Homines libenter quod volunt credunt
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 […]
Posted in Socialism on Feb 23rd, 2011
(A domestic allotment plan for permanent acreage reduction) might work, “if we are really going the route of state socialism. And I am very much inclined to think that we really are going that route.” That was Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace in 1933. There is much more exciting stuff to learn by reading a […]
Posted in Socialism on Feb 18th, 2011
Let’s cast aside the issue of coercion, property rights and even some good economics and focus on a somewhat different major distinction between a free society and the modern constructivist notions of the “good” society. That difference is in what the goals and objectives of such a “society” ought to be. The major distinction between […]
Posted in Socialism on Jan 24th, 2011
Socialism doesn’t work for two reasons (at least). Such a system gets incentives wrong and it cannot aggregate and produce information. Academic debates on these points have been hashed out for nearly a century now. When the Austrians were writing their academic critiques of socialism in the early half of last century (edited: thanks jvb) […]
Posted in Socialism, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Jan 3rd, 2011
Whether egalitarians wish for a perfectly even “distribution” of income or something closer to even (e.g. Rawlsians), one thing most have in common is that they only favor particular forms of redistribution. In particular, egalitarians are often focused on two very narrow areas: (1) where we will be doing the redistribution, and (2) what we […]