Quotulatiousness

September 27, 2024

Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet as “the Errol Flynn of Canadian politics”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the National Post, John Ivison suggests to Justin Trudeau’s Liberals that the Bloc’s price for supporting the government are just going to keep on rising every time they’re asked to save them from a confidence vote in the Commons:

Yves-François Blanchet Portrait Officiel / Official Portrait a Ottawa, ONTARIO, Canada le 1 December, 2021.
© HOC-CDC
Credit: Bernard Thibodeau, House of Commons Photo Services

It is an indication of how desperate the Liberals are to cling to power that they are even considering a deal with Yves-François Blanchet, the Errol Flynn of Canadian politics.

As was said of the hell-raising movie star by his friend David Niven: “You always knew precisely where you stood with Errol because he always let you down.”

The Bloc Québécois leader will leave the Liberals in the lurch as soon as they refuse his extortionate demands, so best to tell him from the outset to go forth and multiply.

Blanchet has imposed an Oct. 29 deadline before his party pulls support for the government on future House of Commons confidence motions.

The Liberals must back two Bloc private member’s bills, Blanchet said, or the mood will become impossible. “And as soon as it becomes impossible, we will know what to do,” he added, ominously.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said conversations are ongoing, though Blanchet said he has had no discussions with the Trudeau government.

Good, because both Bloc bills are policy madness.

Blanchet has presented them as “good for everybody”, but the truth is they benefit very narrow sections of society — older voters and some farmers — and are bad news for everyone else.

One of the bills, Bill C-319, calls on the government to extend the 10-per-cent increase in Old Age Security payments the Liberals made in 2022 for those over 75 to include the 65–74-year-old age group. The bill is at third reading in the House of Commons but requires the government’s blessing to pass because it commits Freeland to spend money. Lots of money.

The other, Bill C-282, requires the government to exempt the supply-managed farm sector (i.e., eggs, chicken and dairy) from future trade negotiations. It is mired in the Senate’s foreign affairs and international trade committee, where one hopes it will be amended beyond recognition.

May 17, 2024

Canada Post is in deep, deep trouble

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I was vaguely aware that Canada Post has been in financial difficulties for a while, but I had no idea things were quite this dire:

You’d better believe that the Canada Post Corporation is in very deep trouble. Here’s how they phrased it in their 2023 annual report:

    Canada Post’s financial situation is unsustainable.

“Unsustainable”. Well that doesn’t sound good. Think they’re just putting on a show to carve out a better negotiating position? Well, besides for the fact that they’re not currently negotiating with anyone, the numbers do bear out the concern:

    For 2023, the Corporation recorded a loss before tax of $748 million, compared to a loss before tax of $548 million in 2022. From 2018 to 2023, Canada Post lost $3 billion before taxes. Without changes and new operating parameters to address our challenges, we forecast larger and increasingly unsustainable losses in future years.

In other words, it’s madly-off-in-all-directions panic time.

Hey! You know I can hear your condescending sniff: “I’m sure this is just a temporary disruption. They’ll figure out how to fix the leak and get themselves back on the road like always. They’re too big to fail.”

Yeah … not this time. The competition from digital communications (i.e., the internet), FedEx, and UPS isn’t going anywhere. Letter delivery nosedived from nearly 5.5 billion pieces in 2006 to just 2.2 billion in 2022. And vague references to “major strategic changes to transform our information technology model” don’t sound much like magic bullets for reversing the decline.

But Canada Post’s labour and pension costs sure are marching bravely forward. In fact, if it wasn’t for Parliamentary relief in the form of Canada Post Corporation Pension Plan Funding Regulations, the Corporation would have had to pay $354 million into the pension plan in 2023 alone. But that $354 million — plus whatever additional amounts show up in 2024 and besides the $998 million in existing general debt — are still liabilities that’ll eventually need paying.

