Krugman Watch: Debt Totalitarian
Default, Devaluation, Or What? Is there anything more to say about Greece? Actually, I think so. Krugman goes on to comment on the loveliness of more debt. Why? Because debt causes two systemic changes. First, it transfers power to the banking class and the state. Second, it replaces law, custom, and religion, as a means…
The Keynesian Conversion Of The Responsibility Of The State
Think of how much easier the job of government is, when instead of seeking competitive increases in production, it seeks redistribution and reduced unemployment. The first requires that you have some comprehension of your economy. The second requires that you have little to none. [callout title=The Net Effect Of Keynes]The net effect of the Keynesian…
Jefferson’s Virtue Of Violence
Today, on United Liberty, the daily Jefferson quote was: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” – Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush (1800) Freedom is created by, and maintained by, the use of violence, and a man’s capacity for violence is his…
Conservative Complaints About The Social Security Scheme
The conservative complaints with social security are that it is not a fund, but a state-expanding tax. Nothing was paid into it, and therefore it is simply a current tax to redistribute from young producers to old consumers who failed to save. And secondly, that this tax also funds an intrusive and abusive government. These…
Don Boudreaux Swings And Misses The Entire Point: Sovereignty
Over on Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux attacks Arizona’s policy, and in doing so, falls into the abyss of economic tyranny: the justification of economic outcome over freedom and sovereignty. By demonizing immigrants, these politicians exploit voters’ misinformation about the economic consequences of the alleged devils. My response was: Don, You’re confusing the priority of people’s perceptions…
The Virtue Of Violence
The Virtue Of Violence: “We do not forego violence in exchange for democracy, we forgo violence in exchange for creating and accessing the market. Democracy is simply a means of hiring and firing the administrators of our markets. We do not exist to serve democracy. Democracy exists to serve the market. And should it cease…
Violence Is A Beautiful Word
Violence is a beautiful word. But its beauty is absent from our discourse. I’m going to put violence into libertarianism. I’m going to put violence back into politics and economics. Violence, violence, violence, violence violence. There. I said it again. Get used to it. I’m going to fix our civilization and its political system…
Another Round On Paparazzi
Peter Surda April 21, 2010 at 2:35 am However, it is still a person’s asset, regardless of price, because people ACT as if it is an asset, and that asset has material value to individuals, which we can determine by surveying the ACTIONS that people take, businesses take, regarding their reputation But this is valid…
An Example Of Libertarian Redefinition Of Property – Fraud In Action
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…
What Problems Should Austrians Solve. Different Ones Apparently.
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…
Conservatives Can’t Remake Society Either.
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. (…
IEA Blog: UK Lib Dem’s and ‘Ten Years Of Substantial Unemployment’
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…
Conservatism Is Not A Longing For The Past – It’s A Capitalization Strategy.
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…
The Sentiment Of The British And Their Pseudo Intellectual Hypocrisy
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…
Contra Mises and Rothbard, and Aligning Mises, Hayek and Hoppe With Weber and Pareto
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,…
IEA Thinks Taxis Are Not A Public Good
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…
People ‘Earn’ Redistribution By Controlling Their Breeding
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…
Conservatives Cannot Articulate Their Promise, And A Warning Is Not Enough
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.…
Yes We Could Have Prevented The Suffering Of Citizens
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…
Notes On “Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide To Economic Theology”
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…
Contradicting Bruce Bartlett’s Fantasy Of American Exceptionalism And Good Government
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…
Density Is Not The Panacea Utopians Think It Is
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…
Bruce Bartlett’s Optimism
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…
Pooling Information Is Laundering Information – Governments Are Money Launderers
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…
You Do Not Engineer A Company. You Grow It.
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…
