Paradocracy

The information technology era has combined with a generation armed with fancy words and concepts they don’t completely understand to equip a great many with smart-sounding statements, which ultimately fail the more rigorous test of logic, and a wide audience to receive and celebrate their every utterance.  So while increasing numbers enjoy the wide-reaching channels of media once employed exclusively by professionals, they exist no differently than the trick-or-treaters on Halloween who do their best to look the part.   One key distinction here is that the former may make a more compelling case by glossing over complex concepts with smart-sounding words or pseudo-scientific explanation, without anyone in the audience noticing the difference.  And while the trick-or-treaters eventually return to their regular attire and reveal their true colors, the con artist continues his charade until he returns home for the night, where he’s either miraculously...

One of the great economic fallacies of the day has been the calculus which intends to track the amount of money spent as some grand testament to the wellbeing of an economy, or which intends to ennoble it as some grand savior, as if that solitary figure bears any relevance at all to the desired outcomes of the economy.  This myth operates hand in hand with the belief that civilizations can spend and print their way to prosperity .  Both myths fail to remain true to the modifying characteristics of free economies and money.  If the purpose of an economy is to enable the realization of wants through the facilitation of trade between mutually-interested producers, and to — as a byproduct — incrementally improve the population’s standard of living, then the metrics must center around the appreciation of the population’s standard of living and the mutual satisfaction of wants, not around the nebulous volumes of spending.  Taken in bare form, spending is completely...

In an article posted on the Politifact webpage, one decisive claim exposes the website as a complete fraud. The reader can find this dubious claim in the organization's article regarding California's taxes, in which the editorial nitpicks Travis Allen, a Republican member of the California State Assembly, for his unequivocal remarks characterizing California's taxes as ranking "among the highest in the nation." Despite the apparent concession that Allen's statement is mostly true , the writer of the piece then misleadingly concludes: "Notably, [California] does not have one of the nation’s highest property tax rates, at 36th highest." The only type of academic who could posit this claim is one who intends to focus the conversation on meaningless rates and doesn't understand how common $10,000-per-year property taxes are in the most populous parts of the state: the San Francisco Bay Area and the Southland. First, the artificially-high c...

The welfare state in the United States has accounted for an unfathomable measure of destruction across both the observable map of this country and the psychological profile of its inhabitants.  The intersection between those two phenomena can be most aptly evaluated through an examination of the welfare state's influence in the composition of the household unit, a contemporary relic of a time gone by. While the average child in the United States today is 18 percent less likely to grow up in a two-parent household, as compared to 1960, the case for the average black child is even more discouraging: in 1960, roughly 22 percent of black children were raised in single-parent households; today, nearly sixty years later, more than 70 percent of black children were raised in single-parent households. The emergence of this trend is due not to the increased viability of single-parent households by means of self-sufficiency and the development of female independence. ...