Cognitive Dissonance at Amazon
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes Employees see themselves as enlightened about diversity but are members of a race-based employee group. I’m such an oddball that Amazon is incapable of pigeonholing me when it recommends books to buy. Netflix has the same problem when it recommends movies. Amazon’s logarithms can’t seem to fathom from my extensive […]
Patricians vs. Plebeians: The Realignment
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes When I was a kid — and the same with my parents when they were young — you could count on certain fundamentals in politics. The Chamber of Commerce represented business, and business generally favored free enterprise. Not always, but mostly. Small businesses could become big and big could become […]
Climate Tyrants’ New Tactics
Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes Chief Justice John Marshall’s observation, “[t]hat the power to tax involves the power to destroy,” has become part of American political lore. Marshall understood that the state’s revenue-extracting power can be weaponized—even against those who have committed no crime. We are now seeing a corollary to that notion in finance, […]
The U.S. Has No Viable Iran Policy
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes Recent Western moves do nothing but encourage the Islamic Republic to escalate its nuclear program. Six years after President Donald Trump withdrew from the nuclear agreement with Iran, known as the JCPOA, and almost four since his successor failed to rejoin it, the United States still has no viable Iran […]
Majority of Americans Unhappy with Current Immigration Levels
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes The majority of Americans are unhappy with the current immigration policy under President Joe Biden. Gallup released new polling data Monday showing that 58% of surveyed Americans are dissatisfied with the current level of immigration, compared to 34% who are satisfied. “This marks an eight-percentage-point increase in dissatisfaction since last […]
Arizona News: June 21, 2024
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion […]
Don’t Let a Crisis Go to Waste in 2025
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes As 2025 draws near, America teeters on the brink of a fiscal abyss. This impending fiscal cliff, marked by the end of tax cut provisions and a spending crisis, calls for immediate and decisive action by Congress to avert a worse economic situation than the one Americans feel today. The national […]
What An Economist Knows About Crony Vaccines
Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes As an economist, my job is not to help you make health decisions about Covid vaccines. Your health history, age, subjective evaluation of risk, and many other factors make recommendations from me meaningless. I can, however, increase your awareness of distortions that lead to poor decision-making. I’m not talking about […]
The New American Genocide
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes The political hostility of the United States today is directed at no one more than America’s European-descended whites—the group whose ancestors are largely responsible for settling, building, and defending this country. That is not to say others contributed nothing, but that the largest contributions and, indeed, the central elements of […]
Duck, Cover, and Mask Up.
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes For the better part of 70 years, the only advice the government offered to people under immediate threat of nuclear violence was “duck and cover.” Generations of schoolchildren were led to believe that if they just got under their desks fast enough, they might well survive to experience nuclear winter. […]