Politics, as any observer of the modern world knows, is the enemy of economics, everywhere and always.

Razib Khan Hired And Fired By The New York Times, Both On The Same Day!

The more depressed and maladjusted you are, the more likely it is that you are seeing things right, with minimal bias

In matters editorial, I am a believer in totalitarian despotism. Most writers are lazy, difficult, selfish, thoughtless, and unreliable.

The job of conservatives is to keep the Republican Party driving on the right-hand side of the road. There are many ways we do this. We argue, we publish, we lobby, we campaign for conservative candidates. Another thing we do is, when the GOP goes off the rails on really key issues - size of government, the National Question, Wilsonian adventures - we stay home on election day.

Conservatism is pessimistic, with a negative tendency - which we mostly resist - towards despair. Liberals are optimists, with a negative tendency, rarely resisted, towards utopianism.

Ultimately, however, as the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, a powerful bureaucratic class is in the same relation to commerce as was the scorpion in Aesop to the dog on whose back he crossed the river. They will destroy commerce and establish socialism, even if it kills them, because that is their nature.