May 1, 2024

QotD: Entitlement politics

Filed under: Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

My grandparents’ generation thought being on the government dole was disgraceful, a blight on the family’s honor. Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much “free” stuff as the political system will permit them to extract … Big government is … [t]he drug of choice for multinational corporations and single moms, for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers, and militant senior citizens.

Janice Rogers Brown, Speech at McGeorge School of Law, 1997-11-21.

February 27, 2024

The Company that Broke Canada

BobbyBroccoli
Published Nov 4, 2023

For a brief moment, Nortel Networks was on top of the world. Let’s enjoy that moment while we can. Part 1 of 2.

00:00 This is John Roth
02:04 The Elephant and the Mouse
12:47 Pa without Ma
26:27 Made in Amerada
42:15 Right Turns are Hard
57:43 Silicon Valley North
1:07:37 The Toronto Stock Explosion
(more…)

February 24, 2024

Never mind the unfunded liability … money printer go brrrr!

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kulak at Anarchonomicon points out that the US government’s debt situation — which was alarming 20 years ago — has continued to get worse every year:

Libertarian Economists have been predicting this collapse of the federal system would happen “By About 2030” since before 2008. I remember in high school in the early 2010s listening to Ron Paul lectures and visiting USDebtClock.com, this was a hot button issue after 2008 … (then of course there was no political will to do anything and everyone just stopped talking about it)

I honestly forget that everyone around me doesn’t already know this, this is so common and accepted in libertarian and economic circles, and everyone who knows it got bored of eyes glossing over when they tried to explain it (in an autistic panic) decades ago.

US Unfunded liabilities:

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, US Debt, and Federal employee benefits and pensions, are all basically intergenerational ponzi schemes that require constant 1950s level population growth amongst the productive tax paying middle-class to maintain. By 2000 it was obvious this population growth was not happening, that population was beginning to age and collapse, and NO, the illegals at the border weren’t adequate replacements … (they weren’t adequate to prop up federal expenses in 2000 when they were still Mexican, now that they’re Guatemalan, Haitian, and Senegalese they’re almost certainly a net drain).

The Specter of Mass Boomer retirements with few to no children and grandchildren to replace them and pay for all the costs of their retirements and healthcare was maybe the slowest but most assured crisis ever to be seen in human history … Demographics is destiny.

This was a foreseen problem in 2000 when US Debt to GDP (just the portion that’s already been spent and interest has to be paid on) was 59% of GDP. Today the US Debt to GDP ratio is 122% of GDP whilst just in the past 24 years. Absolute US Federal Debt (not including state or local) has grown from 5.6 trillion dollars to 34 trillion dollars (102k per citizen: man, woman, and child). just the interest that has to be paid out of your tax dollars on that debt is set to eclipse ALL US Military spending sometime this year … And by 2028 Debt to GDP will be 150% (46.4 Trillion, 132k per citizen, 12 trillion more in 4 years, with no additional spending bills) and the Interest (at current estimates) will be over 2.5 trillion dollars, over a third of all Tax Dollars brought in will be spent on just interest, because dollar confidence has collapsed and the only way to keep inflation from destroying the dollar has been to radically raise the interest rates the Federal Reserve offers.

Now all that, That catastrophic state of things, is just the debt, the money that’s been spent … The real crisis is the Unfunded liabilities, all the promises the US has made to Boomers (who dominate the vote) and others about money they’re GOING to spend.

As of now total Unfunded liabilities stand at 213 trillion dollars, $633,000 per US Citizen (Man woman, and newborn babe)… These are all dollars the US has promised to pay to someone somewhere at some point: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Federal pensions, VA Benefits, etc. And cannot in any politically feasible way restructure or get out of.

If no one ever contributed another dime to social security, and in so doing was promised in turn significantly more than that dime (it’s a Ponzi scheme, it loses money in proportion to and at a greater rate than the money being contributed to it (every dollar you contribute you’re promised multiple dollars in return, and your dollar is not invested, it just pays off previous contributors)) … If everything froze and every young person was locked out of ever receiving Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, the Unfunded Liability would be $633k per every man, woman, and child … that’d be the debt a newborn American would be born with.

