The coolest thing about modernity is that nearly every college-educated person in society has performatively adopted the hegemonic notion that liberal pluralism is good, but none of them actually believes this. Instead, they much more sensibly believe that their worldviews are good and should be promoted and that clashing worldviews…

Seven years ago, I coined the term “identitarian deference” (ID) to describe the idea that “privileged individuals should defer to the opinions and views of oppressed individuals, especially on topics relevant to those individuals’ oppression.” Over the years, I have argued that ID is clearly unworkable, easily gamed, and awful…

Like a lot of journalists last week, David Dayen wrote up Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare for All (M4A) financing plan with the talking points she sent out about it. In his piece “Warren’s Medicare for All Plan Includes No New Taxes on the Middle Class,” he writes that: The financing pays…

I was slightly amused and slightly annoyed yesterday when I saw the Working Families Party endorse Elizabeth Warren for president and then subsequently refuse to release vote tallies and clearly lie about why they aren’t releasing them. The WFP endorsement process works by tallying up party member votes and party…

Max Sawicky claimed that the US could not finance a $10,000 payment to every adult and implored everyone to “do the math,” which for him just meant comparing the $3.2 trillion aggregate sum to the current $4.4 trillion federal budget. I pointed out that the net operating surplus, a broad…

Ryan Grim has a wonderful story at The Intercept about Washington Post’s Fact Checker Glenn Kessler and his nearly constant fuck ups, most of which seem to be directed towards left-wing politicians or facts favorable to left-wing critiques. Grim provides a ton of examples in his piece, but he misses…

Ezra Klein has a piece at Vox about insurance churn. I put out a quick short response to it with a list of statistics on insurance churn that I had cited in prior posts of mine on the topic. But here I want to actually take some time to tackle…

A former Sanders campaign staffer filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) charge against the campaign a short while ago (Bloomberg story; redacted charge). A few people have asked me my opinion of this since I used to work for the NLRB. So I figured I would write this post. Obviously…

One year ago, I wrote a piece that was just a series a quotes from Randy Wray’s 1997 paper titled “Government as Employer of Last Resort: Full Employment Without Inflation.” …