Do Great Minds Think Alike, Or...

Here is me on June 13:

Obama Just Slipped the Economy a Mickey

This is where and how the Obama administration is so dangerous...stealth maneuvers that dictated from on high based that go against the public will and interest.

Buried in a little-noticed rule on microwave ovens is a change in the U.S. government’s accounting for carbon emissions that could have wide-ranging implications for everything from power plants to the Keystone XL pipeline.

and here is the WSJ opinion writers today:

President Obama unveiled his vast new anticarbon-energy agenda this week, which he plans to impose by executive fiat. Crucial to pulling off this exercise is a decision the federal bureaucracy made last month to change the way it accounts for carbon emissions—a decision that received almost no media attention.

In late May the Administration slipped this mickey into a new rule about efficiency standards for microwaves...

and here is me on June 12 on the recently deceased Nobel laureate economist Robert Fogel:

Robert Fogel has died. I have read many books on economics, but few were as affecting, thought-provoking and challenging as Time on the Cross. Fogel was a great mind, and thankfully was recognized for it during his lifetime. God speed.

 UPDATE: Not one of the many economics blogs that I read regularly has seen fit to mention, let alone laud, Fogel. Such is the climate of anti-intellectualism that pervades the modern politically correct academic world that the author of Time on the Cross is verboten.

and here is the WSJ on the very next day

A favorite parlor game of intellectuals today is overturning conventional wisdom—arguing that what everyone always thought is wrong. The results are often fun and more often trivial. Robert Fogel, the Nobel Prize winning economist who died in Chicago Tuesday at 86, was among the first to impose analytical rigor to popular belief. But he wasn't in it for the fun.

After an initial study which showed that America's early railroad system was barely more productive than alternative means of transportation, Fogel turned to slavery in the American south. Written with Stanley Engerman, the two-volume "Time on the Cross" will not get adequate description in this space. Suffice to say his conclusion that slavery was a relatively productive economic system and that it collapsed mainly for political reasons produced a backlash against his work, with accusations that he was defending slavery. Fogel's point was that no matter the economic efficiency of an odious system like slavery, it will eventually fail if its participants are denied political freedom. This is a truth as relevant to our times as it should have been in the 19th century.

This kind of thing has happened many times before (here here and here).