Here is my op-ed on deficit reduction from this morning’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required). For those without subscriptions, the thrust (which won’t be new to long-time readers of this blog) is that raising taxes can’t convert fiscally irresponsible spending to fiscally responsible spending.

If your household is over budget, you can address that problem either by spending less or by earning more income. It is tempting to fall into the trap of thinking that by analogy, the government can address its budget problems either by spending less or by raising taxes. But the analogy fails because raising taxes is not like earning more income; it’s more like visiting the ATM.

The government is an agent of the taxpayers. Raising taxes to pay for government spending depletes our assets just as visiting the ATM to pay for household spending depletes our assets. That’s not at all like earning income, which adds to our assets.

So insofar as the supercommittee relies on tax increases to address issues of “fiscal irresponsibility”, it will have failed.

Here is a test post for Tom.

Happy New Year, one and all. I’ll see you in 2011.

If you don’t blog, you might be surprised by how many spam comments show up every day. (These are automatically generated comments with no content beyond “Loved this post”, together with an attempt to get you to click through to the commenter’s web site.) I use the phenomenally great (and free!!!) software Akismet to snag these comments before they ever get through, and it’s amazingly accurate, though every once in a while there’s a false positive. That is, sometimes a legitimate comment gets tagged as spam (often because it contains a lot of links but sometimes for no apparent reason). So every now and then, I look through the spam folder and rescue those comments, if any.

But a moment ago, I hit a wrong button and permanently deleted 200 spam comments (all generated within the past few hours!) before I’d looked at them. Statistically, there was probably nothing legit in there anyway. But if by chance I threw your baby out with my bathwater, I do apologize — and please try again.

This morning’s post contains some imbedded video from Fox News that looks fine on the blog but shows up as a pointer to the wrong video in the RSS feed. Here is a link to the correct video.

A couple of weeks ago, here at the University of Rochester, two fine student organizations—the History Council and the Finance/Economics Council—joined forces to sponsor a debate on the topic “Is Health Care a Right?”. The disputants were myself and history professor Ted Brown, who graciously agreed to speak first at my request.

Over the course of the evening, I proposed a variety of mutually contradictory health care policies; my intent was not to endorse any one of them, but to demonstrate that all of them were preferable to Professor Brown’s pet proposals. I cribbed some important ideas from David Goldhill’s Atlantic Monthly article, and some important ideas and facts from the always insdispensable Bill Easterly. The format did not lend itself to citations or hyperlinks, but I’m glad to make amends here.

Continue reading ‘Is Health Care a Right?—The Movie’

Godel’s theorem (or at least one of Godel’s theorems) says that no matter what axioms you adopt, there will always be true statements in arithmetic that can’t be proven. In Chapter 10 of The Big Questions I give an explicit example of such a statement, involving Hercules’s ability to win a certain game against a very persistent hydra.

There are many popularizations of Godel’s original argument, of which at least one (by Nagel and Newman) is superb. They do a marvelous job of boiling the argument itself and the surrounding issues down to a little over a hundred sparse pages. But I can boil it down further, into a single blog post. I can do this via the magic of one of my favorite expository techniques, a technique I call “lying”. I will lie to you throughout this post, by sweeping important technical details under the rug and (slightly) corrupting some important ideas to make them easier to grasp—but without, I think, sacrificing the flavor and the gist of the argument. At the end, once we’re clear on the big picture, I’ll ‘fess up to some of those lies.

Here, then, is (more or less) how Godel proved that arithmetic contains true but unprovable statements:

Continue reading ‘Godel in a nutshell’

I suppose I should be gratified to learn that this blog is so influential, but I can feel nothing but sadness at Amazon’s response to my post about Ass Meat Research Group and his co-authors Frozen Horse and Chilled and Frozen Hors the Fresh (formerly Chilled the Fresh). These authors’ names have been removed from all Amazon listings. I am so very glad that I saved the screenshot.