Inequality, Thank Goodness

I'll admit I have not read anyone's in depth analysis on why inequality is anything other than inevitable. Once government has enough power to regulate equality, it will regulate all the money to the insiders. 

Inequality is another "emperor's clothes", people talk about it but there's never been a point at which it was established that it matters, and there's no public debate about why it matters. If inequality were the result of government interference, on the other hand, that would matter to those who value liberty. 

http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/heres-how-much-money-it-takes-to-be-among-the-richest-50-percent-of-people-worldwide/ar-BBPSBdV?ocid=ientp

Self Evident?

They are self-evident, ultimately, because we believe that they are. Or because we believe in a God — whether biblical or not, literal or metaphorical or perhaps, like Jefferson’s or Einstein’s God, one and the same with the laws of nature — who decrees that they are. And, ultimately, this is a distinction without a difference. Either way, what lies at the foundation of the American experiment, our democracy, our very way of life, is an article of faith.

It is by no means the only possible political faith. For most of human history, no one believed in these propositions. Indeed, no one had even conceived of them. We forget how revolutionary these principles were at the time of the American founding, and even for centuries afterward. Until the late 20th century, liberal democracy was an exceedingly rare (and usually short-lived) phenomenon. For millennia, it appeared “self-evident” to most of humanity that the legitimacy of governments flowed from the divine right of kings, or the inherent superiority of a feudal aristocracy, or the enlightened wisdom of a theocratic priesthood. In the last century, totalitarian ideologies of left and right built regimes whose claims to legitimacy rested on the complete sublimation of individual worth to the deified class or race collective. And still today, authoritarians around the world bolster their support by championing the power of national and ethnic groups above the rights of the citizen.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-lessons-my-father-charles-krauthammer-taught-me-about-being-thankful/2018/11/21/c314bf34-ecee-11e8-8679-934a2b33be52_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.24d03038e2cf

It is easy to have contempt for politicians and I do ....

.. but this story is powerful nonetheless for the connection to the human experience.

Every November, as she has done for almost forty years, Nellie Connally readies herself for the reporters’ calls. She has her hair done in preparation for the cameras, and she buys flowers—yellow roses, typically—to freshen her home, a sun-washed two-bedroom condominium on the twelfth floor of a luxury high-rise, the Four Leaf Towers, in Houston. Because the story is always present in her memory, she doesn’t have to brush up for the interviews, and because she is a trouper—she wanted to be an actress, a long, long time ago—she always sounds as if she is speaking on the subject for the first time. The story she is perpetually asked to tell, of course, is the tale of that fateful day, November 22, 1963, when she rode in an open Lincoln convertible with the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy; his wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy; and her husband, John Connally, the governor of Texas.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/the-witness-2/

"Let's Ban Dissent"

A group of international scientists is walking back major claims they’d made in the journal Nature about the rate at which the earth’s oceans are warming. A newly published note from the study’s co-author, Ralph Keeting, makes it plain that these researchers still believe the oceans are warming at an alarming rate, but they now acknowledge that procedural mistakes “that came to our attention” created an unacceptably large margin of error in their results.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/culture-civilization/science/when-the-scientific-consensus-is-corrected-by-a-skeptic/

The battle of climate science is being played out in the heads of mathematicians with statistical calculations based on estimates and evaluations of uncertainty.

But the science is settled, don't forget. It's a little baby science, with little power to predict no ability to control.

How Could A Bad Man Be So Good ...

We now know why President Obama had to struggle so hard to spur the economy and allow it to grow more than 2 percent a year. And that was the high-water mark. In the last quarter of his presidency, growth had slipped to 1.5 percent. Today it’s obvious what Obama’s problem was. He had the wrong policies‚ lots of them. 

How do we know this? Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, and the Republican Congress reversed Obama’s policies. The result, from the day Trump was elected, has been a more robust economy. Nearly 4 million jobs have been added, and unemployment has dipped to the lowest point in nearly a half-century. Let’s compare what Obama did with what Trump is doing.

https://www.weeklystandard.com/fred-barnes/what-trump-knows-that-obama-didnt

John Lott on FBI Active Shooter Records

In all, the FBI claims that concealed handgun permit holders have stopped 3.2 percent of active shooter incidents.

But the bureau misses at least 23 cases where permit holders saved the day. That means they stopped 11.5 percent of active shooter incidents from 2000 to 2017.  We at the Crime Prevention Research Center are more confident that we have all of the cases from 2014 to 2017, when 16.5 percent of attacks were stopped.

Back in 2015, when I pointed out errors in the original report, the FBI simply responded, “We acknowledge in the FBI report that our data are imperfect.”  But no correction was ever made. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/10/23/the_problem_with_the_fbis_active_shooter_data_138425.html

The Sky Is Falling. Again.

For years I assigned statistics students to pick any apocalyptic climate claim in the media and trace it back through the UN reports to its genesis in a scientific study. I knew they would discover that these reports are not scientific documents based on the peer review process, but political documents “approved by governments” and intended to scare the public into supporting constraints on the production and use of energy.

Another choice clip:
Even the average global temperature (whose rise is supposed to increase disasters) has barely budged, only rising a third of the amount that has been repeatedly been predicted by the IPCC computer models.

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2018/10/31/the_uns_terrifying_but_ever-receding_human-caused_climate_catastrophe_110360.html