Winter’s Haven

The usually excellent Glenn Greenwald has written a very poorly argued tirade against the influence of Wall Street money in national politics.
It’s trivial to use this incident to support the exact opposite of Greenwald’s conclusion. If bankers are complaining that they haven’t gotten anything in exchange for their political contribution to Democrats, then presumably [...]

Bryan Caplan eloquently summarizes the libertarian view of the welfare state:
I’m against forced redistribution, even to help the deserving poor.  Still, unless you buy the whole libertarian package, I understand taxing the rich to help the poor.  What I can’t understand is taxing everyone to help everyone.  Means-tested programs like TANF and Medicaid aren’t crazy; [...]

Glenn Greenwald discusses governments spying on their own citizens:

It should go without saying that all of the sponsors of the pending bill to ban American companies from collaborating with domestic Internet spying in foreign countries — the inspirationally-named Global Online Freedom Act of 2009 — voted in favor of the 2008 bill to legalize what had [...]

Libertarians love France’s socialized medicine.
Karx Marx loves capitalism.

Michelle Goldberg ponders the Feminist Case for War.
Matthew Yglesias writes about the current research on birth control and fertility rates (featured in The Economist recently) and how it applies to Afghanistan.

Julian Sanchez has an article in The Nation, which begins

We know the rules by now, the strange conventions and stilted Kabuki scripts that govern our cartoon facsimile of a national security debate. The Obama administration makes vague, reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then merrily adopts whatever appalling policy George [...]

Firstly, Ars Technica brings us the news that gyroscopes are the new training wheels. Every physics major in the world is undoubtedly kicking themselves for not having invented this sooner. I certainly am.
Secondly, Dan of XARK writes in defense of rule breaking generally, and in defense of cyclists breaking traffic laws in particular. I’d sign [...]

Glenn Greenwald says that among progressives there has been
a tribal refusal to criticize one’s own, a gut belief that someone as good and just as Barack Obama couldn’t possibly really be continuing Bush/Cheney policies and complicitly helping to suppress their war crimes
…and he documents just how very, very different the reality is.

This libertarian would like to take a moment to endorse Matt Yglesias’s complaints about land use regulations and the weird love affair many libertarians seem to have with cars and low-density cities.
But then, I do commute by bicycle, and my cultural sympathies lie with the left-wing environmentalist Europhiles, even if we often disagree on questions [...]

Suppose that your next-door neighbor beats and rapes his wife. What is the ethically appropriate response on your part? The commonly accepted answer to this question, with which I agree completely, is to forcibly subdue the husband and lock him in a cage, both to prevent him from committing further violence and as a punishment [...]