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People who live in tents, ride animals, and shepherd other animals, talk about beliefs. People with fixed capital, who live in castles talk about laws. There is a reason for that. When you ask people to value something that’s an informal institution we call belief. When you tell people that property is a rule that…

People who live in tents, ride animals, and shepherd other animals, talk about beliefs. People with fixed capital, who live in castles talk about laws. There is a reason for that. When you ask people to value something that’s an informal institution we call belief. When you tell people that property is a rule that…

As far as we know, a PhD does not increase you earning capacity or your credibility and demonstrably harms it. The value of a PhD is either entirely personal (and expensive) or necessary as entry into the teaching field.  In practice a PhD is certification by a board of specialists that they can treat  you…

Because the government subsidizes and insures physical mail that is hard to steal, and less desirable to steal, using low skilled labor when handling mail, while private industry absorbs risks and the cost of semi-skilled manual labor to manually process wire transfers that are unprofitable, and easily fraudulent, and highly desirable to steal, but without…

When the profitability of the iPhone is sufficiently diminished that a new income stream must be developed, yet Apple execs are unwilling to conquer the desktop market that is sitting there for them to just take away from Microsoft on a scale not seen since Microsoft did the same to IBM. https://www.quora.com/When-might-Apple-begin-to-decline

INTERESTING QUESTION: The family structure determines: the amount of inbreeding the inheritance system the private property rights that originate with the inheritance system the degree of trust extended to non-family members, with inbreeding producing lower overall trust, and outbreeding higher trust. the degree degree of authority necessary to maintain order (prevent violence in retaliation for…

Enough that I don’t want to play this fking game much longer. https://www.quora.com/unanswered/What-percentage-of-new-questions-on-Quora-are-created-by-software-bots

The libertarian argument would suggest that if an electoral college is necessary to prevent the imposition of the will of the populated states upon the less populated states that it is time to move to nullification and secession.  Any statement beyond that is mere pragmatism on the part of the party members. https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-Libertarian-party-view-the-electoral-college-Are-there-any-reasons-if-they-do-or-do-not

Um.  This isn’t necessarily a libertarian issue so much as a logical one.  The problem is that jury determination of penalties is arbitrary, and incalculable so that risk is un-measurable, and that penalties of scale are just passed on to consumers.  This means that lawsuits can be pursued as lottery ticket purchases by all but…

Human action is a work of pseudoscience through chapter 15, and after 15 is fully integrated into mainstream economics.  So it is not useful.  Mises failed to discern that economics, like physics and mathematics was subject to an epistemic requirement for operational definitions. And while he intuited something close to correct, he was unable to…

I will improve Paul Frank’s statement slightly:1) Scarcity2) Universal Utility.3) Non-perishability 4) Volume and weight to value ratio (and therefore transportability)5) Nearly universal convertibility.6) Functional unit of account, store of value, and medium of exchange. Very few goods meet this criteria. Silver and gold are pretty much the only goods that do meet this criteria.…

A postmodern attempt to demonize behavior that is universally demonstrated by all groups as an expression of kin selection. https://www.quora.com/What-is-racism-prejudice-and-discrimination-Why-are-they-so-hard-to-overcome

Necessity of decision making under the pervasive influence of the principle agent problem. https://www.quora.com/Why-does-corporate-governance-emerge

REALLY BAD ANSWERS, I’LL TRY TO DO BETTER1) How can the world be ‘significantly better’? 2) If the world would be significantly better,  for whom would the world be ‘significantly worse’ in your interpretation of how the world would be ‘significantly better?’3) Before we took action on our hypothesis of, how would we know the…

AN ANSWER THAT YOU WON’T LIKE: PRIVILEGE NOT CHOICE Humans justify. Justification is necessary for adaptation, and we are very good at justification. Canada is the world’s most privileged country, so Canadians can justify unprecedented luxuries.   Imagine, anywhere else in the world, a country of that size, with so few people, with that many natural…

Americans still produce. Since 1972 the cost per unit has been steadily increasing. And america still produces complex goods. And inly complex goods that require increasingly skilled labor. However, from the civil war onward, America produced cheap goods because of cheap land and labor – so much so that it caused the european depression if…

They are not. The data clearly demonstrates that companies operate at the minimum profitability that is tolerated by creditors, and that employees and management seek the highest extraction possible that creditors will tolerate.  Government bureaucrats demonstrate exactly the same behavior, but government, because it is a monopoly cannot be ‘corrected’ by the forces of competition,…

All human rights are reducible to property rights, because all rights that can be brought into existence are reducible to property rights.  The International charter of human rights consists, in all but the last three line items, of statements of private property rights.  The last three, are not rights but ‘ambitions’ and were reluctantly admitted…

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ETHICS This is an interesting question in the sense that it’s a clear application of the problem of asymmetry of information, understanding, and power, in the control of a utility (a commons). In any niche where one has power and influence over others, because of an asymmetry of knowledge of a common resource…

It depends on whether you are referring to Christian, “classical liberal” libertarianism in the Hayekian sense, or Jewish “libertine” libertarianism in the Rothbardian sense. Around 10-12% of Americans identify themselves libertarian – although the number that consider themselves Rothbardian is not something we have trustworthy survey data for, the activism of the rothbardian libertine minority…