- Universities are hedge funds that run research labs and have football teams.
- Fast food companies are real estate firms with kitchens.
- Democracies are insurance companies with armies.
- Public (government) schools are unions that run day care centers.
- Police departments are unions that run protection rackets.
- Banks are time-travel machines for assets that tax uncertainty.
- Home Ownership is tax-sheltered/favored investment masquerading as industrious virtue.
- Public libraries are intellectual social status symbols with warehouses.
- Churches are mutual-aid societies that offer moral guidance and tribal solidarity.
Wednesday, February 3, 2021
A rose by any other name...
Sunday, January 24, 2021
The Time of Biden
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
I'm As Mad As Hell, And I'm Not Going To Let You Take This Anymore!
- sex work
- organ donation
- child labor
- drug addiction and misuse
- pay-day lending
- immigrant smuggling
- sudden, high prices in the midst of emergencies - anti-price gouging laws
- high cost of housing - rent control
- low-productivity worker earnings - minimum wages
Tuesday, January 12, 2021
Reading Between the MSM Lines - Partial List
- Fox News gets paid to shout scary ideas at old people.
- MSNBC gets paid to say snarky comments that make their friends giggle.
- CNN gets paid to pretentiously spout conjectures that sound important.
- CNBC gets paid to use buzzwords and pretend noise is signal to make viewers feel smart.
- ABC, CBS, & NBC news all get paid by trying to resemble what their viewers remember traditional network news looked like.
Saturday, December 26, 2020
Partial List of Current Practices Future Humans Will Detest as Immoral and Indefensible
- Abortion
- Immigration restrictions (especially for those seeking to escape poverty or tyranny)
- Trade restrictions (to a lesser degree)
- Tolerance for people living (anywhere) involuntarily in a condition of (meaning without a reasonable ability to escape) extreme poverty (coupled with no acceptance for ignorance as to the solution for extreme poverty--we know how to fix this--free markets and free minds)
- Living conditions of the institutionalized elderly
- The death penalty
Sunday, November 29, 2020
There Should Be A Law!
- Masks and social/physical distancing rules in a pandemic - I much prefer persuasion in the marketplace of ideas backed by good and plentiful information. That said, in a very serious health crisis a government-enforced policy might keep the peace and prevent very costly experimentation from defectors like a business not complying. Bringing this to the news of the moment--I generally do not think SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 qualifies. A failure on the part of government (and others) to even properly try the persuasion avenue does not then necessitate the force avenue. Further, compliance with practices consistent with most all of the nonpharmaceutical interventions has been remarkably high and widespread as well as ahead of the mandated institution of the NPIs. This is a point the advocates of force ignore until they wish to defend against the accusation that the economic and other costs have come as a result of forced NPIs. Then they are quick to point out that "it is the virus, not the lockdown". Careful thinkers realize it is both and the latter makes matters on net much worse.
- Zoning - but not in the way most people think. This one really is more of a government failure that perhaps needs collective agreement. Zoning way too typically becomes NIMBYism protecting vested current interests at the expense of potential and less powerful interests. Basically we may need higher-order (federal) laws preventing localities from encroaching in private property rights.
- Certain, limited cases of patents - Here is my prior thinking on this subject.
- That you're overlooking some critical factor that negates the market failure condition. There is something else going on here; there are needs being satisfied along an unexplored dimension.
- The market failure does exist but will be short-lived and thus insignificant. Short-lived might be in the eye of the beholder, true enough, but this is definitely an area where a longer than average point of view is needed (near-far mode if you will).
- Garbage collection
- Subsidies for under-produced goods (e.g., vaccines, General healthcare, education)
- General city planning such as road layout and utilities, etc.
Sunday, November 15, 2020
Clutch Your Pearls
- Gender pay gaps
- Income inequality (rather than consumption inequality which can be a real problem that government might play a helpful role in reducing)
- Regional discord, violence, and tensions abroad (this is false in that it is never so straightforward as right vs. wrong, good vs. evil)
- OPP - other people’s patriotism or lack thereof
- Overpopulation
- Student debt and higher-education financing
- Business lending in general and in crises like the COVID pandemic (SBA, Fed backstops of direct lending, et al.)
