Author: Curt Doolittle (ericd)

Property Rights and the Paparazzi by JEREMIAH DYKE ….. one cannot own his image or reputation, nor can he own an actual image, a photograph, of himself. Like the mental construction of memory which is a product of one’s eyes and mind, a picture is a product of one’s camera. The question of ownership begins […]

Walter block sent out a survey to the Mises blog in support of some research he has been doing. In it, he asks, what problems should Austrians solve? I read the list, and, thought that almost none of the categories of interest were actually problems that needed solving. The problems that economists need to solve […]

Leftists wish to remake society. They want to return us to the “homogenous tribal redistributive society” (HTRS) on a large scale. They will fail. They have failed. They cannot make a homogenous redistributive and tribal society from a multicultural empire of vastly unequal groups of people who who act as competing groups of people. ( […]

I love reading the UK press, because by and large, the quality of discourse is far beyond that of what occurs in the US. I posted on the IEA Blog, this response to the statement that, coarsely written and paraphrased here as ” Yes the Lib Dem’s may achieve power, but anything is better than […]

Being a conservative simply means taking a gradual approach to social change and particularly with respect to the financial, family and military traditions that affect status and political power, which they are skeptical of. Conservatism means being skeptical that our visions of the future will come true, and looking at the world as what people […]

I read a number of the UK papers every day online. They are better than US papers for a variety of reasons. (( In the current ‘intelligence system’ it’s recommended that americans read Al Jazeera, Pravda, China News Daily, BBC News as well as the NYT. All are biased but the important issue is to […]

I dont like to criticize postings at the Mises Institute, of whom I have been a member and supporter for almost a decade. It is far less work to improve on small errors than to solve catastrophic ones. And therefore less work, and more reward, to criticize your friends in the hope of making progress, […]

Over on the IEA Blog, Eric Masaba asks the question: Why do black cabs cost more than Concorde? I couldn’t point out ALL the holes in this article, because the IEA blog limits the number of characters per comment. I find the argument for the virtue of brevity a ‘cute’ one because affirmations are the […]

Another Empathic Appeal for the poor on NewsJunkiePost.com, entitled, Poverty: Half The World Lives On Less Than $2.50 A Day Unfortunately, the first prerequisite for prosperity is to control your population’s breeding. The worlds problems are not ‘density’ or ‘pollution’ or ‘capitalism’ but the transfer of life-extending technology to peoples who do not the cultural […]

The conservative movement lacks skill in articulating it’s position. It does so because it has shifted from the intellectual debate of the 50’s and 60’s to the emotional debate of the post 60’s era. It has, unlike the libertarian movement, failed to provide a vehicle for educating conservatives with POSITIVE statements rather than negative castigations. […]

Rebekka Grun, on The Growth And Crisis Blog writes that we could have protected the consumers rather than the banks, in her posting Conditional Individual Bailouts – a Potential Anti-crisis Instrument Why not save the individuals that went bust rather than their banks? Unconditional bailouts, of course, would generate the wrong incentives (for the banks […]

I’ve purchased two books, this one “Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide To Economic Theology”, as well as “Economics As Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond”. There are any number of books on this theme. Note: This book was a waste of time and money. It is a silly marxist pamphlet. I can summarize it as […]

Bruce Bartlett, who is a well known conservative, tried to pitch tolerance to conservatives, and in doing so proved he fails to understand conservatism. I left this comment on his web site: Bruce, I want to let it pass, but I simply have to contradict this column of yours, even if I agree with it’s […]

What is it about an office that promotes so much illness? I know that offices where people interact frequently and move between locations lot, and have greater density are natural distribution centers for affection, and I know that the more time children spend in day care and in school, the more they become distributors, and […]

Bartlett annoys me. I’m not sure why he annoys me so much. Perhaps it’s the political hack in him that I find offensive. Perhaps the pomposity? Perhaps the fact that he insults the suffering of the common man? Perhaps both. In this posting he states: I’m rather astounded at all the ill-informed commentary I have […]

What’s the difference between money laundering, general accounting principles as they are currently practiced, the process of taxation, the use of fiat money to create general liquidity, the practice of monthly financial reporting, and the process of electing government officials as proxies for sovereign actions? Nothing. These are all examples of pooling. Pooling information so […]

This is a response to an article posted on An Entrepreneurial Mind. In that post the author, Dr Cornwall recommneds writeing a business plan. And the steps for doing so. And I’m of the opinion that that’s just silly. A plan is a tool for managing weak leaders. A plan is what oyu write when […]

Rafe Champion on The Austrian/Keynesian Marriage from The Coordination Problem. …the problem of regime uncertainty which the Keynesians address by saying you will get all the certainty you need from our helpful interventions. But we have long ago reached the point where most of the interventions are the problem, not the solution. Uncertainty is a […]

On Environmental Economics, the authors take note that Krugman appears to be reading their blog. They then state that the market will fail to protect the environment. Not that the government literally, by reserving powers to itself, FORCES the failure to protect the environment. As soon as something that is useful becomes a scarcity, it […]

The difference between conservatives and socialists, is that conservatives believe that the government was constructed so that the legislature makes laws, and the court overturns those that are unconstitutional. That is the purpose of the court: to guarantee that the laws that are made adhere to the constitution, and to guarantee that the adjudication of […]

From Reuters, regarding today’s CITI testimony before congress: Prince’s infamous comment that his bank was “still dancing” even as the subprime crisis worsened came back to haunt him at the commission hearing where he was asked about it. His explanation seemed to boil down to this: it was a race to keep up with competitors […]

Prior to an important meeting of prominent advocates of freedom, Mises stated roughly, that: 1) Laissez-faire means ‘let the consumer decide’, it does not mean chaos prevails. I translate this more clearly and accurately as ‘a responsible parent forces her child to make decisions’ so that inter-temporal decision making becomes one of the child’s most […]

Hayek is somewhat famous for his essay “Why I am not a conservative.” In that essay, he states that conservatism has no solution to offer us. But Hayek, along with Popper, Mises, Parsons, and the more sociological Pareto, Burkheim and Weber, all failed to provide us with that solution. They all tried and failed. Pehaps […]

Timeplots posted an infographic on women’s participation in congress, which, all things being equal, has essentially remained flat. However, I take issue with the assumption that participation alone is a measure of somehting valuable, other than than as a vidication of the spread of the religion of secular humanism. Also: The Guardian posted an infographic […]

THe NYT Opinion page includes recommends Germany leave the Euro? (Referring to a posting elsewhere.) Yes, it makes sense. Earlier last month I wrote a series of letters and posts recommending Germany pull out of the Euro myself. Mediterranean Europe and Germanic Europe are too different in culture, social structure, and values. Restore the DM. […]