Let me get this straight: You’re real cool and edgy.

You think global warming is the greatest threat to America, Maya Angelou is better than Shakespeare, people with more money than you have too much and big government is suited for every task except the task of defending the country. Oh, and you’re way into, like, several Eastern religions.

To which I say, “Yawn.”

Come on. You think exactly what your college professors told you to think, exactly what government bureaucrats told you to think and exactly what your friends told you to think — all because your goal in life is to be exactly like them.

And I’m supposed to give you credit for being edgy?

Let’s take a little historical journey into edginess. Continue reading →

One of the catechisms of the liberal faith is that they are altruistic while conservatives are selfish. Liberals like this part of their faith because it makes conservatives not only wrong about politics but bad people to boot. (And I do mean boot.)

This belief being a matter of faith and not fact, it is unsupported by the data, which I’ll get to in a moment. So, instead, liberals support it with parables.

One I recently saw is typical. A liberal wrote about his conservative friend who purportedly is selfish, as conservatives purportedly are.

In contrast was this liberal himself, who, he modestly reported, is altruistic. He informed us that his altruism is good for his soul.

Apart from the incongruity of performing altruism for the purpose of benefiting one’s own soul, I have two questions about this story, and then we’ll get to the data.

First, what kind of altruist goes around advertising his altruism? Continue reading →

The true believers of global warming got some bad news recently. Namely, things are not so bad. Here’s the story.

They had predicted, often and repeatedly, that global warming would melt the ice in Antarctica. Melting Antarctic ice would be a disaster because it would flow into the oceans, making them rise like water in a bathtub with the faucet left on.

The skeptics were skeptical. For expressing their scientific skepticism, the believers name-called them “deniers,” took away their professorships and denied them government grants for their work.

The local “green guy” with the ski company in Aspen, which makes money by burning fossil fuels to drag people up a hill so that they can amuse themselves by sliding back down, purchased additional fossil fuel indulgences from the high priests by announcing that people who don’t chant the global warming mantra cannot be elected to public office anymore.

It turns out, however, that Continue reading →

Last month, we saw the World Series and another set of debates in the presidential election.

In the World Series, fair-minded umpires let the players play. They called balls and strikes the way they saw them. The best team won.

In the debates, the umpires cheated. Under the guise of moderators, they didn’t just call the balls and strikes — they delivered the pitches. They delivered pitch after pitch for the Democrats and called strike after strike against the Republicans.

And those pitches were not just any kind of pitch. Not confident of their ability to get fastballs past the Republican candidates, the moderators doctored the ball by smearing their questions with bias and smirk. They threw spitballs.

Their goal was not to ask hard policy questions that might inform viewers as to which GOP candidate would be the best president. It was to name-call them, mock them and strike them out.

In contrast, the moderators in the one Dem debate served up not spitballs but softballs, and invited the Dem candidates to participate in a home-run derby.

The moderators assumed they would get away with bending the rules because they always had.

And so in a scene right out of a Saturday Night Live skit, Continue reading →

“No fair! Bobby got more!” Anyone with siblings remembers that whine.

It didn’t matter what Bobby did to get more. The point was that Bobby should not get more of anything for any reason.

Fast forward 50 years. Here in Aspen, some people are angry that “Bobby got more” because he owns a downtown penthouse with a hot tub on the roof.

But in their fog of envy and rage, they’ve forgotten about the different choices that Bobby and his siblings made over the past half-century. Continue reading →

American students are lousy compared with students in many other industrialized countries. In a 2013 survey of 64 industrialized countries, American students ranked 30th in math, 23rd in science and 20th in reading.

Comically and sadly, however, American students themselves consistently rate themselves much higher than their foreign counterparts. The one subject where they excel is in self-esteem.

Some argue that the reason for our dismal performance is that we don’t pay teachers enough. But we do in fact pay teachers fairly well in comparison to those countries that are outperforming us. Moreover, the people making that argument also tend to argue that teachers are doing a great job.

So which is it? Are teachers already doing a great job? Or are they not doing a great job, but they would if only we paid them more? Continue reading →

News flash: Aspen has become an expensive place to visit.

We’re voting soon on whether the local government should try to fix that by mandating that Aspen be less expensive for certain visitors.

Here’s what it’s about.

Think back to the old days when we rode the lifts with working-class skiers from, say, Baltimore and Bolivia. Remember that?

Me neither.

But in any event, the local social engineers looking to engineer better Aspenites are tut-tutting that we’re poorer without the diversity (which we’re instructed to treasure) of those impoverished and nonexistent Baltimorean and Bolivian skiers who never came here and still don’t. If their absence doesn’t make you feel deprived, then you’re depraved.

Big problems like this call for big solutions, the tut-tutters say. Government ones.

Here’s their solution: government-mandated fleabag hotels. That phrase isn’t very melodic, so they call it “affordable lodging.” Continue reading →

Don’t they remind you of another cute couple?

Upvalley in the People’s Republic of Aspen, they have an “affordable housing” program. The theory is that some people should pay for the housing of other people.

The program is implemented in two ways. In the first, the city uses taxpayer money to buy or develop housing units. So the city is in the residential real estate business. The units of course lose money hand over fist, and require constant cash infusions because they charge rent that is far less than necessary to cover the purchase and development costs. That’s what it means to be subsidized, after all.

The second way is that the city coerces private developers into building affordable housing units as part of their developments. It does this in a crude but effective way: It conditions the building permit on the inclusion of affordable housing units where the rental rates are controlled by a city bureaucracy.

This, too, is in effect a taxpayer subsidy. The developers incur bigger expenses in developing housing in order to include the mandated affordable units. They have no alternative but to pass those bigger expenses on to the buyers of the other units, or else operate their development business at a loss. There’s no free lunch.

The program is fraught with practical problems. For one thing Continue reading →