However because it is NOT frozen and it will not be, by 2028 that number will Rise to $837k and an ordinary household of 4 will have seen their, politically unavoidable, family obligation in future tax payments to the federal government increase by $804,000 in just 4 years.

If your response is that your family doesn’t even make 804k in 4 years and there’s no way you could ever pay that much in 4 years given its just going to increase at a faster rate the next 4 years … CONGRATULATIONS! 90% of families don’t make that much, and less than 1% of families could ever afford to pay that much in taxes in a 4 year time.

This has been slowly growing for decades, and in the late 2000s and 2010s Ron Paul types were screaming that those Benefits needed to be reformed NOW (in 2008) or they’d drown America. But of course, cutting benefits is political Anathema to boomers, so nothing was done …

The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

October 31, 2023

In the 1920 presidential election, Americans voted overwhelmingly for a return to “normalcy”

Filed under: Books, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Warren G. Harding’s term in office has been treated like a punchline by progressive writers and commentators for a century, but Lawrence W. Reed refutes this easy mockery and points out that the winner of the 1920 election deserves much better:

Warren G. Harding, 14 June 1920.
Library of Congress control number 2016828156

Routinely dismissed as a bad chief executive, Harding’s reputation is undergoing a long overdue renovation. The latest contribution in that regard is a new, must-read biography by Ryan S. Walters titled, The Jazz Age President. Read it, and you’ll forever be skeptical of the lazy, biased, conventional historians who worship power and those who wield it.

Warren Harding didn’t just tell audiences what they wanted to hear. He sometimes told them what they did not want to hear. He went to Birmingham, Alabama to condemn racism and Jim Crow laws, for example — a fact I’ve previously pointed out.

Conventional historians praise Presidents for the bills they signed into law but often it requires more courage and conviction to veto them. On that score too, Harding can be judged favorably. He vetoed six bills in the 2-1/2 years he served in the White House. None of the six was overridden. That may not sound like a lot but remember, his party controlled both houses by big majorities; Congress didn’t send him much it thought he wouldn’t sign.

Four bills Harding vetoed concerned minor issues and generated little attention, but one concerned a bonus for veterans of World War I. It stirred up quite a fuss. As the bill worked its way through the House and Senate, Harding gave ample warning that he wouldn’t even consider a bonus that wasn’t paid for. Congress ignored him and sent the bill to his desk. He rejected it, noting as follows:

    In legislating for what is called adjusted compensation, Congress fails to provide the revenue from which the bestowal is to be paid. We have been driving in every direction to curtail our expenditures and establish economies without impairing the essentials of governmental activities. It has been a difficult and unpopular task. It is vastly more applauded to expend than to deny.

After the Civil War, Congress paid pensions to veterans of the conflict and their dependents. Sixty years later, in 1923, it sent a bill to Harding to grant pensions to women who married aging Civil War veterans long after the war. It even authorized higher payments to them than what recent widows of veterans in the war with Germany were getting. His veto message included this unassailable objection:

    The compensation paid to the widows of World War veterans, those who shared the shock and sorrows of the conflict, amounts to $24 per month. It would be indefensible to insist on that limitation upon actual war widows if we are to pay $50 per month to widows who marry veterans 60 years after the Civil War.

Congress should have known better than to expect Harding to sign such bills. This was the same man who declared at his modest, unembellished inauguration that “Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government”. He had expressed a desire to put “our public household in order”. He said he wanted “sanity” in economic policy, combined with “individual prudence and thrift, which are so essential to this trying hour and reassuring for the future”.

If somebody told me all that, I wouldn’t even think of asking him to approve a check for an able-bodied 30-year-old simply because she married an 80-year-old veteran.

