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Cake day: March 13th, 2024

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  • We are not in a recession. The problems with wage stagnation are not some temporary hiccup in the economy. It is a systemic problem. Stop conflating the two, complaining that a macroeconomic term with a very specific meaning isn’t defined the way you want it to be. Stop expecting the problem to heal itself if the fed lowers rates or taxes get nudged up or down or whatever. We know how to fix wage stagnation because we have done it before. Regulation. Labor protections. Minimum wage increases. Wage stagnation occurs in the absence of these things, and they can only be done by Congress.


  • Even though the law can be circumvented, it nonetheless provides resistance. Traveling to another state, filling out paperwork, paying extra money, etc all provide additional obstacles to overcome. If someone was having an acute mental problem and felt compelled to eat a barrel, a simple few hours delay in acquiring a gun can make all the difference. For someone planning on using a gun for criminal activity, at some point they might just consider employment as an easier alternative if acquiring a gun is too much of a pain.

    We have already seen this effect in reverse with regard to immigration. Legal immigration is such a painful crapshoot that people are willing to surrender their fate to cartels as an alternative.


  • Details like this are really just a distraction. Do you really think the average respondent understands these technical details, or have any good reason to memorize the specs of all rifles? The focus on the AR-15 is not because of any risk associated with that particular gun, but because most people understand that this is a semi-auto rifle. There is no other model of gun that will have that kind of widespread recognition.

    Drawing up these very silly technical arguments is a willful ignorance of the underlying issue: What is the limit of deadly force we should allow one person to lawfully own? We don’t let people own tactical nukes. We don’t need to argue over thermonuclear or hydrogen nukes. We don’t need to understand quantum mechanics to regulate these devices. The technical details do not matter. The potential body count is what matters. And so it is with guns, which happen to occupy that grey area where reasonable people disagree on an acceptable level of lethality. You do not need to know all the different models of gun to be killed by one, so we should not require such technical knowledge when engaging in discourse around their regulation.




  • The recent trend of transferring individual rights to the state en masse is alarming. Even worse, the states are working in direct contradiction to experts in the fields they are regulating. Skimming over some of these recent laws, we see legislatures working against medical associations (reproductive health care and gender affirming care), sports rules authorities (trans athlete participation), and education accreditation bodies (this article).

    The result is a gigantic state power that sees fit to decide what health care you receive, what the rules of your sports should be, and what constitutes a good education. We have set up institutions to tackle these problems due to the (now less) common assumption that these decisions should be made by experts and/or local stakeholders, and that politics should have no place in our doctors’ offices, football fields, and classrooms.

    But let’s assume that politics and state power should reach into these spaces. Why would the laws work in direct opposition to the most trusted authorities in these fields? What legitimate purpose could that serve?