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from FEE (Foundation for Economic Education)
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, HIGH, non-profit organization
The city’s enforcement against shoplifters has dwindled, and these are the results.
San Francisco ranks as the fifth-worst city in the US when it comes to retail theft. Now, the problem is getting so bad that businesses like Target and Walgreens are being forced to make drastic changes in response. “For more than a month, we’ve been experiencing a significant and alarming rise in theft and security incidents at our San Francisco stores,” a Target spokesperson said. “With the safety of our guests, team members and communities as our top priority, we've temporarily reduced our operating hours in six San Francisco stores.” Target stores normally stay open to 10:00 pm, but many in the San Francisco area will now close their doors at 5:00 pm or 6:00 pm. Meanwhile, Walgreens stores are faring even worse, with some shutting their doors altogether.
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from Hoover Institution
Nonprofit Organization in Stanford, California
In 1983 U.S. President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which was nicknamed by some as “Star Wars.” SDI was meant to protect the United States from intercontinental ballistic missiles by the use of defensive weapons on both earth and in space. Lasers would play a key role in the technology of destroying incoming missiles. The technology didn’t exist yet, but Reagan proposed that the nation devote itself to developing it.
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from HumanProgress.org
Education Website
In the aftermath of World War II, the territories now known as the Four Asian Tigers were among the poorest places in the world. Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea, all occupied by the Japanese Empire during the war, had poverty rates equivalent to those in the Global South. That changed, thus showing the promise of economic liberalism for the rest of the world.
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from Mises Institute
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED
Why Africa's Geography Is a Barrier to Growth
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED
Why Africa's Geography Is a Barrier to Growth
Browsing through history, we can identify several examples of states overcoming the hurdles of geography to achieve great feats. Though the plague of an inhospitable geography is not an insurmountable obstacle to development, it remains crucial to understanding disparities in income across countries. However, some mainstream economists place a premium on institutional development as a panacea for economic growth. Institutions are indeed important, but the legacy of geography still lingers. Compared to the rest of the world, economic growth in Africa has been quite sluggish. A stunning fact is that during 1965–90, GDP (gross domestic product) per capita growth in Africa averaged 0.8 percent per year. Yet growth in the seven fastest-growing developing countries outside the region averaged 5.8 percent, and growth in the rest of the developing world recorded an average growth of 1.8 percent. Economic decline was so dramatic that the average 1972 GDP level was not attained again until 2004.
What is noteworthy about the depressing title to this article is its source. In a case of uncommon candor, President Biden’s economic team has announced that once the artificially high, stimulus-juiced GDP (gross domestic product) measurements of the next two years subside, the United States will experience sub–2 percent growth for the rest of the decade. This dismal forecast wouldn’t be surprising if it had come from Biden’s political opponents, but coming out of the White House itself, it is an astonishing admission. ... Stagnation is real, but it isn’t “secular”—that is, sluggish growth doesn’t have to happen. The coming stagnation isn’t foreordained; it is simply the inevitable outcome of a progressive agenda that disdains free enterprise.
Michael Rectenwald: In the fall of 2016, I was a left communist. As I will show below, I came to this position after a circuitous tour through numerous sects of Marxism. A year later, I had thoroughly renounced Marxism and embraced the views of free market economists and philosophers Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. How did a career world tourist of left intellectual and radical movements find a home in libertarian social and economic thought? And why did it take twenty-five years to defect? As any Marxist can tell you, ideology can blind one to the insights that might disrupt one’s political adhesions, often against one’s own best interests. Only it was Marxist ideology itself that blinded me.
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from Reason Magazine
Magazine in Los Angeles, California
The public debate over critical race theory (CRT) is in large part a semantics argument, with the anti-CRT faction attempting to include "all of the various cultural insanities" people hear about in the media under the banner of CRT while the other side protests that it's technically a much more limited concept confined to elite education. Progressives are essentially correct that the definition of CRT is being tortured to match conservative grievances, but conservatives are justified in feeling aggrieved by some of these things, and thus the argument is quite tedious. That said, the National Education Association (NEA) appears to have accepted the conservative framing of CRT: namely, that it's not merely confined to academia but is in fact also being taught in K-12 schools. And the NEA thinks this is a good thing that should be defended. At its yearly annual meeting, conducted virtually over the past few days, the NEA adopted New Business Item 39, which essentially calls for the organization to defend the teaching of critical race theory. "It is reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory," says the item.
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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