- Illegal immigration (crime risk) (economic affects)
- Tobacco use, alcohol consumption, sugar composition of food, gun ownership, use of currently illicit drugs, et al. as public health issues
- Food deserts
- Jobs lost to automation
Thursday, November 12, 2020
My Futile Desire For People To See The Truth
- The labeling asset prices as being "bubbles" (e.g., tulip mania, dotcom tech, housing markets--see above, et al.) is neither useful nor helpful. The term is loose, vague, and indeterminate. A classic case of seeming to say something, but being so obscure as to be unfalsifiable. It is the modern financial economics equivalent of blaming disease on the imbalance of humors.
- The current and historical lack of parity in college football and other sports—my first great example of things not being what is so commonly believed in the conventional wisdom. Big firms like regulation and so do big sports programs. The NCAA benefits the blue bloods at the expense of the lesser schools.
- The cause and nature of the Great Depression and the subsequent recovery (it wasn’t WWII).
- The cause and nature of long-term economic progress as told by McCloskey, et al.; the true nature of economic inequality (consumption versus income); how good things actually are and how much they have actually improved.
- The shallow and near emptiness of news journalism and that watching and reading the main-stream media is a form of entertainment done at the expense of one’s intellect.
- The immorality of conducting and impossibility of 'winning' the drug war. One can extend this to all prohibitions on victimless crimes, activities and trades done by consenting adults that are labeled crimes not because of a violation of anyone's property or personal rights but because society has deemed it taboo, immoral, or otherwise contemptible (e.g., organ sales, prostitution, price gouging, etc.).
- The harm and unintended consequences of price controls in all there guises: minimum wages, rent controls, anti-price gouging laws, restrictions on compensating college athletes, et al.
- The injustices that exist and persist in the world, how good it could be in terms of justice and wealth for all of us, and the multiplicative benefits of free markets and free minds.
- The economics especially and general state of the science concerning environmental policy.
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
Breaking Professions Down Into Three Essential Roles
I think one can categorize most professions into a small number of distinct roles--let's explore this idea and arbitrarily limit the number of roles to three in each case. It is my contention that few of the people practicing these professions are good at more than one role, and many are not very good at any of the roles. Consider:
- Lawyers: navigator, firefighter, bodyguard
- Financial advisors: tour guide, travel agent, psychologist
- Medical doctors: band-aids, antibiotics, placebo
- College professors: inspirational speaker, revealer of truth (model explainer), advancer of truth (researcher)
- Elementary school teachers: babysitter, basic skills tutor, etiquette shaper
- Catholic priests: moral consigliere, charity executive director, art museum curator
Sunday, November 8, 2020
Libertarian Party 2020 Presidential Run - A Postmortem
- Get rid of purity tests - The infighting of no-true-Scotsman has to be limited to early primary candidate selection. Once we have a candidate, rally behind them. This doesn't mean we cannot criticize, but know what stage of the game you are in. This also helps broaden the tent. Be a directional libertarian rather than a destination libertarian.
- Focus on uncompetitive states - perhaps never leave California or perhaps more appropriately Texas or just both of those two important states. Imagine building a strong base in demographically and electorally important areas. The Free State Movement envisioned flocking to a small state to dominate politics there, New Hampshire emerging as the destination. Rather than focusing on winning a small state's electoral votes, this would be a strategy of focusing on winning hearts and minds to reshape the policy debate.
- Articulate stances in better sound bites - Help the voters know in the simplest terms why they are taking the leap to support, advocate, and vote Libertarian. A platform of less government is not enough. Specifics are crucial here, but more importantly we need to highlight solutions rather than what sounds to many like retreat into the darkness. A great example is Corey DeAngelis' straightforward and impactful message on school choice/education reform: "fund students (families) instead of institutions" and "let the money follow the child".
