Better Than Drudge

recent posts

about

Category: Economics

  • I’ll See Your Economic Collapse and Raise You National Demise

    By Selwyn Duke Being just weeks away from reaching our debt ceiling and with frightening talk about a fiscal cliff, there’s much sympathy in Washington for tax increases. Even conservatives are wavering. A few Republicans have dumped their anti-tax pledges, and former Nixon official-turned-actor Ben Stein favors taxing the wealthy. He says that we can’t…

  • In Defense of Price Gouging

    By Selwyn Duke In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, there has been much talk about price gouging. New Jersey is prosecuting some who engaged in it, and pundit Bill O’Reilly has threatened to put offending gas stations in his fearsome Factor pillory. But is this prudent? To be clear, I personally wouldn’t want to raise…

  • Losing the Future: The Fiscal-conservative Fantasy

    By Selwyn Duke With the loss of the 2012 election, there is much talk of how the Republican Party must do some soul searching. How will the GOP wage successful campaigns when demographic and cultural changes favor the opposition? Increasingly, the answer is that the party’s party is over, that it must move into the…

  • Barack Obama: Anatomy of an Ideologue

    By Selwyn Duke As with G.W. Bush before him, much time is spent arguing about Barack Obama’s character. Does he mean well and just not govern well, or is it something else? What can be missed during this debate, however, is that most damage is done in the name of doing good. Consider, for instance,…

  • Should Sandy’s Victims Get Your Tax Money?

    By Selwyn Duke Living near the coast in the Northeast, I see the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy firsthand. Many have been without power for days; there are long lines at gas stations; some supermarket shelves are bare; and, more to the point here, some in vulnerable areas lost their homes. And because the storm…

  • Why Accept Contraception as a Women’s Issue?

    By Selwyn Duke While many points have been made about this campaign’s contraception controversy, there’s one that I haven’t yet heard anyone mention. Why do we accept contraception as a women’s issue?

  • Election 2012: Sound Bites vs. Reality

    By Selwyn Duke Any good advertising man knows that a catchy slogan is worth a thousand words. A lot more customers are won by “Coke is It!” or “Just Do It” than are lost by the tedious expositions on side effects rendered at the end of drug commercials. Unfortunately, sound bites, true or not, are…

  • Petulant, Perturbed Obama Just Can’t Help Himself

    By Selwyn Duke As with the vice-presidential debate and Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s attitude in Monday night’s debate spoke more clearly than anything he said. No, he didn’t laugh like Bozo the Clown, giggle like a schoolgirl, shake his head, and roll his eyes like Jokin’ Joe did. But he looked petulant, perturbed, and on…

  • Enough Already with the Women-Get-Paid-Less Nonsense

    By Selwyn Duke The intersex wage-gap question asked at the last presidential debate once again thrust the issue of equal pay for women into the headlines. And since Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are both vying for women — who vote in greater numbers than men do — both campaigns have been saying all the…

  • How Government Will Take Meat off Your Table

    By Selwyn Duke The British pork industry is collapsing, and it’s a story that should serve as a warning to all of us. Why? Because the agents of its demise have the entire West in their crosshairs. The numbers are staggering. With a pig herd halved during the last decade, Britain has gone from producing…