From the Guardian: Decline and fall of the American Empire Key passage: “Let me put an alternative hypothesis. America in 2011 is Rome in 200AD or Britain on the eve of the first world war: an empire at the zenith of its power but with cracks beginning to show. The experience of both Rome and […]
Classic problem with left-wing economists
This article from Slate does a very decent job at explaining how bad the economic situation is and will most likely remain so for the foreseeable future. Then near the end, the classic Keynesian slip, “That is not to say that there is nothing to be done, of course, or that the current state of […]
Academia, Harold Bloom, and the Western Canon
Throughout the twentieth-century the American right slowly lost all influence inside academia. How and why this happened is a discussion for another post (Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” is a good place to start) but what is certain is that today the elite academic institutions in the United States are completely controlled […]
On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor, November 1766
Ben Franklin, November 1766 I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed […]
The Myth that is the Rule of Law
A great article by Tom Engelhardt over at Salon.com will make it hard to deny the hard fact that there is no longer such a thing as the ‘Rule of Law’ (though I would argue that its death began in the mid 1800’s, and its final days have come under this current regime). “…At least […]
The Future of Money?
‘Bitcoin’ is an interesting example of the future of money. Bitcoin is a non-asset backed and non-state controlled money. With the Fed destroying the value of our money it comes as no surprise that we should start to see such experiments as these. I tend to be skeptical of such non-asset backed currencies, but it […]
The Hypocrisy of Partisanship
It is funny, in a way, how people view politics. For most it is like any professional sport, they choose a team at some point in their life, based on some illogical rationale, such as the color of their uniforms, a family member who roots for them, or maybe it was the only team on […]
A “Right” To Health Care?
A right to something implies no one can legitimately take it from you or prevent you from enjoying that right. Thus a right to something means you are justified to use force to defend it. For example you have a right to your life, so if someone attacks you or threatens your life you can […]