It is especially incoherent when welfare liberals accuse markets of involving BOTH radical cooperative interdependence, such that much of a society’s wealth is a “social product” to which individuals have no moral claim independent of some rule of distibutive justice, AND a kind of radically fragmented free-for-all state of nature war of all against all.
Tim Worstall: Bad, Bad Minimum Wage. Guess what: a price floor reduces demand! In real life, even!
Sean Corrigan: We Shoulda Seen it Coming! Since the effects of loose money are well known to economists, why can’t business adjust for them?
Check Point Nullification Project; Road Block Registry
cultured bone wedding rings; reported in New Scientist
Patrick J. Buchanan: The Anti-Conservatives
electrodes against depression — me next!
The Smaller Picture: you help design a bitmap font
Robin Hanson reports:
I just produced the following draft (PDF), which tries a new statistical approach on the question of which side is “right” in a media controversy. I applied it to the coverage of PAM, but it might also apply it to other controversies.
The Informed Press Favored the Policy Analysis Market
The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), otherwise known as “terrorism futures,” burst into public view in a firestorm of condemnation on July 28, 2003, and was canceled the next day. We look the impression given of PAM by 396 media articles, and how that impression varies with six indicators of article information: mentioning someone with firsthand knowledge, time since the firestorm, article length, a news versus an opinion style, and periodical prestige and period. All six indicators significantly and substantially predict more favorable impressions of PAM. A multiple regression predicts that a two thousand word news article in a prestigious monthly publication one hundred days later that mentioned an insider would give a solidly favorable impression of PAM.
Wodehouse, the next generation: a fan’s delightful movie concept
Bryan Caplan: The Idea Trap: why bad economic policy is so rarely repealed
Institute for Justice: The 25 Best Friends of Property Rights: amicus briefs in support of petitioners in Kelo v. New London
. . . I consider the right of property to consist in the freedom to dispose first of one’s person, then of one’s labor, and finally, of the products of one’s labor — which proves, incidentally, that, from a certain point of view, freedom and the right to property are indistinguishable from each other.
Frédéric Bastiat (1849): Protectionism and Communism. Cited in FFF Email Update.
On a private mailing list someone wrote:
having just seen the 1951 Britisher version of the Dickens Christmas Carol, it struck me that free marketeers should really live in Dickensian England and try work their way out from the bottom.
I thought of writing a rant about Dickens’s sins, but a better approach presented itself:
FYI
1838: Oliver Twist
1843: A Christmas Carol
1846: repeal of the Corn Laws — commonly cited as the first triumph of the free trade movement
if only you believed in miracles
Travis found a choice rant by Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek:
But the bluest blue-state left-“liberal” atheist oughtn’t be too quick with the self-congratulatory praise of his or her own rational faculties. Most left-liberals are pure creationists when it comes to society and social order. For them, government is the creator of order . . . .