John's Recommended Articles

"The law of demand says that at a higher price, less is demanded, and it applies to grapefruit, cars, tickets to Terminator movies and, yes, labor. Since a legislated increase in the price of labor does not magically increase workers' productivity, some workers -- the least-productive ones -- will lose their jobs. That's why economists looking for the effect of the minimum wage on employment don't look at data on 45-year-old men but, instead, on teenagers and young adults, especially black teenagers and young adults. Paul Samuelson, the first American winner of the Nobel prize in economics, put it succinctly back in the 1960s, when analyzing a proposal to raise the minimum wage to $2 an hour: 'What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2 an hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?'"

"Fantasies of self-sufficiency won't fly -- there's not enough crop land in the U.S. to replace imported oil with ethanol. At best, ethanol can be an additional source of fuel supply, contributing to a strategy of diversifying our supply base to soften the possibility of price shocks.
But this runs straight into the clout of the farm lobby. Brazil has already established itself a low-cost producer of cane-based ethanol churned out in large volume at the oil-equivalent price of $25 a barrel without any heroic biogenetics involved. Its example is already inspiring copycat behavior by other Latin, Caribbean, African and South Asian countries, with similar conditions that make them potentially prolific exporters of biofuels.
Unfortunately, against the danger that poor countries might find profitable new niches for themselves as energy producers, rich countries have been busy erecting trade barriers to kill off the incipient competition to their own farmers. The U.S. imposes a 54-cent-a-gallon tariff on Brazilian ethanol, to discourage competition with domestic ethanol, which receives a 54-cent subsidy from taxpayers. The European Union just slapped new duties on Pakistani ethanol.
This should lay bare the fraud that what's going here has anything to do with energy security. It has only to do with the agricultural lobby masquerading its interests behind foolish and misleading rhetoric about energy security."

"Now that President Bush has declared a national commitment to end our alleged addiction to foreign oil, naturally the first energy bill that Congress wants to enact this year would make America more dependent on foreign energy companies.

This is an energy policy only Arab oil sheiks could love, because it drives their production and profits up, at the expense of home-grown producers. When Congress last passed a windfall tax on oil in 1980, America's domestic crude oil production plunged and demand for foreign oil increased by almost 15%. We imposed a tax on ourselves and OPEC nations got the windfall."

"Scalia criticized those who believe in what he called the 'living Constitution.'
'That's the argument of flexibility and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break.'
'But you would have to be an idiot to believe that,' Scalia said. 'The Constitution is not a living organism, it is a legal document. It says something and doesn't say other things.'"

"In order to express their displeasure with the idea that Muslims are violent, thousands of Muslims around the world engaged in rioting, arson, mob savagery, flag-burning, murder and mayhem, among other peaceful acts of nonviolence.

The rioting Muslims claim they are upset because Islam prohibits any depictions of Muhammad -- though the text is ambiguous on beheadings, suicide bombings and flying planes into skyscrapers.

The belief that Islam forbids portrayals of Muhammad is recently acquired. Back when Muslims created things, rather than blowing them up, they made paintings, frescoes, miniatures and prints of Muhammad. But apparently the Quran is like the Constitution: It's a "living document," capable of sprouting all-new provisions at will.
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"In a single stroke, the Baker plan would make the U.S. government the largest property owner/real estate agent in New Orleans. And property development is not the federal government's strong suit, to say the least (think HUD and Cabrini-Green in Chicago). By paying out at pre-Katrina values, the feds would also deter private investors from going in and buying up properties and thus creating a new market floor. Who knows what prices should be if Uncle Sam is setting them at what might be inflated pre-Katrina values? This is a recipe not for a rapid turn-around, but for making the feds the Donald Trump of New Orleans for a decade or more.

In any case, the idea that rebuilding is impossible without the guiding hand of a federal planning czar is historically inaccurate. After the great Chicago fire and the San Francisco earthquake, these cities were at least as desperate as New Orleans is today. But both were well on their way to restored glory within three to five years with little federal money and no central planning agency. We'd rather trust private homeowners and developers to make rational decisions about where re-investment in New Orleans should occur and--just as important in areas highly susceptible to future flooding--where it shouldn't."

Judiciary Committee hearings on the NSA's terrorist surveillance program: "One of the most telling moments is when Debra Burlingame points out that prior to the September 11 attacks, the NSA was surveilling an al Qaeda member in Yemen who placed or received more than a dozen phone calls to and from a number in San Diego. Because these calls involved someone in the United States, the NSA didn't listen to them. It turned out that the 'Kahlid' who was receiving the calls in San Diego was one of the September 11 hijackers. In fact, he was one of the hijackers who murdered Debra's brother, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77.
This is what Democrats and the news media call 'domestic spying.' Do the Democrats really want to return us to the days when al Qaeda could call its American operatives with impunity?"

As used by the media, "global warming" refers to the theory not only that the earth is warming, but doing so because of human industrial activity.
"But even if a change is measured, how do we know it's manmade? Giant, mile-thick sheaths of ice have come and gone from North America in recent millennia. In our unstable and evolving planet, temperature is often either rising or falling. Who knows whether a trend is the product of human activity or natural?
The answer is nobody. All we have is hypothesis.

Nobody doubts, for instance, that when Bill Clinton asserts global warming is the greatest threat to mankind, he's consulting not the science but a purported "consensus" of scientists. A layman asks himself: What can "consensus" mean if it asserts a judgment nobody is equipped to confidently make?"