This was the same Warren Harding, remember, who gave the country perhaps the best Treasury Secretary in its history, Andrew Mellon. According to historian Burton Folsom, Mellon slashed government expenses and eliminated an average of one Treasury staffer per day for every single day he held the office. Harding, Mellon and Calvin Coolidge (Harding’s successor), together with a friendly Congress, reduced the federal budget and cut the national debt by more than one-third.

April 16, 2023

Raising the minimum retirement age may be necessary, but it will never be politically popular

Filed under: France, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As protests and riots continue against the French government’s attempt to raise the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64, Theodore Dalrymple explains why he finds sympathy with the working poor who will be most directly hurt by the change:

Riot police on the streets of Bordeaux as violent protests against French government plans to raise the retirement age continue.
YouTube screen capture from an AFP report.

As I hope to be able to work till my dying day, I am perhaps not the right person to animadvert on the present disturbances in France about the raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64. My work has always been pleasing to me, and it remains so; I even manage to delude myself sometimes that it is important.

I am forced to recognize, however, that not everyone is in the same happy position as I. I am sure that if I had been a dustman all my life, I should not hope to be emptying dustbins at my present age (73), let alone at the age of 85. While my work remains work, and in a certain sense occasionally even hard work, especially when I have to think, what I do is not physically demanding. No one ever got arthritis or fibrosis of the lung by writing a few articles.

The reform of the pension system in France, from my limited understanding of it, is rather unfair. It is true that some reform is necessary: There are ever fewer workers to fund the pensions of ever more pensioners (the system being entirely unfunded by investment). On the other hand, it is those who do the most unpleasant and unremunerative jobs who have to work the longest, and the reform only increases this unfairness. As the old cockney song has it, it’s the rich what gets the pleasure.

Nevertheless, the extreme opposition to the reform, which is hardly a radical one, strikes most foreigners as rather strange. In a way it is also sad, for it implies that a long retirement is the main aim of all that precedes it, which in turn implies that all the work done for several decades before retirement has been an unpleasant imposition rather than something of value in itself. That the quid pro quo for a longer life expectancy is a greater number of years spent working seems not to strike anyone with force.

The demonstrators probably think, no doubt correctly, that the reform is the thin end of a wedge: If it is allowed to pass without a fuss, there will be further such reforms until the retirement age will be 70, 80, or never, depending on life expectancy. As for the younger demonstrators, they do not seem to worry much that it is they who will be paying for the people older than themselves to retire early, the distant prospect of early retirement being more real to them than the far more proximate high rates of taxation.

October 16, 2021

QotD: Social security

Filed under: Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[F]rom a pure policy perspective, Social Security makes little sense except as a modest welfare program. There is, after all, no earthly reason why most middle class or wealthy citizens need the government to garnish their wages for decades and then provide a retirement benefit later: People are generally perfectly capable of saving for their own retirements. Those who want to paint the program as indispensable are fond of pointing to the large numbers of retirees who rely almost wholly on Social Security for their incomes. But then, when you take a hefty 12.4 percent bite out of people’s paychecks — leaving them with less to save — and tell them they can rely on a government benefit later, it’s not exactly shocking that many people don’t save and rely on a government benefit later.

Julian Sanchez, “Social Security’s Progressive Paradox: Retirement ‘insurance’ as a Rube Goldberg machine”, Reason, 2005-05-02.

May 24, 2019

Ontario universities’ “quarter-million dollar club”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Being a tenured university professor is generally a well-paid job, even in Canada. But thanks to an unintended interaction between pension legislation and retirement policies, older tenured professors are required to draw their pensions (which are pretty damned good by themselves) and their salaries from the university, which boosts many of them well into the quarter-million a year range:

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

Ontario is a weird place sometimes. One month ago, the government announced that it was implementing a performance-based funding plan which – if you took the government’s half-thought-out comments seriously – raised the possibility that hundreds of millions or perhaps even billions of dollars currently projected to be spent on institutions might be snatched away if institutions failed to hit some ill-defined targets in a type of contract-based funding system. You’d think this would be a big deal, something people would want to talk about and discuss.

