L'Esprit de l'Escalier for March 1, 2013
L'Esprit de l'Escalier:
Well, as William Rehnquist said, "strict construction" and "originalism" are masks for hostility to criminal defendants and civil-rights plaintiffs...
When Joe Stiglitz first mooted the first version of "CPI reform" back in 1994 as an idea, the interesting thing about it was that it was plausibly (a) correcting an error because indexation wasn't supposed to increase values over time but simply adjust them for changes in the cost of living, while (b) affecting the budget half by raising taxes relative to baseline and half by cutting spending. That's still true. The problem is that it absolutely kills 90+ widows…
I must say: rarely have such a large proportion of the people who have actually read a book like Lean In said: "These reviewers aren't reviewing the book I read: they are trash-talking Sheryl Sandberg, not reviewing the book". It's weird…
I would not say that fighting to the last Russian (and the last Briton) was a "strategy": Roosevelt certainly wanted to be in there pitching a lot earlier…
I have never understood the game that Amity [Shlaes] is playing. There are solid arguments for the point of view she wants to boost that she could make to build her reputation and network of trust. But she doesn't make them. And so she undermines herself and her long-run career to a remarkable degree. This transparently-wrong misreading of what Galbraith said about Coolidge and of what Coolidge said about the 1920s bubble is just one case…
