Thousands of TWEETS, Posts, Articles, Pages, chapters, Notes, Diagrams, drafts, sketches and Quotes from 2009 to present
It Will Take All The Cuts From Ryan, Obama And Rand To Balance The Budget
From Mish Shedlock: “Look at it this way: If we take all of the cuts the Ryan has proposed and all of the cuts the administration has proposed, we are still not there. However, if we add them together, then kill the department of energy and the department of education, and cut still more from…
The Remaining Marxists Are Not Trying To End Poverty
From a Comment on Cafe Hayek: “Marxists must define poverty as a relative phenomenon. Otherwise, they couldn’t in good conscience be marxists.” Or perhaps, better said, they wouldn’t have a semi-rational reason to justify class envy, and therefore attempt to obtain unearned social status through political power rather than through market service of others. [callout]Social…
On Happiness: Prospective and Retrospective
To be happy, people desire access to new stimuli – ‘relishes’ as Aristotle put it, or ‘new experiences’ as we put it today. People prefer working on optimistic ends. They prefer to work successfully to accumulate new stimuli, rather than at planning to prevent negative stimuli, or at planning to conserve resources so that they…
Stocks Are Not Currency. We Buy Companies Because We Like Them. And We Like Them For Different Reasons
Felix Salmon writes: … it’s maybe no coincidence that the Russian clients of Goldman Sachs who are falling over each other to bid ever-higher prices for Facebook shares are much the same people as the Russians paying $100 million for trophy Picassos, or Los Altos mansions. The theory here is that Goldman Sachs, SecondMarket and…
Anarcho Capitalism Is As Logically Ridiculous As Marx’s Communism – But Both Have Something To Teach Us
Marxist doctrine states that steps are required to create the utopian communist society. The eventual result of marxism’s destruction of the system of property was for the purpose of creating an anarchic society where everyone had what they wanted, and wanted nothing more – the fixed-pie fantasy. The state was only necessary as a first…
Americans May Be Wiser Than We Think After All
Newsweek did another poll that purports to measure our cultural ignorance. How Dumb Are We? NEWSWEEK gave 1,000 Americans the U.S. Citizenship Test–38 percent failed. The country’s future is imperiled by our ignorance. Which brings to mind a chain of reasoning: 1) To increase productivity and therefore decrease prices, we must all participate in a…
If You Want To Celebrate, Join A Church – A Wet Blanket On The World Bank’s Sentimental Talk.
(Copied here for documentation purposes.) Over on The World Bank OTAVIANO CANUTO solves for happiness by actively working against it. We economists tend to see well-being, and poverty in particular, as a matter of finances and income. But fortunately, at least in the Bank, we have come a long way from that simplistic view. Reducing…
Is There An Unassailable Argument Against The Religion Of Rand? (And Whacky Derivatives Like Galambos?)
Regarding Philosophy, Religion, and Government: a) A Philosophy is a set of related ideas for the purpose of allowing humans to take actions that accomplish ends in the face of necessary uncertainty about the future. b) A Religion is a habituated philosophical framework, for political purposes, using pedagogy for indoctrination, and which relies ostensibly upon…
Yes, It Would Be Nice If We Could Withdraw The Empire And It’s Costs – In Exchange For Reduced Standard Of Living
Having created, by accident, the empire, and having done so for the purpose of exporting our market system, and its trade routes, we are stuck with the very real consequences of creating power vacuums if we withdraw our military power, and create opportunity for the greater cost of NOT acting as we are acting. We…
You Can’t Define Away ‘Structural Unemployment’
The term “Structural unemployment” has a technical definition and a colloquial definition. And authors frequently criticize the colloquial as not matching the technical, rather than the premise put forth by the colloquial. However, the colloquial definition is correct. That is, that there are people trained and experienced in skills that will not return to the…
Economics Is A Moral Philosophy Because It Solves For Political Ends
From Economist’s View (In reference to Schiller’s argument (in an exceptional recent paper) that economists should be more interdisciplinary.) Is Adam Smith Partly an Economist, or Wholly a Moral Philosopher?, by Brad DeLong: Tiago at History of Economics Playground reacted very negatively to an AEA Annual Meeting presentation by Robert Shiller and Virginia Shiller: This…
Doolittle’s Law: Any Mention Of Sweden In An Economic Discourse Means The Argument Is False
Do you know Godwin’s law? That any internet discourse eventually devolves into something involving Hitler? There is a new law. I’m coining it, as Doolittle’s law: The minute someone mentions Sweden in an economic argument, you know that they’re analysis is wrong. 1) As Felix Salmon states, Wealth is very different from Income. The WEALTH…
Zeus: The One True God. The One True Religion.
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Just To Play Fair..
I argue that anarchic propertarianism is a brilliant and fruitful research program. But it is, as currently envisioned, another luddite fantasy rather than an institutional solution to modernity that can compete with democratic secular humanism and irrational financial probabilism. Until we unite Austrianism with New Institutional Economics with modern technology we will not have a…
NPR Is The 700 Club For The Church Of Democratic Secular Humanism
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of NPR. I’m a listener, albiet not a frequent one. On the other hand, using taxpayer money for purposes that are political in nature, content, or value judgements which other taxpayers find patently offensive is simply intolerable. We will not have a government that we can all…
Constitutional Monarchy And Aristocratic Philosophy Need An Ideology – A Rationally Competitive Economic Ideology
An Ideology: Any reasonably coherent set of social, cultural, moral and political ideas that can be used to obtain and hold political power on the behalf of a part of a population that perceives it has similar interests. THE POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES There are three basic western philosophical traditions: 1) Aristocratic and Conservative with the longest…
Response To Judith Curry On Scientific Storytelling
Copied here from http://judithcurry.com/2011/03/06/climate-story-telling-angst. On Climate ETC: Judith Curry writes: If climate scientists were to use their past accomplishments to bolster their current claims, there would be less controversy, as it’s more difficult to undermine the credibility of established achievements. Which is a distracting straw man argument that posits the climate issue as one of…
On Definitions and Moral Arguments
And one more thing that I just see too much of – arguments over definitions. I. A definition is a contract between two or more people on the properties, causal relations and utility of those relations. I.I A term is the name for the set of properties, and causal relations and the utility of those…
Violence and Virtue vs Morality and Fraud
My rights are protected by my willingess to kill in order to defend them. Legal documents either require that many people are willing to kill to defend them, or that many people are willing to kill to enforce them, or that many people are wiling to kill to change them. Moral arguments by contrast are…
It’s Fraternity, Not Democracy That Separates The West
Humans unconsciously rely upon these social constructs in order to establish priorities in political decision making: The Family The Cult The Tribe The Fraternity In the west, we rely upon the fraternity. The remnants of our military social order. Democracy works for us because we are a fraternal society FIRST. Democracy DEPENDS upon the fraternal…
