1. Glenn Loury and John McWhorter discuss the Naomi Schaefer Riley firing as well as Black Studies in general. Loury, controversially it seems, rags on Henry Louis Gates’ DNA project in which the distinguished Harvard professor of Afro-American Studies has spent time looking into the genetic history of various blacks around the country. While Loury opposes Riley’s blog-polemic in general, he does admit that Black Studies has not been great at minting rigorous scholars.
2. Is the health care mandate Coasian? The authors draw on Coase’s original analogy of the farmer whose fields are trampled by a rancher’s livestock after they escaped from the rancher’s broken fence. Coase’s insight was that the farmer and rancher existed in a system which forced the rancher to build the fence in the first place. The broken fence isn’t solely his responsibility, then, as it was imposed on him. I’m in no position to argue with Coase (and I’ve read virtually none of his work), but hopefully he addressed the fact that the fence was erected as much for the protection of his livestock as it was for the protection of the farmer’s fields. Regardless, the comparison to the health care mandate doesn’t seem to hold. The Coasian analogy involves a direct infringement on personal property. Hospitals taking care of patients and then billing taxpayers or increasing prices is not the same thing.
3. As I said on Twitter, Rich Lowry owes Pat Buchanan royalties for this (good) article.
4. Mayor Bloomberg arguing that cities should be forced by federal action to take in immigrants in order to bolster their economic base. This type of argument assumes that there’s some rule that says that every dying city in America should be saved.
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As an aside, I heard Henry Louis Gates interviewed on NPR re: his genology project.
In that context he is a really likeable guy: humble, self-denigrating, funny, and wildly passionate to learn the tools of geneology. Not at all what I expected.
Why not allow American citizens to relocate and homestead in the hollowed out cities? FDR had a relocation project, and it failed miserably. Bloomberg is spouting the normal crap about immigration being a strength. The frontier is closed, we have millions unemployed, we do not need more immigrants from 3rd world countries. Bloomberg’s nanny turn after 2006 destroyed his chances of ever being a 3rd party POTUS candidate. I sincerely thought he was considering it, that he could have pulled it off and with the current face off, he’d have a great chance.
Bloomberg is an ass.
1. If we could simply order immigrants where to live, then we could “order” them to go home and live in their own countries. Not even immigrants are going to want to live in slums and they will defy attempts by any government to force them to.
2. Who died and made him king to decide where other people should live and work?
3. If importing unskilled immigrants from third world countries was a formula for economic success, then California would have streets paved with gold, instead of running billions in the red.
¨This type of argument assumes that there’s some rule that says that every dying city in America should be saved.¨
Thoughtful.
I must admit that this truth has escaped me; but your right. Furthermore, it is not the federal government´s job to be micromanaging cities. It is up to the same city to apply whatever mix of ¨carrot and stick¨ if any at all for whatever ails them. Some cities may very well continue to hemorrhage if not eventually outright die; no quarter for moral hazard. If an immigrant wishes to go to wherever, that is his business.
Honky Dory, Bloomberg’s master plan for Detroit’s turnaround