God Is In Control
A short one, since two people I was talking to today said they also (like me) had been dealing with such issues recently. Specifically, we get stressed out thinking we’re carrying the world on our shoulders, and then through prayer realize that we are not the ones running the show. Moreover, the Person who *is* in charge is good; there’s a happy ending when all of these plot threads come together.
Romans 8:28: “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”
Something Is Screwed Up in the Labor Market
As part of my research on the Affordable Care Act (aka “ObamaCare”), I used the standard government statistics to look at Part Time Employment compared to Total Employment. Here’s the graph:
Now be careful, there was a change in definitions of “part time” in the mid-1990s, which is responsible for that spike. So arguably you might want to slide the chart down after that point, meaning that the ratio in recent years may not have surpassed the peak back in the early 1980s.
Either way, though, it is crystal clear that the relative growth in part-time work is not merely a standard recession phenomenon, since it is much larger now than it was after the dot-com crash. Whether to attribute any blame to the ACA (which has built-in incentives for employers to limit full-time employees) is debatable, but what seems uncontroversial is that the U.S. labor market is undergoing dramatic changes that do not bode well for the little guy.
“If You Hate the Government So Much, Move to Somalia!”
I tackle this common objection in my latest LibertyChat article. An excerpt:
People lose the ability to think rationally when it comes to politics, so let’s change the context for a moment. Suppose I say, “You can get a better night’s sleep if the room is dark.” Would it be a good put-down for a critic to retort, “Oh, if you don’t like light, then go take a nap in a black hole!” ? Of course not.
Further Thoughts on Plea Bargains
I tried to deal with some of the (excellent) objections I got from my last post. An excerpt:
Don’t plea bargains minimize the coercion against individuals? As one critic put it, who is the “victim” here? How does a defendant lose by being offered a deal that he has the right to refuse?
Although superficially plausible, this way of framing the issue might be misleading. Look, by the same token I can describe it like this: I’m not suggesting that the government remove the ability of defendants to accept plea bargains. Rather, I’m suggesting that the government take away the option from prosecutors of offering them.
Potpourri
==> In the last third of this Tom Woods podcast on book publishing, he goes off on his critics who accuse Tom of “just writing books to get money from the liberty movement.” (Just think about what kind of a person would make such a comment.) I love it when Tom goes off on Internet commenters.
==> Joe Salerno has a good article on the alleged stable (real) price of gold. I didn’t realize people believed the misconceptions that Salerno (rightly) explodes. I think a true liberal arts education would force kids to not only read Macbeth, but also to learn about the classical gold standard.
==> The irascible John Cochrane has an amusing reply to a recent Krugman jab.
==> Not only did David R. Henderson work in the Reagan Administration, but more important, he was interviewed by Joan Rivers!
==> Speaking of David, he puts numbers to it and quotes Scott Sumner’s own linked survey to show that only 6.6% of business economists agreed with Sumner about what went wrong with monetary policy in 2008. (Remember that Scott had recently complained that conservatives were listening to the “5%” of climate scientists who disputed the standard view.)
==> Perhaps due to my patronizing double-standard, for some reason I have tended to pull back from bashing Hillary Clinton. But c’mon, listening to her praise Henry Kissinger is just plain creepy.
==> Sheldon Richman also was perplexed by Dan McCarthy’s article on liberalism & empire.
Obama on Pulling Troops Out of Iraq
This is pretty awesome, just watch the whole thing, it’s short.
Government Plea Bargains Are a Horrible Practice
I think you will like this one; it has a plot twist near the end. The opening:
Because it is so commonplace, most people accept the practice of State prosecutors offering a “plea bargain” without much thought. After all, it seems like a win-win situation: the State saves on court costs and other resources, while the defendant who takes the “deal” does less time than what he or she is likely to suffer if the case goes to a full trial. Yet even though they are very common in the U.S., a prosecutor offering a plea bargain is actually quite horrible and a travesty of justice, when you think about it from a certain perspective.
To warm you up to my view–which may at first seem odd–consider this quotation I found from a legal website: “Plea bargains are extraordinarily common in the American legal system, accounting for roughly 90% of all criminal cases. Many countries, however, do not allow plea bargains, considering them unethical and immoral.” Isn’t that interesting? By the end of this post, you’ll understand why this typical U.S. practice is considered a miscarriage of justice in many other parts of the world.
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