The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. – F.A. Hayek
Posted in Education, Health Care, Socialism on Dec 14th, 2011
Michael Moore should be paid more and is exploited. I mean it. He has produced a number of misleadingly anti-capitalist documentaries that have become educational darlings. I cannot get my mind around that these are commonly used “educational” tools in high school much less college. But given that he is so popular and that so [...]
Posted in Classical Liberalism, Property Rights, Socialism, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Nov 17th, 2011
The concept of human rights is a particularly appealing one for folks on the left. Invoking human rights in an argument is sort of like insinuating that your opponents don’t think human beings matter. It’s a neat rhetorical trick, and it’s tiring. If a progressive, for example argues for nationalized health care, and I push [...]
Posted in Socialism on Oct 26th, 2011
My friend John B. should really have his own blog! After we’ve taken care of their wealth, to keep the nation happy and prosperous we should pass a law making it illegal for there to be a wealthiest 1 percent — this country should just be the normal 99 percent. Sure, that isn’t mathematically possible, but [...]
Posted in Socialism on Oct 6th, 2011
Via Arnold Kling, this is precisely right: Community and collectivism are opposites. Community is valuable and powerful; it is individuals freely choosing to cooperate and identify with each other to achieve more than they can individually, as we do in the open-source community. Collectivism is a fraud. It pretends to be about community, but it [...]
Posted in Environment, Socialism on Jun 28th, 2011
Well, no need to couch our ideas in clever little puzzles anymore: I understand that our country has people living in poverty, some of whom are now losing their jobs to Chinese competition, but that’s simply our shame – we have all the money on earth, and we haven’t figured out how to spread it [...]
Posted in Environment, Socialism on Jun 27th, 2011
On corporations, clean energy, and the corrupt political process: Explaining this mystery (why Big Oil is not investing more heavily in renewables) may bring us back to where we started. In the childlike enchantment we’ve lived under since the Reagan era, we’ve wanted very much to believe that someone else, some wavy-haired CEO, would do [...]
Posted in Socialism on May 1st, 2011
On this much celebrated day around the world, I repost my mourning for the hundreds of millions that have been brutally tortured, maimed, and murdered in the name of “the social good” and “brotherhood.” Shame on them. Mourning on May Day May 1st, 2008 by wintercow20 It is criminal and immoral to celebrate, on this day, [...]
Posted in Socialism on Apr 30th, 2011
Tomorrow is May Day. I plan on rerunning an old piece, so consider this my new piece for this year. I finally got around to reading Free to Choose, Milton and Rose Friedman’s famous book on the power and virtue of the free market. In it, they make a comment that the Socialist Party was [...]
Posted in Environment, Socialism on Apr 22nd, 2011
From the PERColator: For example, in 1978 Congress, concerned about impending shortages of natural gas, passed the Powerplant and Industrial Fuel Use Act. This prohibited the use of natural gas for power generation and industrial use. As a result, capital investment shifted towards a new generation of coal-fired power plants. If all the coal-fired electric generating capacity [...]
Posted in Socialism on Mar 20th, 2011
Here is an illustration of how the intellectual forebears of the modern egalitarian movement thought: Everybody is poor together. There is much discontent, much regulation of life, but not much terrorism or repression except of the old upper classes. That was Roger Baldwin writing about his gaga-eyed impressions of the young Soviet Union in the [...]
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