A presidential candidate like Donald Trump should not be viable. Candidates he supports should not be viable. The existence of Donald Trump should be a boon for the Democrats. And, in fact, it has been. But it hasn’t been enough. Perhaps four (or eight?) years worth of results will tip the balance for Democrats, but it is reasonable to ask: why have Democrats been coming up short against Trump, both in the Presidential election and in special elections...
Read More »For the (Probably Not) Last Time, the DREAMers Are Not Taking Your Jobs
[unable to retrieve full-text content]For the (Probably Not) Last Time, the DREAMers Are Not Taking Your Jobs: I believe that a lot of well meaning people genuinely think this, and they deserve an explanation as to why they are wrong rather than just getting yelled at on humanitarian grounds.
Read More »The Mass Immigration Debate within the Socialist Party of America from 1910–1912, Part 1
The Socialist Party of America existed between the 29th July 1901 and the 31st December 1972. Before the party was repressed for its opposition to World War I and suffered splits over the question of Communist Russia, it was probably the most successful and largest radical party of the socialist Left in America, at least down to the 1920s.The Socialist Party of America was made up of Marxists, anarchists, some members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union, democratic socialists...
Read More »What is the Case against Marxism in a Nutshell?
That is, what is the case against the actual theory presented by Karl Marx in volume 1 of Capital? This was the only volume of Capital that Marx published in his lifetime, and volume 3 contradicts volume 1 in important respects.First, we need to know what Marx actually argued in volume 1 of Capital.The essence of Marx’s theory and his conception of the historical tendency of capitalism is as follows:(1) Marx had an elaborate labour theory of value on which he founded volume 1 of Capital (see...
Read More »Why did US Libertarians become disillusioned with Libertarianism?
First of all, it requires some study and serious effort.Here is some direct and fascinating evidence from Vox Day, a former libertarian personality who is now an Alt Right blogger, about why he turned against libertarian ideology both on the issues of immigration and free trade:[embedded content][embedded content][embedded content]As we can see, it was the feeble libertarian responses to the problem of free movement of people, and gaping holes in the theory of free trade that did it for Vox...
Read More »George Borjas on the New Immigration Meme
George Borjas, perhaps the US’ pre-eminent immigration economist notes: Maybe it’s just me because I instinctively read in between the lines whenever I read anything about immigration, but I’m beginning to detect such a seismic shift in the immigration debate. We all know the party line by now: Immigrants do jobs that natives don’t want to do. As a result, natives do not lose jobs, and natives do not see their wages reduced. And anyone who claims otherwise is...
Read More »Where Have All the Unions Gone and Where Are All the Jobs?*
Economics is a simple field. Just about everything can be described in terms of supply and demand. If the supply of something is scarce but the demand for it is strong, its price rises. On the other hand, if there is a lot of supply but little demand, its price will go down. Now, buyers and sellers can engage in certain strategies to weight the scales. For example, sellers of a product can band together (perhaps by buying each other out) to achieve some...
Read More »Ten things to know about social assistance in Canada
I’ve just written a blog post about social assistance in Canada. Points raised in the blog post include the following: -Social assistance has two contradictory objectives: 1) to give people enough money to live on; and 2) to not give people enough money to live on. -Very few immigrants receive social assistance (relative to the general population). -Several Canadian provinces have seen a rise in persons with disabilities receiving social assistance. -The inadequacy in social assistance...
Read More »The Murder Rate – A Regression with Many Variables
In this post, I want to look at the murder rate, by state. I ran a regression with the state murder rate for 2015 as the dependent variable, and literally threw the kitchen sink at it: demographics, weaponry, income, education, population density, etc. Basically, if its something some reasonable percentage of the population believes matters, and I could find data for it, I threw it into the hopper. I also included variables relating to immigration status. The...
Read More »Education and Externalities
Some years ago I read this NBER working paper. (Note – a couple years later a slightly modified version appeared in the American Economic Journal but I will quote from the earlier, non-paywalled version since it is available to everyone.) Here’s the issue, in a nutshell: In this paper, we use administrative data from the Houston Independent School District and the Louisiana Department of Education to examine whether the influx of Katrina and Rita students...
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