John Tamny exposes some of the fantasies that infect the campaigns of Sanders, Trump, and Cruz. A slice:
Bernie Sanders’ website asks visitors “Do you want America to be run by a politician of the People or a politician for the Power?” If elected president Sanders plans to (among other things) raise the minimum wage, provide universal healthcare and free college education, and much higher tax rates on the “rich” to pay for all of his ideas. These are big promises, particularly from a politician who claims to abhor power. That is so because only the most powerful of politicians could secure the votes and funding from Congress to achieve Sanders’ policy vision.
David Boaz is the only libertarian among the 20 or so voices – voices that include Mark Helprin, Yuval Levin, and Thomas Sowell – in the already-famous issue of National Review rejecting the candidacy of Donald Trump. Here’s a slice from David’s excellent contribution:
Not since George Wallace has there been a presidential candidate who made racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign. Trump launched his campaign talking about Mexican rapists and has gone on to rant about mass deportation, bans on Muslim immigration, shutting down mosques, and building a wall around America. America is an exceptional nation in large part because we’ve aspired to rise above such prejudices and guarantee life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to everyone. Equally troubling is his idea of the presidency—his promise that he’s the guy, the man on a white horse, who can ride into Washington, fire the stupid people, hire the best people, and fix everything. He doesn’t talk about policy or working with Congress. He’s effectively vowing to be an American Mussolini, concentrating power in the Trump White House and governing by fiat. It’s a vision to make the last 16 years of executive abuse of power seem modest.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Pat Michaels uncovers the truth about recent climate-change claims. (gated) A slice:
Instead of relying on debatable surface-temperature information, consider instead readings in the free atmosphere (technically, the lower troposphere) taken by two independent sensors: satellite sounders and weather balloons. As has been shown repeatedly by University of Alabama climate scientist John Christy, since late 1978 (when the satellite record begins), the rate of warming in the satellite-sensed data is barely a third of what it was supposed to have been, according to the large family of global climate models now in existence. Balloon data, averaged over the four extant data sets, shows the same.
It is therefore probably prudent to cut by 50% the modeled temperature forecasts for the rest of this century.
