John Kozy

Immigrants, legal and illegal, are people and should be treated as such.

The first thing a judicious reader notices is how much disagreement exists among economists on almost every, perhaps every, matter. Then it becomes clear that much of this disagreement is acrimonious. Some of these people appear to hate each other. Now ask yourselves, how likely would it have been that man would have stepped on the moon if as much disagreement had existed among physicists? After noticing the extent of this disagreement, one begins to wonder just what these economists know.

This book describes the genesis and development of the economic collapse in ways that exhibit how serious and intractable it is. The editors have had the good sense to not indulge in any Pollyanna prescriptions of how it will all end up; they have also had the good sense not to present the crisis as a doomsday event. As such, they presents things in ways that show what went wrong and what needs to be fixed and leave the fixing to us.

Some claim that there is no hope of doing perfect research. So, is there hope of doing perfect research? Of course there is—sometimes! It all depends on the whether—whether the subject is limited and whether the researcher can write and is intelligent enough to adequately evaluate the evidence. Unfortunately, many sites on the Web are peddling research but are selling Polish sausage. Not a pretty picture.

Nearly 80 percent of Americans say they can't trust Washington and they have little faith that the massive federal bureaucracy can solve the nation's ills. This anti-government feeling has driven the tea party movement. A smaller government will not solve our problems. Nothing will change until we change the way government works.

If the huge intelligence gathering service works effectively, why is the torture necessary? And if torture is necessary, doesn't it mean that the huge intelligence gathering service doesn't work?

Mainstream American journalism has been subjected to the severest criticism by the American public. One that has been missed is just plain bad reporting.

Should law be based on rules or principles? What is the its goal? To enact rules that authorities want people to obey or to outlaw wrongdoing? The former allows the law to be used to make people conform. But conformity and freedom are incompatible. Rules-based systems turn people into sheep, allowing them to live without making moral choices. Maybe people prefer that; if so, any hope of alleviating the human condition must be abandoned, since sheep are easily led to the sheering.

Do those who buy the paintings of long dead artists and fund buildings for artistic performances do so because they truly love the arts or because they want to boast, "Look what I can afford to do!"? There was a time when wealth supported artists. That practice died out sometime after the sixteenth century. What goes on today borders on the absurd. While huge amounts of money are being spent, the artists themselves are being neglected. This is not love of art for art's sake; it's merely benefact

The notion that there is political lopsidedness in academia tilted to the left is an old canard propagated by anti-intellectual ideologists who do not now and never had a taste for truth. The only reason this canard keeps popping up is that journalism is a label that leans toward stupidity. It will go away when journalists quit reporting it.