Policy
The regimes push: higher taxes, higher debts, more wars they then botch, visible collapse of state authority over borders and citizenship, more political centralisation that makes crises worse, more hostility to entrepreneurs and those who can build and create value.
We have a public imagination that cannot conceive of what exactly to do with children, especially smart children. We fail to properly respect them through adolescence, so we have engineered them to be useless, and so they shuffle through a decade of busywork. Partly, the length of schooling has increased simply because it could—because we no longer
... See moreSimon Sarris • School Is Not Enough
... See moreOur brains have not evolved much in thousands of years and are subject to all sorts of constraints including evolved heuristics that lead to misunderstanding, delusion, and violence particularly under pressure. There is a terrible mismatch between the sort of people that routinely dominate mission critical political institutions and the s
... See moreUniversities need new inter-disciplinary courses. For example, in March 2014 Stanford announced new undergraduate degrees such as Computer Science and English. It would be great if Oxford created alternatives to PPE such as ‘Ancient and Modern History, Maths for Presidents, and Coding‘. Instead of bluffing through essays on competing views of macro
The sense of public service in government employment has long since disappeared and has been replaced with complacency and a belief in job entitlement. Thus the lack of a clear definition of "customer" can lead to unintended consequences.
... See moreA brilliant libertarian-republican theoretician before achieving power and after leaving it, Jefferson is a classic case of corruption of principle from being in power. The first Jefferson Administration, however, was certainly one of the finest libertarian moments in the history of the United States. Expenses were lowered, the army and navy were s
By pushing funding for state activities up to the federal level, the aid system biases American government in favor of imprudent deficit financing.
It is better to fund state spending activities at the state level because state governments must generally balance their budgets and limit their debt issuance.17
When the federal government borrows heavily, it competes with the private sector for limited financial resources, driving up interest rates.
Since 1970, the U.S. has massively increased educational expenditures, mostly to expand school administration, which has vastly outpaced the growth of both students and teachers. Today, taxpayers spend more than $15,000 per public school student. Yet test scores have largely flatlined and, in some areas, even declined.