October 2023
M T W T F S S
« Sep    
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  

Categories

Archives

Archives

The Mind Prison System

In a recent, in-depth, late night/early morning conversation with my friends, I received a maddening and tragic realization about the horror of the state education system. Now, I’m already fully aware of alternative methods of teaching, and the systemic critiques of John Taylor Gatto in his books “Weapons of Mass Instruction” and the “Underground History […]

Let’s have more Billionaires

I’ve recently come across another missive from Thom Hartmann, that reveals a lack of firm economic grounding. The very title of the article, “Ayn Rand’s Gospel of Selfishness and Billionaire Empowerment is Plaguing America” and it’s subtitle “The United States and other independent governments around the world are crumbling while Ayn Rand’s billionaires are taking […]

How not to end poverty

In spite of popular belief the rich should not fight poverty by giving away their money to the impoverished. In his show, “The Big Picture”, Thom Hartmann points out that the richest 100 people in the world have enough wealth to eliminate world poverty 4 times over. In direct defiance of the show’s name, this […]

Political Behavior

Michael Huemer, writes a nice piece covering Why People Are Irrational about Politics. He knocks down several hypotheses such as miscalculation, ignorance, and divergent values using specific counter examples, observations of party platforms, and thoughtfully considered analysis. In the summary, a rather bleak view of the political animal emerges:

The best explanation lies in […]

But who would take care of the poor?

Joshua Fulton argues against the popular notion “that nobody would help support the less fortunate” in his article, Welfare before the Welfare State. I’d like to claim that many recall the horrible conditions of poverty during the industrialization era, except that all those people are dead. So, honestly, such imagery was planted in our collective […]

The Descent of Government

Over the past couple weeks I’ve run across two charts, which demonstrate beyond a shadow of doubt, that government meddling just does not change fundamental behavior. Although I only collect two charts here, I was thinking that some bright person with more time might be able to collect more such charts, and present a case […]

Rant: A breed of well-informed idiot

I’m not liking the peer review system right now. Since I’ve started grad school, I’ve had every one of my papers rejected. This leads me to the following theory: reviewers are some breed of well-informed idiot. They may be smart in the field, but I think they don’t read closely. I know that I’m biased […]

Anarchism in Iceland

Just read this interesting post[Polycentric Order: First Draft of Anarchic Iceland] about Icelandic history. Apparently, from 930 CE to 1096 CE, they had a tribal form of government with no really official rules. Just that the chieftans met for 2 weeks of each year to resolve disputes and re-establish boundaries. The rest of the people […]

Illegal Everything

John Stossel (I’m really starting to like this guy) recently did an episode titled “Illegal Everything” in which he make the following observations/arguments:

Legalizing drugs does not lead to more use, but does lead to less violence. (example: Portugal, as can be read about in Scientific American, and Wikipedia). Cops have raided food co-ops for […]

Homo Economicus can vote, but chooses not to

Interesting lecture, put out by the Adam Smith Institute, about The Lessons of Public Choice Theory. It turns out that democracy is a less efficient system than the free market.

For example, voters rationally remain ignorant because their input in the election is not correlated to their knowledge about the process and the candidates. When […]