I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.
|
|||||
|
If you’re a UK taxpayer, don’t bother donating to the British Red Cross for the relief of Hurricane Irma. You’re already giving. About £13bn a year of tax. Not all to the Red Cross of course – they get only a fraction of this. The bulk of it goes to teaching Ethiopian nomads how to play electric guitar, setting up pedicure shops in Sudan and sending top British hat-designers to Basutoland to show the natives how to fashion Crêpe De Chine and ostrich feathers into women’s headgear. In other words, the bulk of this money is wasted on hopeless schemes that don’t develop anything by one iota. – Raedwald September 11th, 2017 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
 That’s terrible economics. It’s a classic application of a well-known fallacy called the Lump of Labor — the idea that there are a fixed number of jobs in the world, and those jobs get divvied up among people. How do we know this is a fallacy? It’s obvious that the number of jobs in the world isn’t fixed. Imagine if the United States deported every single American except for Jeff Sessions. Would Sessions then have his pick of any job? No, he’d be in the forest trying to eat berries to survive. Kicking people out doesn’t just reallocate jobs from one person to another. It also destroys them. September 10th, 2017 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
Black markets are the most underutilized tool for alleviating poverty. These underground markets are often portrayed in a negative light by governments because they are untaxed, unregulated, and therefore are a hazard to public safety. A more sinister description often involves black markets as a cesspool of organized crime, overflowing with drugs and weapons, and a source of income for terrorist groups. Such portrayals are completely dubious. Ninty percent of India’s workforce is employed in the informal sector, which includes everything from agriculture to small scale manufacturing and services September 9th, 2017 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
“We joke about Victorian prudery, but in fact we are quite as prudish in different directions, and no less given to euphemisms or circumlocutions. There is even a distinct parallel in our reasons for adopting them. The Victorians saw themselves as having overcome animal instincts and were therefore prudish about sex: on the other hand they had yet to invent orthopaedic surgery, so someone who had lost a couple of limbs in an industrial accident was called a cripple. Our society recognises it has not overcome animal instincts and therefore has few inhibitions about sex, but has endless faith in its surgeons, so that words like `cripple’ are embargoed in favour of euphemisms like `differently abled’ which are quite as absurd as anything applied to sex in Victorian times. We are not expressionally crippled they were were: we are just differently hibited.” – Samuel Smiles and the Construction of Victorian Values, page 144-5, by Adrian Jarvis. (The whole book, despite a few touches of lefty determination to imply that Smiles would have disliked rail privatisation, is a fine study of Samuel Smiles, author of such tomes as Self Help and Lives of the Engineers. Smiles was a remarkable man: one of prodigious output, living to the ripe age of 92, which was some feat in his time.) September 8th, 2017 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
The de facto Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Mr Damian Green, has been doing the rounds of the television studios explaining why, in his opinion, all European Union laws should be “incorporated” en bloc into British law. In a wonderful example of missing-the-point, the opposition (the BBC and so on) are complaining about everything – apart from what they should be complaining about. The ‘Great Repeal Bill’ does not actually repeal any regulations – it turns European Union regulations into British regulations, but it does not repeal them. It does not make them ‘void’ as the regulations of Cromwell (for example banning Christmas and punishing adultery by death) were declared ‘void’ en bloc in 1660. But why does Mr Green (and the Prime Minister – and others) think that European Union regulations have to be ‘incorporated’ into British law – why not allow them to become void in March 2019 and return to the Common Law? The question is not really an administrative one, as Mr Green would claim, it actually goes to the heart of legal philosophy. To someone like Mr Green ‘the law’ means detailed regulations governing every aspect of economic life – to him the only alternative to this is chaos (people eating each other – or whatever). Mr Green has indeed heard of the Common Law (most certainly he has) – but the term ‘Common Law’ to a legal mind such as that of Mr Green means ‘the judgements of judges’, the Rule of Judges rather than the Rule of Law. I am reminded of a ‘Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England‘ by Thomas Hobbes. The ‘philosopher’ is, of course, Mr Hobbes himself – and the defender of the Common Law is a made up character who is written by Mr Hobbes to lose the ‘dialogue’. To Mr Hobbes, as to Mr Green, ‘the law’ is just the ‘commands’ of someone (a legislature, or an official. or a judge), there is no sense in Mr Hobbes that ‘the law’ is a set of PRINCIPLES of natural justice that one tires to apply in everyday life (in individual cases). September 8th, 2017 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s official: every cyclone or hurricane these days is the worst, strongest, most powerful [insert hyperbolic untruth of your choice] EVER! Hurricane Irma has been no different. Of course, the reality is far less sexy… …when it comes to 1-minute sustained wind speed, Irma ranks tied for second place (with four others) when it comes to North Atlantic hurricanes. In terms of intensity (the lower the air pressure the higher the intensity), Irma doesn’t even crack the top 10 in the North Atlantic (it’s 12th). How does the mainstream media get away with this? – Marcus over on Catallaxy Files. September 7th, 2017 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
