Homines libenter quod volunt credunt
Posted in Government Gone Wild, History, Institutions, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Nov 21st, 2012
(1) One of the most influential and long-lasting Supreme Court Decisions was the Wickard v. Filburn decision in 1942 which basically said that anything is interstate commerce. In this case, a farmer in Ohio decided to grow extra wheat for himself, wheat that was never going to leave his farm and be consumed entirely by his family/farm […]
Posted in Education, Environment, History on Aug 21st, 2012
Via Bradley and Fullmer, here is a chart of “Settleable Dust” in Pittsburgh, PA from 1925-1965: Sorry the quality is not better, it is from a bad scan on a bad scanner. I suppose the canned response to this is that the EPA encouraged global trade in steel from 1925-1965 and that all of the […]
Posted in Education, Environment, History on Aug 20th, 2012
Surely the stories of dark air over London had something to them. And they did. Air quality in London steadily deteriorated until the beginning of the 20th century. But just as the air dirtied (with no one’s intention by the way) so too did it clean. Here is a a chart via Matt Ridley (I […]
Posted in History, Institutions on Aug 13th, 2012
I am a big fan of harp-guitar players and one of my favorites is Stephen Bennett. Here is one of my favorites from him, entitled Merry Christmas Mr. Gorbachev. It’s a happy sounding song, as it should be. I imagine he wrote it as a reference to the (in)famous Christmas night in 1991 when Soviet […]
Posted in Environment, History on Jun 7th, 2012
Now that I think about it, it does seem rather strange that it took so long for us to figure this out. The Easter Island heads have bodies! Here are some pics: The article I link to says this may have been caused by a Tsunami. Hayek of course would not have been surprised. […]
Posted in Health Care, History on Apr 16th, 2012
Folks love to ask me if I think anything the government does now, or has ever done, is good. That’s a silly question for a lot of reasons. Without explaining why I think the question is silly, let me share with you my quick answer: Yes! Public Health Investments. Now, when I say this, I […]
Posted in History on Jan 29th, 2012
More from Ralph Raico: Egged on by (Eleanor) Roosevelt, the FBI “began to tap the telephones and open the mail of vocal opponents of FDR’s foreign policy and to monitor anti-intervention rallies.” It “initiated surveillance of several of the president’s prominent congressional critics,” including Senators Burton K. Wheeler and Gerald Nye. The White House and […]
Posted in Government Thuggery, History on Jan 15th, 2012
Another gem from Ralph Raico’s Great Wars and Great Leaders: Roosevelt, who always viewed any criticism of himself as a perversion of true democracy, was outraged. The President of the United States wrote a personal letter to a managing editor declaring that Flynn, “should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, […]
Posted in History on Jan 8th, 2012
How do you think Americans would look back on WWII and the fight against Nazi-ism is its associated toxic enterprises if we stayed out of it entirely, and the Australians or the Mexicans saved the world from speaking German?
Some of you might be aware of the less “noble” origins of public schooling in America. Here is an illustration of early British attitudes toward it, from Bill Bryson’s At Home: Yet the idea of educating them (the masses) was treated almost universally with abhorrence. The fear was that educating the poor woudl fill them […]
