Words & Numbers

It’s no secret that social media is in a bit of a shambles. The big players like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are purging accounts, censoring content, and mining data. Many users are very unhappy with them. But what alternatives do we have? Maybe more than you think. Join James Harrigan and Antony Davies along with Minds.com founder Bill Ottman as they talk about social media alternatives and mo...

There was once a time when politicians were civil to each other. Neighbors and friends who disagreed politically remained neighborly and friendly to each other. Opponents were graceful in defeat and generous in victory. But somewhere along the line, we lost that. These days, it seems that all there is is vitriol and hate. That is what happens when an electorate focuses solely on the outcomes that...

In the wake of the midterm elections, there’s been a lot of talk about democracy and how it works. Many—largely on the left—are confused and angry because, despite garnering the higher number of votes, Democrats failed to take a majority of seats in the Senate. This demonstrates a basic misunderstanding about American government, the electoral process, and how they work. Join Antony Davies and Jam...

“It’s the most important election in history.” That’s the rhetoric you see plastered across the news and social media. Perhaps, people view this election as such because they believe it to be the government’s job to provide things for them. This is apparent on both sides of the aisle. Democrats want free health care and education. Republicans want a border wall and tariffs on imported goods. But,...

Economists use the term “creative destruction” a fair amount, but what does it actually mean? It generally refers to a company going out of business, or sometimes whole sectors of the economy vanishing as disruptive technologies and strategies come into play. It is very easy to see the “destruction” part of creative destruction. We see the empty storefronts and people out of work because the busin...

Canada recently legalized the possession and use of marijuana and proposed legislation to pardon those previously convicted of such “crimes.” So, it’s as good a time as any to take a look at how such things are handled in the United States. While, yes, in the majority of states, there is some provision for certain kinds of legal use of marijuana—including full legalization in a few—the fact remain...

Imagine, if you will, that the United States federal government somehow received all of the money it normally would for the entire year on January 1st. The day it would have spent it all and started deficit spending (that is, spending money it simply doesn’t have) could be dubbed “Deficit Day.” This year, 2018, that day falls on October 19th. From this day until the end of the year, the US Federal...

When it comes to free trade agreements, ideally they should be very short. Four words would suffice: “Trade will be free.” But politicians being what they are, what we (that is to say, Mexico, Canada, and the United States) actually have to replace NAFTA is a 1,800-page tome called the USMCA. Hundreds of pages of caveats doesn’t sound very much like free trade. That said, this trade agreement, lik...

In this episode, we’re answering listener questions. What’s going on with this scary, dystopian Chinese social credit system? What government agency would you get rid of? What happens when religious leaders (allowed to freely exercise their faith as enshrined in the First Amendment) don’t allow their followers the right of free speech (also enshrined in the First Amendment)? Join Antony Davies and...

Worries about mob rule have been around longer than our Constitution. Indeed, James Madison wrote about the problems of “factions” in what we’ve come to call the Federalist Papers . We like to think that our three branches of government with their checks and balances are impervious to the evils of faction. But today we may be living Madison’s nightmare. Join Antony Davies and James Harrigan as the...

Imposing “price gouging” bans after a natural disaster doesn’t actually help anybody. On paper, it looks ideal. Shoppers who don’t have funds and didn’t prepare for the storm can still afford to buy everything, even if it’s completely last-minute and a bit of a race to the finish line. But the reality is that price-gouging laws don’t make things better, nor do they make things fairer. In the face...

Conservative and liberal: probably the two most commonly used words to describe a person’s political affiliations. And, of course, we all know that Republicans are all conservatives and Democrats are all liberals, and this is the way it’s always been. Right? Well, no, not really. The way that we’ve come to understand these terms currently has drifted pretty far afield of the way these words have b...

The word “capitalism” has become incredibly loaded over the years. And since the term was actually popularized by Karl Marx to be the foil for his own ideology, that’s fairly understandable. It brings to mind all of the very worst aspects embodied by the elite, greedy, rent-seeking Gordon Geckos of the world, hoarding their capital resources like dragons on a pile of gold and profiting from the ha...

We’re experiencing the rise of a new kind of socialist. The original definition of socialism—state ownership of the means of production—is beginning to fall by the wayside. What self-proclaimed socialists are asking for now is for the state to control the means of production. While this might seem like a pedantic distinction, it’s an important one. But the rebranding of socialism by democratic soc...

Everybody vaguely familiar with basic economic concepts knows that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. It’s a great phrase and speaks to the principles of both opportunity cost and scarcity. That said, a “free lunch” refers to more than your afternoon repast. Everything costs something. And if you end up paying zero dollars for it, that only means it was paid for by someone else. This holds tru...

James and Ant have a lot of experience with both high school and college students. Most of the time, they’re extremely impressed with the high school students that they encounter. But something seems to be happening in the summer between high school graduation and beginning their first semester of college. Something… not ideal. And to a point, it’s perfectly natural. Young people are interested in...

As the back-to-school season gets into full swing, hundreds of thousands of young people are heading back to class at their chosen college or university. On average, the simple dollar cost of tuition and fees for a four-year degree is about a quarter of a million dollars. A large majority of students will have to take on some kind student loan debt to cover these costs. But we've been told our who...

People tend to have a strange blind spot when it comes to government. We—or a lot of us, at least—tend to assume the best of intentions from our government. Our fellow civilians garner suspicion, but our elected officials are somehow magically benevolent and altruistic. When governments misbehave and act violently, we tend to think about these actions in terms of warfare. And yes, in the 20th cent...

Gallup recently asked 1,000 people about what the most important issue we’re dealing with is in the United States. You might think that the majority answered drugs and gun control, but you’d be wrong. Instead, the survey found that drugs only received 1% of votes as being the biggest issue, and a whopping 2% for gun rights, with those numbers only going as high as 4% since January. The only time t...

There are many people in this world who like to make the argument, "Correlation is not causation." And this oft-used expression is true. Correlation is not, in fact, causation. Just because two things tend to happen at about the same time does not necessarily mean that they have anything to do with each other at all. That said, lack of correlation does mean lack of causation. So what does that mea...

Why are we debating the Supreme Court nominees as much as we are? Unbelievably, written requirements of the Supreme Court are non-existent. Where the Constitution lists age and experience requirements for both presidential and congressional candidates, only a tiny paragraph describes what the third branch of government should look like. All of those standards and regulations you think are law? Non...

What do you know about the political party you disagree with the most? Who do you think makes the group up? Is it a bunch of “libtard snowflakes” who are all union-backed? Or is it a bunch of offensive alt-right wackos with too much money to know what to do with it? Either way, those perceptions are both completely off-base—caricatural, even—and dangerous. A study, titled, “The Parties in our Head...

The criminal justice system presents a lot of issues, the least of which is discrimination. . . despite what the public may think. Over decades, prosecutors have slowly taken power and responsibility away from the jury and into their own hands, destroying the premise of “presumed innocent until proven guilty.” Statutory immunity, legal discretion and the opaqueness of the criminal justice system a...

Which would you rather be, a member of the working class in America today or an 18th-century French monarch? The answer to that is almost certainly the former. A lot has changed in the last 200 years. Heck, a lot has changed in the last 20 years, for that matter, and with a few notable exceptions, those changes have been for the better. In the year 1800, 95 percent of the world lived in extreme po...

 It's a well-established fact that Social Security and Medicare are in serious trouble and have been for a while. The newest projections released last week have Social Security being insolvent in the year 2034 and Medicare in 2026. A fair amount of this trouble can be laid at the feet of the federal government and its seemingly insatiable habit of spending money it doesn't have. It's gotten to the...