From Peter Gordon, referring to an article in the Atlantic. “The LA metropolitan area is actually spread over parts of five counties and includes twice as many cities as writer Conor Friedersdorf cites. The Orange county-LA county boundary is invisible to most of us. And even granting Friedersdorf’s view of the world, trading the 88 cities he acknowledges for even more authority accruing to the LA County five-member Board of Supervisors would be no great boon. These five already have much more power and money than they can wisely administer.” “There are many good reasons that Americans migrate to the suburbs and one of them is home-rule. Another one is a measure of local government choice. The City of Bell and some others have been found to be corrupt. But the fact that the bad guys have a small jurisdiction to steal from rather than a big one is a good thing.”
Form: Quote Commentary
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some positive sentiment toward monarchy. I wish we had kings and queens again. “
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/buruma50/EnglishFinally, some positive sentiment toward monarchy. I wish we had kings and queens again. “Monarchy: In case of upheaval, break glass, install monarch, rebuild your society..” Monarchy is the only form of government humans fully understand. It is the most successful and most durable form of government that the world has ever known. Democracy is ‘The God That Failed’.
Source date (UTC): 2011-05-06 12:57:00 UTC
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Editing audiobook. Law, Legislation and Liberty. Priceless quote: “If our civili
Editing audiobook. Law, Legislation and Liberty. Priceless quote: “If our civilization survives, … I believe men will look back on our age as an age of superstition, chiefly connected with the names of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.”
Source date (UTC): 2011-04-19 22:17:00 UTC
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French posted this short article on our education ‘bubble’. I”m trying to figure
http://mises.org/daily/5211/Conventional-Education-Will-Go-the-Way-of-Farming?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4da8bacf251b69e9%2C0Doug French posted this short article on our education ‘bubble’. I”m trying to figure out if it’s thought provoking. Maybe. I don’t think we’ll save on education in the future. I think that we overspend on irrelevant education, but that we could spend much less on relevant education. Unfortunately, under Democratic Secular Humanism, the university is the church. And good luck getting the church to change it’s doctr
Source date (UTC): 2011-04-15 17:42:00 UTC
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“Weber believed that that Marx’s description of alienation had little to do with
“Weber believed that that Marx’s description of alienation had little to do with capitalism, but was a consequence of industrialism and bureaucracy.”
People don’t hate government per se. They hate bureaucracy whether it’s in the government, in our large businesses, or in our entertainment. Organization is synonymous with Bureaucracy which is synonymous with Oligarchy.
Privatize everything.
Source date (UTC): 2011-04-14 19:53:00 UTC
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It Will Take All The Cuts From Ryan, Obama And Rand To Balance The Budget
“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 defense budget, we might have a solid chance at balancing the budget in 10-12 years. In other words we need more defense cuts + some of Rand Paul’s ideas + some of Paul Ryan’s ideas + some of Obama’s ideas.”
I’ve been thinking exactly the same thing. That’s what it’s going to take. (Wonkish) And as long as we kill the department of education it’s worth it to me. But afterward, we should hang the boomers by the millions for their ignorance and stupidity. (I’m a Jones Generation, along with Gates and Jobs, not a Boomer.)
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It Will Take All The Cuts From Ryan, Obama And Rand To Balance The Budget
“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 defense budget, we might have a solid chance at balancing the budget in 10-12 years. In other words we need more defense cuts + some of Rand Paul’s ideas + some of Paul Ryan’s ideas + some of Obama’s ideas.”
I’ve been thinking exactly the same thing. That’s what it’s going to take. (Wonkish) And as long as we kill the department of education it’s worth it to me. But afterward, we should hang the boomers by the millions for their ignorance and stupidity. (I’m a Jones Generation, along with Gates and Jobs, not a Boomer.)
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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 status is important. It’s a cognitive necessity. It tells us who to imitate.[/callout]
The left’s desire is not to end poverty, it is instead, the desire to alter one’s natural, biologically and environmentally determined social status either by gaining access to unearned income or by gaining status through access to political power. And social status is not irrelevant. Social status is important. It’s a cognitive necessity. It tells us who to imitate.
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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 the like have identified a group of buyers who are willing and able to pay through the nose for assets which are rare and special and which few other people can have. So long as companies like Facebook and Zynga meet those criteria, the winners in any auction for their shares are likely to be cursed — or, to put it another way, the final auction price is likely to significantly overvalue the company. Looked at in this way, the market in private equity is less an opportunity for plutocrats to get excess returns, and more an opportunity for intermediaries to extract large profits by selling them overpriced equity in overhyped tech stocks.
That’s true. And you’re right that it’s not an advantage for plutocrats to have access to shares that common investors dont. But, that rather pejorative language is not the way to look at it. Instead, business men are finding a product that has extra-monetary value to investors and charging them for it. Or, more simply, Social status is a ‘good’ that people will pay for. If I have a Ferrari, two Porsche’s an a Jaguar, and my wife has a gucci purse and a hanoverian horse, the fact is that cars, purses, and horses are not scarce. So social status is what we pay for. Why is it that shares of stock in companies should be regulated such that people cannot buy status in companies the way that they buy status in products? And in a market economy, paying for social status is about the only way of achieving social status. There is nothing fraudulent about selling social status. There are plenty of ways to lose money. There are plenty of ways to spend money getting something that you want.
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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 division of knowledge and labor. 2) As productivity in the division of labor increases, the total stock of human knowledge increases. 3) As the stock of human knowledge increases, each of our shares of that knowledge decreases. 4) As our individual shares of that knowledge decrease, our knowledge consists largely of those things that we can act upon given the resources at our disposal. In other words, people aren’t so much ignorant as they are knowledgeable about what actually matters. They may not have room for the irrelevant.
[callout]The general perception, and the presupposition of the boomer-era article’s sentiments, is that political knowledge is valuable.[/callout]
The general perception, and the presupposition of the boomer-era article’s sentiments, is that political knowledge is valuable. And it implies that we can possess the knowledge needed to understand the issues that our government must manage given it’s current constitution. And it further implies that political freedom is a ‘good’ – when, it’s evident from the record of history that personal freedom is absolutely a good, but political freedom is simply a necessary evil in order to prevent the government from forming a predatory bureaucracy, and treating the population as it’s property. So people only need the minimum knowledge of government needed to preserve their personal freedom. People aren’t ignorant. They’re too ignorant of political knowledge and economic principles to make political and policy decisions. And that’s not surprising because political decisions are of necessity made in ignorance. And decisions are made in ignorance either out of political necessity or political contrivance. They must be. Because we do not possess sufficient knowledge or DATA in government to make any other form of decision OTHER than decisions of political necessity and political contrivance. Politics has become ridiculous and irrational because at the scale of our empire, the data no longer exists with which to make rational arguments in real time. The political structure cannot operate without data. And so, like the chinese, we have devolved into sentimental moral arguments rather than practical, political and economic arguments — the furtive gestures and spittled pontification of silly Keynesian probabilists to the contrary. So it’s good that people are ignorant of it. There is no value in the study of falsehoods. Maybe Americans are wiser than we think after all.