Category Archives: News commentary

A recent blog post by investor and stand-up comedian James Altucher (mentioned here) arguing that New York is dead forever attracted the hostility of many New Yorkers. Fellow comedian Jerry Seinfeld wrote a New York Times op-ed calling Altucher a “whimpering putz.” Mayor De Blasio, naturally, agrees with Seinfeld.

The New York Post told Altucher to “drop dead,” noting that, if he really loved the city as he claims (he co-owns a comedy club there), he would stay and do his part to revive it. Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi suggests that New York is not only not dying, “the rich are moving out and the city is being reborn.”

With all due respect to these people, they missed Altucher’s point. New York as a city will survive. But New York as an ideal, a place that builds wealth and fulfills dreams like nowhere else in America, will not. Not to put too many words in Altucher’s mouth, what is really dead is the idea that New York City or Manhattan densities are necessary have a healthy economy and diverse culture. Continue reading →

This Independence Day weekend, I’ll take a stand and say that confederate statues erected during the Jim Crow era to celebrate slavery and intimidate blacks should be torn down. But the decision to tear down a statue should be made democratically, not by mob rule.

When mobs started tearing down Confederate statues, people asked what would come next: would statues of Jefferson and Washington be torn down as well? Then statues of Jefferson and Washington were toppled in Portland.

Washington and Jefferson probably contributed more to human freedom than all but a handful of other people in the history of the world. But they owned slaves, so their statutes probably deserved it, right? Continue reading →

“Climate change is happening,” says environmentalist Michael Shellenberger. “It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.”

Shellenberger makes these statements in an article “apologizing” for the “climate scare.” Although he himself used to call climate change an “existential crisis,” he no longer believes that. In fact, he hasn’t believed it for awhile, but didn’t say so publicly because he feared “losing friends and funding.”

Shellenberger says he has been an environmentalist for 30 years, which means he joined the movement just as it was being taken over by socialists. As I describe in The Education of an Iconoclast, the environmental movement in the 1980s was tolerant of a wide range of views. Continue reading →

Political commentators have observed that Americans have increasingly sorted themselves into Red and Blue areas, with blue dominating the cities, red dominating rural areas, and the suburbs still being a mix sometimes referred to as purple. A new study takes a close look at this sort in Oregon.

As an Associated Press article notes in discussing this study, in 1966, the Democratic Party had a majority of voters in every region of Oregon, yet the state elected a Republican governor who won 33 out of 36 counties. By contrast, in 2018 ruralites were 30 percent more likely to be Republican than urbanites, and the winner of the governorship won only seven counties, namely those that were the most urbanized.

The study itself says changes resulted partly from the decline in federal land timber cutting. This left rural areas with high unemployment and resentment against the urban areas that supported the reduced cutting. Continue reading →