At Reason (“The Government Wants To Cap Credit Card Late Fees. It Will Hurt the Poor“), Veronique de Rugy shows levels of compassion for the poor suffering banks that hasn’t been seen since John Stossel condemned the immorality of walking away from underwater mortgages. De Rugy starts off on a note seemingly calculated to alienate…

I recently stumbled across an old Tyler Cowen post at Marginal Revolution — on “zero marginal product workers” — which perfectly illustrates the circularity of marginal productivity analysis, and how it hides power relations behind a facade of neutral economic laws. As Cowen initially states the argument, we have had a recovery in output, but…

At Grist, Amal Ahmed quotes a new report from Physicians for Social Responsibility to the effect that polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAs, are widely used in oil and natural gas fracking. PFAs are a forever chemical — meaning they persist indefinitely in soil and water, and wind up entering the food chain — linked to “birth…

…It’s apparently an automated message. In “The lessons from America’s astonishing economic record” (Apr 13th), The Economist manages to regurgitate virtually every lazy neoliberal talking point in existence. The (unsigned) article sets out to demonstrate, contra the near-universal American perception that “the economy is broken,” that the American economy is actually a “stunning success story”…

In “Is Working From Home Really Working?” (paywall-free version here), Steven Rattner opines — or rather pearl-clutches — that the phenomenon variously known as quiet quitting, working from home, or the Great Resignation, reflects a change in American attitudes toward work. And changed in a way that he views as “not for the better.” This…

A Rally Against Resistance Firstly, I’d like to give my thanks to Dennis Morgan at Counterpunch for stating succinctly the exact fundamental problem with the “Rage Against the War Machine” rally that took place on February 19th, 2023. In Dennis’ own words, “We have to demand that the supply of weapons shipped to Ukraine stop…

On April 20th, Ron DeSantis, Florida governor and presidential hopeful, signed a law allowing Florida juries to recommend the death penalty with only an 8-to-4 vote. Previously, Florida required a unanimous vote in death penalty cases. Under the new law, Florida will have a lower threshold for imposing the death penalty than any other state….

Steven Greenhut, apparently filling in for Christian Britschgi as Reason’s resident landlord whisperer, recently voiced his concern that “The COVID-19 Pandemic Permanently Damaged Property Rights.”  I know proppity is a word to conjure with among right-libertarians. From my anarchist perspective, the term — as opposed to possession — carries far less weight. But I regard…

We in the US have a gun problem. This isn’t at all to say the problem is as simple as “there are too many” or “it’s too easy to obtain them legally,” but the presence of a distinct problem localized here in this country is undeniable, and it’s been getting worse. One might argue the…

The Utah legislature just passed a law that makes “inhibiting or impeding the operation of a critical infrastructure facility” — a category that includes oil and gas facilities, power plants, and railroads — a felony punishable by five years to life in prison. Another law passed along with it makes a person who “interferes with…

For years, right libertarians have loved to throw around the “World population living in extreme poverty” metric, which shows extreme poverty shrinking steadily as a share of the population from 1815 on, and then in absolute terms since about 1980. The problem is that “extreme poverty” is defined in monetary terms, as living on less…

At Slate, Edward Ongweso Jr. treats the Silicon Valley Bank failure as “emblematic of a startup ecosystem and venture-capital apparatus that are too unstable, too risky, and too unmoored from reality to be left in charge of something as important as the direction of our technological development.” It’s fair to say there’s a considerable gap…

The terms “woke” and “wokeism” have been ubiquitous on the right for the past year or so. Charlatans like Chris Rufo, James Lindsay, and Jordan Peterson regularly rail against this or that alleged manifestation of it, Robby Soave’s main shtick at Reason is recounting the latest incident of some paragon of scholarly reasonableness who was…

The drama of the so-called “culture wars” picked up recently with Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for a “national divorce” over supposed entrenched cultural issues. Setting aside how this would be a terrible deal for red states, how fundamentally unworkable the idea is (what happens to blue cities inside red states), or how bad a…

In the early morning hours of February 6, 2023, Turkey and northern Syria were shaken by two major earthquakes in quick succession. Eleven cities in Southern and Eastern Anatolia and Syrian Kurdistan, home to around 3.5 million people, were severely affected by the earthquakes. The fact that the disaster struck in the early hours of…

The Norfolk Southern disaster in East Palestine has raised numerous issues of corporate malfeasance, and how it is enabled by corporate collusion with the state. Some of that, as we saw in December, is the federal government’s protection of the railroad industry from labor action against its intolerable work hours and lack of sick leave,…

All over the U.S. imperial core, the trumpets of war are being sounded against queer communities. More than that: reactionary forces are, to put it as bluntly as possible, planning to exterminate us. Consider the following: More than 300 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills have been filed in 2023 alone. It’s only March. Some of these bills include…

The fear and anxiety induced by earthquakes are often exacerbated by the challenges posed by capitalist societies, where individuals face significant obstacles in their efforts to modify their living conditions or relocate to safer regions. This creates a complex and concerning situation that demands urgent attention from scholars and policymakers alike.  It’s particularly concerning that…

Tyler Wright is a Twitter hustlebro whose handle is — predictably enough — @DefiningWealth. His bio is typical of the ilk, who prey on basically the same demographic of gullible young men as Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate: “$0 at 22. $1.5 Million and Retired from Corporate America at 28. Now I help people do…

The Panopticon model, proposed by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, is actually a mechanism of self-censorship. Prisoners in cells arranged in a ring with completely open fronts would have to control their own actions and not do anything wrong in order not to be punished, since they would not know when the guards in the…