A recent essay on Big Think says:

Birth control isn’t about my health unless by health you mean, my capacity to get it on, to have a happy, joyous sex life that involves an actual male partner. The point of birth control is to have sex that’s recreational and non-procreative. It’s to permit women to exercise their desires without the sword of Damocles of unwanted pregnancy hanging gloomily over their heads.

It seems to me that pro-sex rhetoric would have more traction if it gave some weight to the role of sex as an expression of love, which reinforces the bond of couples. Even independent of procreation, that’s a social purpose that the most pleasure-hating communitarian could at least grudgingly endorse.

When did this happen? Mary Ruwart has webbed the first edition of Healing Our World.

How Old Is Your Globe? — Changes of state names, with dates.

Non-registered readers who try to comment now see

Error 1: Click back and type in the password.

I can find nothing in the settings that would explain this. Sorry. Until it’s debugged, you can mail comments to me and I’ll post them in your name.

(And yet, at least one spambot continues to get through.)

Later I remembered recently installing Spam Free — without seeing the full instructions. It’s off again for now.

One often hears:

[Libertarianism] can only work if all the conditions of a free market economy are present … things like anyone being able to easily enter any market segment, all consumers having near-perfect knowledge of what they are purchasing, large numbers of sellers selling identical products to large numbers of buyers, etc.

And one is moved to ask whether the political system makes up for such departures from the ideal by adding moral hazard.

Where did the meme came from? My guess is that some introductory economic textbooks contain theorems that rely on those simplifying assumptions, and some students get that far and no further.

I don’t know much about academic economics but I do know that there’s plenty of interest in the negations of those simplifications; for example, Ronald Coase made his name by pointing out the importance of transaction costs, including the cost of overcoming imperfections of knowledge.

What I need is the libertoonian equivalent of the TalkOrigins Archive, containing standard responses to the other side’s tired assertions.