No one could have predicted the housing bubble pop, right?
Charlie Stross, interviewed in H+ magazine, mentions in passing
. . . the more socially dysfunctional libertarians (who are convinced that if the brakes on capitalism were off, they’d somehow be teleported to the apex of the food chain in place of the current top predators).
I’m curious to see his favorite examples; I hope I, at least, have never (since age ~25) said anything to justify such a crack, beyond indulging in “if I were dictator” daydreams as I assume everyone does.
I can’t imagine a plausible world that would have someone like me at the top of the heap. I’m a libertarian because I’m convinced that the poor and the dysfunctional would live easier in a more open world.
But I can say that until I turn blue, and there will always be someone to call me a liar.
Charlie goes on:
. . . they mostly don’t understand how the current system came about, or that the reason we don’t live in a minarchist night-watchman state is because it was tried in the 18th and 19th centuries, and it didn’t work very well.
For whom? Presumably it disappointed those with the power to change it, before the masses got the vote.
because you asked for it, or because you didn’t
retro MacOS theme for WordPress. I’m pretty sure this is before it was called MacOS, that’s how old it is. (Hat tip to Bill Detty.)
See Takana. The 306 figures shown there can be reduced to 45 by rotation and reflection. I fitted a polynomial curve to each partial path, and superimposed them.
a very clever picture — clean, but be warned, much of that site is NSFW.
Bon mot from Sheldon Richman:
Advocates of the free market are sometimes parodied for their seemingly all-purpose answer to any problem: Let the market handle it. What may sound like a simplistic answer, however, is actually the most complex prescription imaginable. In the modern world, the workings of any particular market are so complicated, they are beyond the grasp of mere mortals. Moment by moment, day by day, so many subtly interrelated decisions are made by so many people worldwide that no individual or group could possibly understand the big picture in any detailed way. So there is nothing simplistic about proposing the market as a solution to an economic problem. It’s short way of saying: let the multitude of knowledgeable people seeking profit, risking their own money, and responding to incentives find a solution based on persuasion not force. Translated that way, it sounds like a promising approach.
Ironically, those who don’t appreciate markets are in fact the ones who offer a simplistic, even empty alleged solution to economic problems: government regulation. That phrase is uttered like an incantation, the magical answer to all doubts about how, in the absence of fully free markets, problems would be solved. The irony is that while “let the market handle it” can be unpacked and made specific, “regulation” cannot.