But no. Somehow, this is not what is currently obsessing the Ontario university sector. Instead, apparently, we need to talk about how it’s a human rights violation for professors to be asked to enjoy their retirement on a six-figure annual pension.

Crazy? Well, yes. Here’s the deal. Time used to be that universities could tell professors to retire at age 65 or 67 or whenever. Over the course of the 2000s, provinces gradually got rid of mandatory retirement; in Ontario this occurred in 2006, when the provincial government amended the Human Rights Code to that effect. It should have surprised absolutely no one that more and more full professors, who towards the end of their career routinely make over $180,000 per year, decided to delay retirement not just past 65 but pretty much forever. In 2011, only 6.7% of professors were over 65 and 0.9% 70 or over. Just five years later in 2016, that was up to 10.2% and 3.3% respectively. At the time, I estimated that the compensation costs for the over-65s amounted to $1.3 billion, or enough to hire about 10,000 new junior faculty. The share of that going to the 70-pluses would amount to a little north of $400 million.

But here’s the thing: federal pension legislation requires individuals to start drawing down their pensions at age 71. You can’t opt-out. And so as a result you get individuals who are in what Carleton University economist Frances Woolley recently called the “quarter-million dollar club” (do read Frances’ piece – everything she does on higher education is excellent, but she is extra-excellent on this one). Even if you understand the legislative path that led us here, you probably – rightly – think this is an outrageous sum, particularly in light of the fact that research productivity tends to decline over time and teaching loads among full professors are not all that onerous.

On the other side of the pond, a recent tribunal ruling at Oxford’s St. John’s College points in a very different direction:

Oxford and Cambridge universities can force old professors to retire in order to boost diversity, a tribunal ruling suggests.

Prof John Pitcher, a leading Shakespeare scholar and fellow at St John’s College at Oxford, claimed that he had been unfairly pushed out at age 67 to make way for younger and more ethnically diverse academics.

He sued the College and university for age discrimination and unfair dismissal, claiming loss of earnings of £100,000 – but Judge Bedeau dismissed both claims.

April 3, 2019

Greater Poland Uprising – Book Picks – Veteran Care I BEYOND THE GREAT WAR

Filed under: Books, Economics, Europe, Government, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published on 2 Apr 2019

It’s time for another episode of Beyond The Great War where we answer questions from the community. This time we take a look at the Greater Poland Uprising and the situation of Poland in early 1919, Jesse recommends a few of his favourite history books and we also talk about how veterans were treated after the 1918 armistice.

» SUPPORT THE CHANNEL
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thegreatwar
Merchandise: https://shop.spreadshirt.de/thegreatwar/

» SOURCES
Boysen, Jens. “Polish-German Border Conflict”, in 1914-1918 online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online…

Davies, Norman. White Eagle, Red Star. The Polish-Soviet War 1919-1920 and the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’ (London: Pimlico, 2003 [1972]).

Gattrell, Peter. Russia’s First World War (Pearson, 2005).

Gerwarth, Robert. The Vanquished. Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923 (Penguin, 2017).

Horne, John. “The Living,” in Jay Winter, ed. The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 3: Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 592-617.

Leonhard, Jörn. Der überforderte Frieden. Versailles und die Welt 1918-1923 (CH Beck, 2018).

Pawlowsky, Verena/Wendelin, Harald. “Government Care of War Widows and Disabled Veterans after World War I,” in: Contemporary Austrian Studies, XIX: From Empire to Republic: Post-World War I Austria, eds. Bischof, Günter/Plasser, Fritz/Berger, Peter (2010): 171-191

Prost, Antoine. “Les anciens combattants”, in Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Jean-Jacques Becker, eds. Encyclopédie de la Grande guerre 1914-1918 (Paris: Bayard, 2013): 1025-1036.

Snyder, Timothy. The Reconstruction of Nations. Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (Yale University Press, 2003).

June 29, 2018

QotD: What is a discount rate?

