President Biden told us over a year ago that “the pandemic is over.” While the virus is still mutating, the worst is clearly behind us. Recent data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control’s COVID data tracker estimates that COVID-19 causes less than 1 percent of new deaths. 

The following is the final post in a five-part series on Yale’s Akhil Reed Amar’s criticism of Thomas Jefferson. Follow these links for Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

In this fifth and final post examining Akhil Amar’s NR essay arguing that Thomas Jefferson should be castigated rather than celebrated, I look at Amar’s parting shots and discuss what drove Amar to write his essay.

In April 2020, the size of the U.S. government’s total public debt outstanding as measured against the country’s GDP spiked up to 135% in the wake of government-mandated pandemic lockdowns. That’s the highest the U.S. national debt-to-GDP ratio has ever been, breaking the previous record of 121% set in the World War II era.

On 2023’s Labor Day, President Biden boasted of cutting the U.S. government’s budget deficit at a speech in Philadelphia.

The following is the fourth post in a five-part series on Yale’s Akhil Reed Amar’s criticism of Thomas Jefferson. Follow these links for Part I, Part II, and Part III.

My argument is rather than jettisoning Thomas Jefferson as Amar demands, we should ditch Amar, who is a darling of the Federalist Society and has no trouble persuading the “conservative” editors at NR to give him space. Amar’s popularity among Conservatism, Inc., to borrow a term from Paul Gottfried, is a symptom of why the right is content to simply follow the left and occupy the ground that the left abandons as it moves in a more radical direction. 

Last year, I wrote about why empirical minimum wage studies might fail to find a disemploying effect. In this post, I want to explore yet another reason why it might seem like raising the minimum wage is a free lunch. The reason concerns economics going “beyond p’s and q’s”—a theme I’m fond of promoting on Marginalia.

The following is the third post in a five-part series on Yale’s Akhil Reed Amar’s criticism of Thomas Jefferson. Follow these links for Part I, Part II, and Part IV.

In the two previous posts, I dealt with Amar’s criticism of Jefferson related to the Virginian’s opposition to the national bank and his advocacy of nullification. This post deals with Jefferson and secession, which Amar blasts as follows: “He played footsie with the plainly unconstitutional idea that a state could unilaterally secede. (At one point he nonchalantly declared that whether America remained united or instead divided into two parts was “not very important” to American ‘happiness.’ Jefferson Davis was aptly named.).”

The following is the second post in a five-part series on Yale’s Akhil Reed Amar’s criticism of Thomas Jefferson. Follow these links for Part I, Part III, and Part IV.

Akhil Reed Amar wants Americans to “break up” with Thomas Jefferson and instead toast other Founders such as Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. In the first post in this series, I dealt with Amar’s attack on Jefferson based on the Virginian’s opposition to the national bank. Amar also finds fault with Jefferson because “[h]e fathered the false idea that each state could legitimately ‘nullify’ a federal law on its own say-so (as distinct from sounding political alarms against unconstitutional federal actions, filing lawsuits, or doing other things that ultimately relied on national legal and political dispute-resolution mechanisms).”

A useful way to think about price controls is that they destroy mutually beneficial Coasean bargains. By a “Coasean bargain,” I mean an offer that takes the following form: “I’ll pay you to reduce this harm” or “I’ll compensate you for bearing this harm.”

I have always been interested in etymology, which can often provide interesting historical insights about whatever topic a word encompasses. Changes in language patterns in terms of the meaning and frequency of certain words can reveal much about a society’s cultural perception of a given issue.