Recent content by Largo

Do you think that people were just sitting around going "No central bank is great" and then Wilson showed up and six months later the Federal Reserve Act is passed?

The Japanese wanted the demilitarization, and it was the US which didn't want Japan to demilitarize after Korea happened. Like, we have Americans increasingly hating the military, the national security state, and the military-industrial complex after messes like Afghanistan and Iraq. What do...

We can take the Mises Institute, hardly a left-wing source. The Mises Institute argues that such comparisons are irrelevant and that the United States should be compared with say, other American countries than smaller European states. But if you accept that as true, you cannot turn around and...

Crime and violence rates are far worse in the United States than Europe.

I suppose I should have been more clear and acknowledged that you posted something that is of no relevance to the topic, so I'll apologize for not doing that if that's what you want. After all, your joke only makes sense if you think Santos's crime is laundering money incompetently.

Misusing campaign funds (which is what I understand Omar to have done) and directly stealing from donors aren't the same thing at all? One happens all the time. The other really doesn't because most politicians aren't as stupidly greedy as Santos was.

He isn't being kicked out for lying, he's being kicked out for stealing from his donors and ringing up credit card charges in their names. I'm not sure whether I would have voted to kick him out, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

I think the initial opening was worth it and frankly inevitable, though certain decisions taken after Kissinger's time could have been done better. One thing I'd observe is that in a scenario where we didn't open to China at all, you would definitely see a lot of people argue "Well, if we were...

The open joy at his death is all the more ridiculous by its obsession with trivial matters. Kissinger's legacy, whether you want to argue that it was for good or ill, should be defined by his decisions in regards to China and the Soviets. Whether you think it should have been done or not, the...

As I touched on earlier, the US and Japan actually really aren't in the same class in terms of wealth. You can argue that Japan has other advantages (they actually have a sensible housing policy, among other matters), but arguing on this front is not a winning move.

The earlier arguments make it pretty clear. I think Russia intends to exterminate the Ukrainians wherever it can get their hands on it. I don't think Israel intends to exterminate the Palestinians. It's killing people, but there is no intent, and that intent is absolutely necessary. We can...

There's more to genocide than "killing a lot of people," you know.

Do you think that economists don't track per capita? I would observe that this is hardly a new criticism of economics. I remember reading an essay several years ago about 19th century proto-fascists in Italy, and how they helped lay the seeds for it to develop in the 20th century. And while I...

I love Japan, have family there, speak the language, and the semester I spent actually living there was arguably the most fun I've ever had. And I would never in a thousand years want to live there. I don't want to bother with a full refutation, but I'm just going to point out that the median...

You could, I dunno, go with what the African countries have actually decided. Which is that even if the political boundaries don't exactly match up with national boundaries, reenacting the World Wars to fix it is not worth it.