Douglas L. Ross - My Personal Reflections

Kurgman is writing a blog now in the newly "free" NYTimes website. He's probably doing it to promote his new book. I assume he'll give the proceeds to the poor to alleviate income inequality, right Paul? Anyway, out of curiosity I looked at the source of the chart that Krugman uses to make his point (by the way, it was pointed to not by Krugman but by a reader who made a comment). The very first paragraph of that report says this... According to Kuznets’ influential hypothesis, income inequality should follow an inverse-U shape along the development process, first rising with industrialization and then declining, as more and more workers join the high-productivity sectors of the economy [Kuznets 1955]. Today, the Kuznets curve is widely held to have doubled back on itself, especially in the United States, with the period of falling inequality observed during the first half of the twentieth century being succeeded by a very sharp reversal of the trend since the 19...

Charles Kruathammer makes a very well reasonsed argument in The Weekly Standard for specific and extremely limited exceptions to the general "rule" that torture should be banned. I find two things praticularly convincing about Kruathammer's arguments: He forces us to deal with the question of whether any use of torture at any time is ever justified in any circumstances. His conclusion is that we must "be honest about [the necessity of sometimes] doing terrible things [like torture]" in those rare cases where by doing so, there is a high probability that we might prevent even more terrible things. Nearly everyone agrees that torture isn't necessarily always the best solution even in extreme circumstances. However, logically the problem is that there is clearly some probability that torture might sometimes be the only practical solution. Another thing that occurred to me was that we [Americans & British] have a tendancy to think of ourselves as being agai...