The above picture is the most commonplace thing in the world. There is a gift wrapped car in a shopping mall. Obviously, this is a prize in a competition, designed to encourage people to visit the shopping mall and spend money in the shops. The car is first generation Daewoo Matiz – later known as the Chevrolet Spark – an old design now but one of the cheapest cars in production in the world. It’s an utterly awful car to drive, but it is A NEW CAR!. If you are a shopping centre owner, then the main thing is that it is a new car. That it is the cheapest new car in existence is not the point. The point is that the prize in our competition is A NEW CAR! It’s a city car, also. If you are in a place where the traffic is bad enough, a lack of acceleration and an inability to drive above 80km/h matters less, anyway. Well, yes. And no. There is, of course a story. I live in London by myself. My family are in Australia. London is cold, dark, and deserted between Christmas and New Year, and it can be depressing to be here by yourself. Although I don’t need much of an excuse to go travelling at the best of times, I particularly try to get out of town, ideally to somewhere where there is no Christmas. Last year this led to my finding myself in Tehran, Iran. I didn’t quite entirely escape Christmas – there was still a Christmas tree in the lobby of my hotel – but I mostly escaped Christmas. Certainly, the traffic gridlock on December 25 was horrendous, as indeed the traffic gridlock is horrendous in Tehran on most days. There is a metro in Tehran, but Tehran is a sprawling city which makes it only so useful, a little like the metro in Los Angeles. Tehran is a sprawling city of multi-lane freeways and horrendous traffic in a basin surrounded by mountains, a little like Los Angeles. In the expensive suburbs of north Tehran, it’s not especially hard to find yourself in achingly hip cafes that might almost be in Silver Lake, too, but let’s go there some other time. The whole “enormous, car-centric sprawl with an immense freeway system” makes Los Angeles a polluted city by American standards, but in all honesty it is much less polluted than it used to be. Modern cars are more efficient and have more advanced emissions control systems than was the case even a few years ago, and like all developed world cities, the air in Los Angeles is much cleaner than it once was. In Tehran, though, imagine a rapidly growing city, that despite sanctions is getting richer. Demand for cars is high, but due to those sanctions Iran is unable to import cars from many industrial countries. Cars stay on the road longer, which means the pollution will remain worse for longer than in many other cities of similar levels of development. Sanctions are uneven, so it is much easier to do business with carmakers in certain other countries than others. When you look around, you find that most of the cars are Korean, or French, or will be oddly familiar things or brands you haven’t heard of. This gets us back to the overtly Korean car in the shopping mall. September 6th, 2017 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hayek had a profound personal interest in the outcome of the great ideological struggles of his time and understood them very well. He too was driven out of his home by the Nazi threat and landed in London where the academic scene was dominated by Fabian-style socialists who imagined themselves to be great fighters of fascism. Hayek shocked them all by calling them out: the system you want to manage society will actually bring about the very thing you claim to oppose. In other words, the book is not as much about the reds as it is about the browns and the threat that this way of thinking poses even to England and America. September 6th, 2017 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
I should have though feminists have more to worry about this film than everyone else. The point of Golding’s book is that, freed from societal restraints, the boys descend into savagery. If gender is a social construct then, freed from societal restraints, girls should also descend into savagery because the only difference between boys and girls is how society shapes their behaviour. But this contradicts feminst doublethink that tells if that although gender is a social construct, girls are actually more caring and empathetic, even without social conditioning. If the film follows the plot of the book then it isn’t going to show a feminist utopia; it’s going to be more like Heathers or Mean Girls. – ‘Shatterface’ This is an interesting comment by ‘Shatterface‘ on a Spiked article about an all-female remake of Lord of the Flies. September 5th, 2017 | 54 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Jews. And the Freemasons. In a conspiracy. Working together. Dear God. It’s all real… September 4th, 2017 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mrs May is like a self-inflicted bullet lodged near the heart of the Conservative Party after a botched political suicide – Cameron’s resignation. Leaving it there for now or operating are the options. The risks of the general anaesthetic, cutting open the chest and infection seem rather unattractive to the patient, who has a mountain to climb, but leaving the bullet in risks fatal damage upon any exertion. The bullet seems to think that it has a mandate to go on and dig deeper, like a Nazgûl knife blade fragment going for Frodo’s heart. – Mr. Ed of this parish September 3rd, 2017 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Recent Comments