Homines libenter quod volunt credunt
Posted in Caring, Central Planning on Jul 30th, 2018
More from Walden: If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life … … I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness […]
Posted in Central Planning, Constitution, Government Gone Wild on Jul 28th, 2018
In thinking about arguments that I have heard made against the NSA’s PRISM program (this program is basically the limitless power the NSA seems to be exercising in collecting an ungodly amount of information, without warrant, from all Americans’ use of the internet), a little conundrum came to mind. One of the things the NSA […]
Posted in Central Planning on Jun 2nd, 2018
I’ve received a ton of correspondence about the role computers may play in the future of central planning. My responses are generally of the following nature: (1) If computing power and complexity improved to the extent that we COULD in principle do central planning, we would NOT NEED them to do central planning. (2) I […]
Posted in Central Planning on Apr 18th, 2018
Neither cleverness, nor stupidity, is predictable.
Posted in Central Planning, Extended Order, Knowledge, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Dec 5th, 2017
I frame the analytic discussions about markets versus socialism as a knowledge problem. The key to the success in any “economic system” is to figure out a way to have valuable knowledge and information produced, transmitted and acted upon – even by actors who do not know that they are part of the solution. The standard discussion […]
Posted in Central Planning, Extended Order, History, Institutions on Nov 23rd, 2017
Today I reprint a slightly edited piece I put together several years ago. I’d change a lot of it, from the content to the tone, if I were to do it over – but one must live with one’s younger self. Happy Thanksgiving to all. Four centuries after the celebration of the first Thanksgiving, there […]
Posted in Central Planning, Government Thuggery, If I Really Hated the Poor ... on Oct 27th, 2017
Heaven forbid if it were. Happy 100th Anniversary! The following is from “the secret archive,” published as “The Unknown Lenin” (1996), and the entry is dated March 1922: “It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the […]
Posted in Central Planning, Disingenuous on Oct 17th, 2017
It would be lovely if, when we passed certain rules and regulations, we had procedures in place to review their performance and effectiveness. Today, we sit at the halfway point between the issuance of new CAFE standards as part of the 2009 “Stimulus” package, and the year 2025, the target date for new vehicle fuel […]
Posted in Central Planning, Government Gone Wild, History on Aug 22nd, 2017
I was in the midst of my high school formative years when a couple of watershed moments in world history happened, and these had fantastically powerful and lasting impacts on me. I grew up in New York City during the Cold War, and there were nuclear fallout shelters in our little Catholic school, and the […]
Posted in Central Planning, Disingenuous, Education, If I Really Hated the Poor ..., You Can't Have it Both Ways on Feb 8th, 2017
It is well understood that the incidence of defaults on college debt is higher on people with smaller loans outstanding. These are marginally attached students to begin with. Remember that 40% of students who start college do not finish. Yet, contrast this with where the “noise” is coming from on “free college” and the “college loan crisis.” […]
