Category: Thoughts

“The conservative strategy is to starve the beast as the only hope of preserving their freedom and their culture. In that context, their approach is entirely rational: in the battle between the public intellectual who would undermine their culture, and the entrepreneur who would preserve it, they are funding the entrepreneur. It is an entirely…

So the answer is pretty obvious. Canadians act like happy people, because they are. They live privileged lives in a privileged country. How else should they act? It’s odd. I can walk around Moscow, Paris, Istanbul, or rural Hungary and understand the cultural signals people are using. Why is it that Canadian signaling is so…

Part I. Observations About The Comments Part II. Comments from Metafilter PART I. OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THE COMMENTS 1) Religion European atheism is tied to the desire of the emerging middle class to sieze economic power, political power, and social status from the church. The USA never had the relationship between the aristocracy and the church,…

via Philosophy by Another Name – NYTimes.com. I would like to launch the Campaign for Renaming Philosophy (C.R.P.) — or perhaps more accurately, the Campaign for Renaming Academic Philosophy (which has a less attractive abbreviation). I suggest meeting with other philosophers informally to discuss the question and forming small groups of people dedicated to the…

Science consists of a network of externally testable hypotheses.Scientific statements are testable because the physical universe is internally consistent, and because of that consistency, subject to fixed categories that are reducible to numbers which can be manipulated by the process of ratios we call mathematics. As such, the physical universe is extremely simple compared to…

via This is Really Why the Economy Is Looking Up(Snarky) « Modeled Behavior. I remember some folks telling me that the Lehman bankruptcy would be no biggie. [Whaaaat? “That’s how capitalism works!”], they said. Seems they are right. You declare bankruptcy and badabing-badaboom a little over three years later everything is cleared up. Easy peasy.…

via Yes, They DO Hate the Constitution! « ACGR's "News with Attitude". I hate to stomp on bunnies, but nonsense like this doesn’t do our movement any good: However, her  fellow Justice, the supposedly ultra-conservative and strict constructionist Antonin Scalia is quoted as saying “The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union…

I’ve been criticized today about my support for war. As a libertarian my tolerance for violence makes me an outlier. But I have no problem with war — at all. The war against Saddam was not a problem for me assuming that it was to create a base from which we could topple the Iranian…

As a followup to my criticism of The American Conservative’s position on Iran, The National Review’s David French http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/292767/legal-case-striking-iran-david-french states: There has, in fact, been an “armed attack” against the United States. Iran has been waging a low-intensity war against America and Israel — both directly and by proxy — for more than two decades.…

Every society contains a population which together, as shareholders, possess a portfolio of norms, a portfolio of opportunities, and a portfolio of capital. When we tolerate something, it means that we are willing to bear the knowing theft, involuntary transfer, or privatization of some small part of those portfolios that we would expect other members…

via The American Conservative » Netanyahu Calls the Shots. We are seeing something awful unfolding before our very eyes – an essentially phony case for going to war being driven by a foreign country and its domestic lobby with the political class too terrified to say no and a complicit media beating the drum. Philip…

via Everything Wrong With The Libertarian Movement, Part 1 on United Liberty by Jeremy Kolassa Jeremy criticizes the Mises Institute (as I sometimes do as well) for its supposedly anti-collective rhetoric: Mainly: a) Unable to accept intellectual property rights b) Unable to accept that anarcho-capitalism does not work in the real world c) A penchant…

Paul Gottfried via Paul Gottfried – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. I’ve met Paul a handful of times, and while he probably doesn’t remember, been to lunch with him once to discuss his work. Paul’s been a troubling figure for me for two reasons. First, as a sensitive person, he’s personalized the attacks on him rather…

It would be painfully easy to make a career out of criticizing the left. Plenty of people do it. It’s entertaining but it doesn’t further the cause. Unfortunately I have real work to do, and can’t sign up for a daily routine. Maybe now and then I’ll just make the rounds.

Brad takes issue with Chris Caldwell’s assertion that the republican party is not where wealth votes: It takes a somewhat weird failure to look at the cross-tabs to arrive at the conclusion that the Democratic Party is the party of "billionaires, academics, minorities and single women" and the Republican Party is the party of "landscape…

March 5th, 2012 Posted by CurtD Krugman jumps on the Kochs bandwagon today: I replied: Of the libertarian think tanks, Cato is the most policy oriented. The Kochs want to move it more into policy and further away from theory in order to help the republican party platform. (Which doesn’t necessarily bother those of us…

Crises, however, are not fables. They do not exist to teach us lessons or help us learn to mend our ways. The forces at work are utterly indifferent to the narratives we attach to them. Like everything else, they are simply a chain of events. One damned thing after another. Our task is to understand…

Paul Krugman writes that the right wing strategy is based on false principles. But he misses the point: There were some technical problems with my earlier post on GOP deficit phoniness, although not in any way that changes the message. So, here’s an update. I use the intermediate-cost estimate from CRFB (pdf) for the four…

Liberty is purchased with the tip of a spear, the point of a sword or the barrel of a gun. It is maintained by a hard constitution, the common law, and the mastery of the violence required to prevent its subversion. Righteous indignation is litte more than sound and fury signifying nothing, and those who…

Causality, like all human concepts, is a product of the necessity of humans to act, in order to alter the course of events, so that they can consume the difference. Causal understanding is then bounded by human perceptive ability, processing power, in real time. And from this perspective, whether something is causally replicable on one…

On Hillsdale Natural Law Review, Tyler O’Neil suggests that many conservatives aren’t libertarians despite using the term. Because Kinsella posted about it being a bit sloppy, I thought I’d use it as an excuse to try and write something definitive. THE LIBERTARIAN SPECTRUM “Libertarian Party” vs “Libertarian philosophy” vs “libertarian movement” vs “libertarian sentiments” A)…

“Ben Bernanke has said that he could not save Lehman because it would be have been in violation of the law. My response is that it is not his responsibility to enforce the law. It is his responsibility to safe guard the lives of millions of people. … When the Capitol Police haul him away…

Last night, a wonderfully intelligent Canadian I’ve recently met referred to me as a ‘free marketer’. Which in Canadian lingo is a synonym for Libertarian. (We clearly need a Mises chapter up here in eastern Canada.) And, I’m fussing with writing a page the separates Propertarians from Anarcho Capitalists. If it was possible to regulate…

There are few worthy intellectuals outside of Sowell who are capable of, or have succeeded, in altering the conservative public rhetorical framework. Our think-tanks are largely efforts at consolidating political parties behind the language of moral sentiments — not adapting the political system, nor providing outlets or alternatives to the progressive temptation to manipulate the…

Today, Karl reminds us that he has been harping for a long time on the fact that we could borrow money very cheaply during the recession — actually, with negative real costs — and put it to use in the economy. This post is another example of why Karl Smith is a better public intellectual…