Filed under: Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is not the 20 percent savings you got by buying a new washing machine on Black Friday last year. A discount rate is a way of accounting for the fact that dollars in the future are not quite the same as dollars you have right now.

You know this, don’t you? Imagine I offered to give you a dollar right now, or a dollar a year from now. You don’t have to think hard about that decision, because you know instinctively that the dollar that’s right there, able to be instantly transferred into your sweaty little hand, is much more valuable. It can, in fact, be easily transformed into a dollar a year from now, by the simple expedient of sticking it in a drawer and waiting. It can also, however, be spent before then. It has all the good stuff offered by a dollar later, plus some option value.

Even if you’re sure you don’t want to spend it in the next year, however, a dollar later is not as good as a dollar now, because it’s riskier. That dollar I’m holding now can be taken now, and then you will definitely have it. If you’re counting on getting a dollar from me a year from now, well, maybe I’ll die, or forget, or go bankrupt.

The point is that if you’re valuing assets, and some of your assets are dollars you actually have, and others are dollars that someone has promised to give to you at some point in the future, you should value the dollars you have in your possession more highly than dollars you’re supposed to get later.

The rule for establishing an exchange rate between future dollars and current ones is known as the “discount rate.” Basically, it’s a steady annual percentage by which you lower the value of dollars you get in future years.

All you need to remember is two things: the longer you have to wait to get paid, the less that promise is worth to you today. And the higher the discount rate you apply, the lower you’re valuing that future dollar.

Megan McArdle, “Public Pensions Are Being Overly Optimistic”, Bloomberg View, 2016-09-21.

February 25, 2018

Amphibious Landing Craft – Widow Compensation – Repatriation I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published on 24 Feb 2018

Ask your questions here: http://outofthetrenches.thegreatwar.tv

March 16, 2017

Words & Numbers: Blocked by a State’s Wall of Taxes

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 15 Mar 2017

This week, James & Antony discuss the case of Connecticut’s budget shortfall. The state hopes to solve their financial problems by raiding the retirement accounts of previous Connecticut government employees who have moved out of the state, and take 30% of those savings. This plan would hurt retirees, break promises, and trap many people in the state based on a policy that may be illegal.

January 26, 2017

QotD: Why government intervention usually fails

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We saw in an earlier story that the government is trying to tighten regulations on private company cyber security practices at the same time its own network security practices have been shown to be a joke. In finance, it can never balance a budget and uses accounting techniques that would get most companies thrown in jail. It almost never fully funds its pensions. Anything it does is generally done more expensively than would be the same task undertaken privately. Its various sites are among the worst superfund environmental messes. Almost all the current threats to water quality in rivers and oceans comes from municipal sewage plants. The government’s Philadelphia naval yard single-handedly accounts for a huge number of the worst asbestos exposure cases to date.

By what alchemy does such a failing organization suddenly become such a good regulator?

Warren Meyer, “Question: Name An Activity The Government is Better At Than the Private Actors It Purports to Regulate”, Coyote Blog, 2015-06-12.

January 22, 2017

QotD: Conflict of interest

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I am not sure that this is a suitable subject for a blog post, probably more a project for an aspiring PhD student, but with all the discussion of conflicts of interest in the Trump cabinet, it strikes me that the most glaring conflict in the public sector is ignored: The CoI between state and local politicians elected with the support of public sector unions who then participate in compensation negotiations for the members of those unions. Here the temptation of the politicians to buy the support of the unions with public money is overwhelming. The impact of this is potentially trillions when public pension liabilities are included.

This is such an obvious conflict that I have looked to see if there are laws preventing this, but my initial research shows nothing.

It would be interesting to see if there is a statistical relationship between union support and subsequent pay rises. I would expect this relationship to be especially strong with deferred compensation (such as pensions) since this is very difficult for voters to monitor and can be easily gamed with unrealistic assumptions about, for example, investment returns.

Roger Barris, quoted by Tyler Cowen, “Understudied conflicts of interest in American government”, Marginal Revolution, 2017-01-11.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress