Watch this for a good laugh. It's funny because it’s true.
Yikes. It could certainly be much worse.
The media is so damn hypocritical it disgusts me. Trump
messes up almost everything, but slipping away to enjoy one steak when his life
has been scrutinized constantly for over a year is the least of his offenses.
Now this is a fun article. In brief, Ethos = character,
Logos = policies, and Pathos = personality. Pathos wins in a contest
against either Ethos or Logos every time. Why? People are easily fooled on
character and policy when emotions from within are too strong.
We must say it till we are blue in the face. The minimum
wage is hurting the people it purports to help the most.
"Unfortunately, Larson’s
comments strike at the heart of the matter. It would be great if the state had
to foot the bill for the increased wages, but the state has no source of
revenue that does not come directly at the expense of its citizens. Whether
through direct taxes or from revenue generated by traffic citations or other
minor infractions, the state does not have the means to pay for a wage
increase. However, neither do many Washington businesses.
When wages are inflated artificially (not as a natural
response to increased market demand and higher profits), financial hardships
are inevitable. As children, we were taught that money doesn’t grow on trees. However,
this lesson seems to have been lost on proponents of minimum wage
increases."
95% of all policies fail the standard cost benefit analysis. The
worst of the bunch? Policies outlawing
drugs. This is not an opinion. This one is not up for discussion. Best
option is to legalize all drugs now.
Walter William from 2001. I often point out to my fellow
graduates and current students at U of C that higher education, and really all
education for that matter, is a liberal sounding board. They usually
return with some kind of question (and I think this is the correct question)
along the lines of "well have you ever considered that maybe the reason for
that is the most educated people are all liberal?" To that I usually
answer in one word - incentives. And this is exactly what I mean.
By the way, if we are going down this route, have you liberals
ever wondered why the large majority of economics professors are conservative?
Ball’s in your court.
A quote from Professor Williams:
"In keeping Americans ill-educated,
ill-informed and constitutionally ignorant, the education establishment has
been the politician’s major and most faithful partner. It is in this sense that
American education can be deemed a success. The education establishment and
politicians, particularly Democratic politicians, work hand-in-glove to further
both of their goals. The education establishment makes large payments into the
political campaign coffers of politicians, and politicians return the favor
with large government education expenditures."
The nanny state can't govern as well as each
individual can. Not only does a politician need to be the smartest person
in the world, in order to beat the free market, a politician has to be smarter
than every person in the world COMBINED in order to govern with more
efficiency. à Too many unintended consequences
Campaign finance has always been an interesting subject for me.
Why are people so focused on reducing the amount of money that can be
contributed to a certain candidate? They claim that this benefits the
rich and special interests at the expense of the poor and underrepresented.
If we take this approach we are violating people’s Constitutional right
to express themselves. If we truly wanted to stop special interests
(which politicians most certainly do not) wouldn't we simply eliminate the
ability of politicians to yield to the special interest requests they get.
Then people can still contribute as much as they like to a campaign because
they believe this politician will create good policy rather than specifically
enacting a policy on their behalf. This is a classic example of
politicians solving an issue rather than getting at the actual problem that we
have. More unintended consequences …
"Among other things, the bill
seeks to ban unrestricted ‘soft money’ contributions to political parties and
restrict advertising by advocacy groups during federal elections. Soft money
contributions to political parties emerged as a means around 26-year-old legal
limits on direct contributions to political candidates. During the Republican
primaries, Sen. McCain campaigned on this issue, saying that the billions of
dollars going into the campaign coffers of political parties created undue influence
and special favors.
While it’s true that McCain-Feingold
poses a significant threat to our First Amendment guarantees, our rights to
express ourselves in the political process, there’s another issue totally lost
in the debate. Let’s look at it.
Which issue should we be more
concerned about? Should we be concerned by the fact that people are willing to
pour money into political campaign coffers with an eye toward gaining access,
influence and special favors? Or should we be more concerned that our elected
officials are in the business of granting special favors in exchange for
campaign contributions? The McCain-Feingold bill suggests that we should be
concerned with the former while ignoring the latter. The only solution to
political corruption must involve measures to reduce or eliminate Congress’
ability to create a privilege for one American that’s denied to another
American."
"… We’ve become a nation of
thieves. Nineteenth century
philosopher-economist Frederic Bastiat was right on the money with his
observation, ‘The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at
the expense of everyone else.’"
We need to stop forcing (nudging) encouraging everyone to go to
college. If a kid got a real high school education they would get most of
what the left like to claim are "positive externalities" from
education (ie. less gang involvement, less crime, better decision-making).
After all, it doesn't take a degree in economics to know that joining a
gang is probably a net negative decision as long as other possibilities are available.
But that is the key - as long as other possibilities are available!
So instead of forcing kids to go to college and devaluing higher
education while simultaneously increasing the price, we need to offer things
along the lines of trade schools and apprenticeships. This article shows
the success of apprenticeships in Germany but also claims it would be difficult
if not impossible to implement in the US, but at least the thought is in the
correct direction. The current left has put us down a path of ever more
education and ever less production.
For all the people who don't think we should be always focused on
our individual freedom ... It can be taken away quicker and easier than you
know. Blurb below is the lesson, but please read the full article for
background on how the author got here.
"That is to say, whatever the CIA, the Pentagon, … do as part of
a national security state operation, no one will ever be prosecuted for it. The
national-security state branch of the government has simply become much too
powerful. There is no possibility that the Justice Department is ever going to
target anyone for crimes committed in the course of a national-security state
operation.
But let’s just assume, hypothetically, what would happen if President
Obama and the national security state decided that Trump’s supposed unfitness
for office posed as big a threat to national security as Allende’s. What if they
decided to prevent Trump from assuming power, just as Nixon, the Pentagon, and
the CIA decided to prevent Allende from taking power and then later instigated
the events that brought his removal him from power?
If that were to happen, there is absolutely nothing anyone could do
about it. That’s the nature of a national-security state. If that were to
happen, Congress would buckle, the federal courts would buckle, and so would
the mainstream newspapers, just as they did in Chile. After all, given that these
institutions have buckled in the so-called war on terrorism in the face of
totalitarian-like powers now being wielded by the president and his
national-security forces, there is no doubt that their buckling would be much
pronounced in a military coup.
If Obama, the Pentagon, and the CIA were to end up doing to Trump what
Nixon, the Pentagon, and the CIA did to Allende, undoubtedly there would be
many Americans who would cheer, just as there were many Chileans and
Americans who cheered when they did it to Allende and, for that matter, just as
many Egyptians cheered not so long ago when the U.S. supported military
dictatorship ousted that country’s democratically elected president in a coup. But
as we learned from Pinochet’s reign of terror, the consequences of violating
the will of the electorate oftentimes brings adverse consequences, including
tyranny, round-ups, torture, rape, and murder of tens of thousands of innocent
people, along with impunity for the malefactors."
I have a few comments on this:
1. I think this is the first FEE
article I have outright disagreed with.
2. I love Musk's ambition. He is definitely part genius and he seems
(and I have read a lot on the topic and about him) to be a good person trying
to do what is right for society.
3. I COMPLETELY agree it is
ridiculous that his two companies, as well as Solar City, are so heavily
subsidized by taxpayers. He should do what he does, but be funded by
shareholders who are the people able and willing (and with skin in the game) to
make the decisions that ultimately make it a smooth engine.
4. I don't fault Musk for
approaching and coming to deals with various government entities and I think it
is hypocritical of the author to be upset with him. After all, FEE is a
big free market think tank and should understand that incentives are always at
play. The blame in this scenario does not go to Musk who is obtaining
funding from the politicians but to the politicians themselves for allowing
this to happen.
5. Musk is probably correct that
we need to be looking into better forms of energy and trying to colonize Mars. I just disagree with how he is funding this
venture.
An excellent piece. Is progress really progress if
it is forced on the people? Kind of like the forced apologies I had to give my
brother as a kid. What were they worth?
I have pasted the whole article below.
"’So what happens now? Now we fight. Now we organize.
So they may take every piece of social progress we've made in the last 50
years, from gay marriage back to the civil rights act. So what? We'll take them
back.’
The words sat there, dark on my back-lit computer screen. They were meant to be
the apex of a long, impassioned plea, posted online by a man I respect, a
brother of sorts, reacting to the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of
the United States. It was a plea driven by anger and fear – mostly fear. He
warned of suffering, disease, death, decline, suppression, persecution,
harassment, assault, poverty, hunger, and total destabilization.
We have never talked politics, although the paths our
lives have traveled intersect in the world of applied philosophy. We have never
talked economics, or history. The nature of our occasional intersections, with
its peculiar focus on unity and brotherly love and acceptance, preclude such
talk, as politics, economics, and history tend to be divisive. I find this sad
because they need not be. Perhaps we should find another intersection, one
where such talk is proper, I would like to try to see the virtue in his
approach.
His is a perspective espoused and defended by nearly all
Americans; a vision of a nation where every man, woman, and child is free not
just from political oppression, racial bigotry, or religious intolerance, but
also free from disease, intimidation, shame, poverty, and catastrophe. It is a
noble vision. And frankly, it is a universal vision. The progressives hold no
monopoly on that goal, despite their rhetoric. It is a vision made real only by
the means of social progress.
Social progress. The true sense of the phrase is ennobling. Make no mistake, if
there is to be a leap in human evolution, social progress is the requisite
precursor. I long to see an era of broad, lasting social progress.
The means by which progress is made possible is the cipher by which we can
decode whether the progress (as laudable as it may be) be social or antisocial.
A black man can walk into any restaurant in Georgia and be seated and served.
He can expect the same menu items, treatment, and service as any other patron.
Compared to 1940, that seems to be real social progress.
A gay man can rent an apartment from anyone, provided there is consent on both
sides, even foot-washing, born-again evangelicals, regardless of his sexuality.
He can expect the same treatment from the landlord as a heterosexual, newlywed
couple. Compared to 1990, that seems to be real social progress.
A poor mother can walk into a clinic with a child stricken with illness,
unashamed of her indigence, and expect her child to be seen and cared for
exactly the same as the millionaire's kid next door. Compared to 2000, that
seems to be real social progress.
But is it? Are these really social progress?
Might Does Not Make Progress
There is an idea that has plagued mankind, possibly forever, but most radically
since the dawn of progressivism a century ago. That idea is that society is an
institution organized by common conformity to a regulatory framework that
delimits acceptable action. The idea is that, as the regulatory framework
progresses toward that universal vision of the brotherhood of man, so too does
society progress.
But society is not an institution. It is not organized by regulatory
frameworks. And a degree of conformity certainly is not a measure of consent.
Society is an aggregate of individuals, each with a personal regulatory
framework governing his or her ideas of good and bad, right and wrong, virtue and
vice. Society only progresses to the degree that its members progress, and the
only means a man has to measure his progress is to consider the nature of his
internal governance, his conscience. He must consider that which causes him to
feel pleasure and that which causes him to feel pain, that which causes him to
feel pride and that which causes him to feel guilt, that which causes him joy
and that which causes him sadness.
External regulation cannot induce progress.
My friend, lamenting an expected withdrawal of social progress, fails to
realize that there was little real social progress to begin with. The
ethical construct that leads a progressive to leverage the violence of the
state to force progressive-like behavior is the same ethical construct that
compels the racist restaurateur, the homophobic landlord, and the heartless
clinician. It is an ethic that Montague called kraterocracy. It means
"might makes right." It is the idea that those who rule have the
right to determine right and wrong, that those in power have the right to
establish normative values for all those weaker than they are. My friend,
fearing a withdrawal of ‘pieces of social progress,’ proclaims, ‘We'll take
them back.’
But they aren't pieces of social progress. They are expressions of brutalism.
The universal vision that progressivism strives for is rooted in virtue. But
the laws passed to achieve that vision are selected precisely to create
cautionary tales, warnings, and examples; they are constructed raw and violent
to push a point. It is how the
brutalists proclaim that racism is bad, bigotry is bad, intolerance is bad, poverty
is bad, disease is bad, intimidation is bad, shame is bad, poverty is bad, and
catastrophe is bad. They leverage the threat of violence to make an example out
of those who act out of line. It is a line of reasoning absent of virtue,
regardless of the ends it seeks to achieve.
It is not virtue that advocates such laws, but compulsion, control, and
dominion – the very same vices the laws seek to address are what drive the
supporters of such laws. They have abandoned true social progress in favor of a
counterfeit. Not only are those laws, as much as the behaviors they seek to
inhibit, examples of anti-social progress, but they are indicative of
regression, not progression. Their existence is evidence not only of the brutal
culture and normative mores of society but of their supporters as well.
What progress is there if the black man can only get a meal because the
restaurant owner will have his food and beverage license revoked if he
doesn't? In a socially progressive
society, the restaurant would have gone out of business long before there was a
need for such a law.
What progress is there if the gay man can only rent a room because the landlord
will be fined if he doesn't? In a socially progressive society, the landlord
would have no tenants.
What progress is there if the sick child is treated only because his mother's
insurance company was forced to put her in their book? In a socially
progressive society, the clinician's professionality would be figuratively
executed in the public eye, a public that would have had the generosity to
cover the child's expenses.
We live in a society of regressive values. Even the means by which
good-intentioned men and women seek to achieve that universal vision are
evidence of their own social regression. There is not and cannot be any virtue
in regulation. The initiation of force, or the threat thereof, is always evil.
As George Washington said, ‘Government is not reason, it is not eloquence – it
is force!’ Real social progress isn't found in laws and cannot be inculcated by
compulsion. Only individual enlightenment begets lasting social progress, and
that is the kind of social progress for which my friend is longing – the kind
that isn't threatened because the head of the state is a bozo, or a psychopath,
or a misogynist, or racist.
And that should be the focus of our work – individual enlightenment, of
ourselves and of others. Let us work toward that end. Let us strive to free
individuals from the shackles of culture and history. Let us help men evolve
into enlightened souls. Let us give them permission to question dogma. Let us
call out as such the elements of every culture, tradition, or belief system
that is regressive. Let us live and act and talk in a way that breathes the
spirit of confidence into the souls of men and women who have been brutalized
and made to be afraid. Let us enliven them with truth, and be examples of hope
and charity.
This isn't a battle, it isn't zero-sum; it is an adoption, a welcoming of
brotherhood, and an invitation to bathe in cool waters. Only virtue can beget
virtue, and only in virtue is real social progress possible."
Here we go already with the Trump cronies. Ivanka is married
to Jared, Jared's brother, Josh has a company that makes money selling Obamacare
insurance policies. Way to go people - you elected this guy to rid Washington
of the “ruling elites” and “crony establishment”, yet here we are.
Congrats! :/
Something
to be thankful for:
"Bottom Line: The
fact that a family in America can celebrate Thanksgiving with a classic turkey
feast for less $50 and at a ‘time cost’ of only 2.29
hours of work at the average hourly wage for one person means that
we really have a lot to be thankful for on Thanksgiving: an abundance of cheap,
affordable food. The average worker would earn enough money before their lunch
break on just one day to be able to afford the cost of a traditional
Thanksgiving meal. Compared to 1986, the inflation-adjusted cost of a turkey
dinner today is more than 20% cheaper, and nearly 29% cheaper measured in the
‘time cost’ for the average worker. Relative to our income and relative to the
cost of food in the past, food in America is more affordable today than almost
any time in history."
Why
is it that democrats think the liberal agenda is the path to enlightenment and
prosperity. A simple glance at the data shows that areas under liberal
and progressive control have consistently been highlighted as areas where life
is not thriving.
I don't mean to be too simple about it because I understand there could
be and are conflicting variables, but the correlation alone at least warrants a
true investigation instead of blind loyalty to the democratic party.
GS makes the point that its going to be difficult to really cut
taxes because the debt is historically extremely high relative to GDP when
compared to the last 2 times a republican took office following a democrat.
Thanks Obama.
If you are an econ junkie, give this a read. I wonder if
Friedman thought about the possibility of the Fed as a bureaucracy created to
give economic rents to the banking sector and still would have considered it to
be the best option. I truly don't know but would love to hear more.
An important concept of libertarianism is identified by Tho
Bishop. Truth right here! He says:
"One
of the most common fallacies those on both the left and the right regularly
make about libertarianism is suggesting that opposing government funding of a
specific product, service, or organization is the same as opposing their very
existence."
Libertarians don’t necessarily think various government
organizations are out to do harm or are negative beings. Libertarians simply oppose the governments involvement
and the nature of forcing anyone to do anything they wouldn’t voluntarily do.
