowledged the difficulty of coming up with a reasonable definition of "failed." I will say that I don't think it's enough to be simply below-average in literacy or abo…

I'm not inclined to think that slow demographic decline constitutes failure. Even if you disagree with that, my preferred definition has the additional "law and order" requirement,…

Not sure why you were downvoted. This is the best answer I've ever received to my question.

I was vague with the meaning of "liberal." Otherwise I completely stand by the post. * Re: abortion. You reversed the "all circumstances" and "some circumstances" labels: only 29% …

In the few parts of the parent comment that were coherent, the poster made erroneous factual claims. I was simply trying to clear those up.

I put the word in quotes to indicate the tendentiousness of any potential definition. I personally don't think of any part of America as having "failed," but if you force me to pic…

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These have been the rules for nearly 250 years. Why are you only up in arms about it now?

Curiously enough, the only parts of the country that have ever approached anything resembling "failure" are (heavily progressive) urban areas like NYC and Detroit.

This thread is for breathless catastrophizing. Not sure why your reasonable comment is here.

Can you point to the law McConnell violated in doing this? And if not, in what sense is the current court illegitimate? Finally, how does this in any way address my question about …

Can you explain how the current president "seized" power? Was there some extra-legal mechanism at work that I'm not aware of?

Can you explain in what way this is a "Jim Crow era practice?"

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Leftism was the cause of the worst crimes of the 20th century (whose death tolls wildly exceed even that of WWII). The real tail risk resides in views that are considered perfectly…

If we take climate change activists at their word, the answer is a resounding YES. There is a full-blown crisis brewing, one that can only be resolved with massive social changes (…

Your linked paper does not discuss natural disasters at all. How is this an answer to the parent comment’s concerns?

You're confusing concepts. Regression to the mean doesn't depend on any IID assumption. Conditional expectations are right in the definition! In the bivariate normal case (height, …

> It's rational for the company to try to pull them Aren't there issues with follow-on offerings? By taking the entire IPO pot for itself, the company will probably struggle to fin…