- Stop sounding like extremists - This dovetails with the prior idea. “End the Fed”, “Taxation is Theft”, et al. are not salient. Find a way to be against war without sounding like a 60s hippie—pacifism is right but it doesn’t sell. You can’t win support by telling people they are awful. You have to sell the message of hope and progress.
- Look the part - Quit going for shock value. You need to look like a candidate out of central casting. No nicknames on the ballot (e.g., Spike). No taxation is theft hats. The target new voter does not want to elect someone from Comic-Con.
- Focus on a few key, pivotal issues that resonate in the current election - Might I suggest The Big Five?
- Get more exposure in mainstream channels - We have to bring the message to a much broader audience. We are certainly still in the brand awareness stage of marketing. Where is the Free To Choose of the modern era? Perot built a voter base from primetime segments he paid for and starred in. How about a libertarian town hall? How about starting this now and developing some multi-year momentum?
Wednesday, October 14, 2020
List of Ambivalence
- Chick-fil-e’s Sunday Policy -- I am disappointed from the point of view as a customer; I am very much in support of their ability to choose to do this and I am impressed by the choice.
- The Trump Presidency -- not Trump himself, who I find quite objectionable. There are just some things to like and some things to very much dislike. I had the same appraisal of Obama, Bush, Clinton, . . .
- Deplatforming by social media, other tech companies, and financial processing firms/networks -- It is certainly within their rights in almost all cases, but I am fairly sure it is not good ethically or pragmatically in all but the most isolated cases.
- Hunting -- I am not sure it is always morally objectionable, but it is often enough.
- The National Anthem before sporting events -- Notice how we don’t see this practiced at high brow events like the philharmonic, etc.
- Separating activities, clubs, etc. by boys and girls and by men and women (e.g., Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Men’s Grill, Lady’s Auxillary, etc.) -- Is this socially healthy? Is it logical? I think in some cases it certainly is, but there is a slippery slope.
- Roundabouts (aka, circle, traffic circle, road circle, rotary, rotunda, and island) -- These are unfairly criticized in many cases, but they are also irresponsibly used and often inappropriately built.
Thursday, October 8, 2020
What Explains Country Variation in COVID Deaths?
I see a lot of vague or implied speculation on why there are such large differences in COVID-19 death rates (et al.) among various countries and regions. But many of these have internal tensions once we think a little deeply about the arguments being hinted at. Biases are leading to a lot of lies of omission if not just outright bad reasoning.
Why is Sweden different than Finland? What explains Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea versus France, Italy, and Spain? Germany versus Belgium? USA NE versus Texas versus Florida versus USA Midwest?
Here is a partial list of the usual and some unusual suspects:
- General health in the population
- Partial immunity including from prior coronavirus exposures
- Climate including ability to comfortably be outdoors and in open-air environments (definitely relative to when the virus struck)
- Prior and continued use of various drugs and treatments
- Proportion of at-risk people especially elderly
- Quality of procedures for protecting the vulnerable
- Quality of testing
- Quality of tracing
- Population density (within cities and otherwise relative to where people actually live; e.g., excluding most of Canada when measuring for Canada)
- Government NPIs including lockdowns and other policies but not test and/or trace
- Degree of movement within and among various communities (city to city, within a city, cross sociodemographic, in and out of country, et al.)
- Strain(s) of C-19 virus affecting country and timing of the infection
Wednesday, September 2, 2020
In Case of Pandemic Break Glass
Sunday, July 19, 2020
Life Is A Negative Lottery
- Flat tire, car wreck, . . .
- Stomach bug, a cancer diagnosis, . . .
- House fire, termites, . . .
- Tripping on the sidewalk, bumping one's head, . . .
- Tornado, flood, . . .
- [this list could go on and on]...
- Nurturing good relationships and broad networks
- Maintaining a diversified investment portfolio added to regularly with constant market exposure--long-term compounding is the call option (outsized upside) aspect of this
- Putting a small but meaningful amount of money invested in esoteric opportunities like Bitcoin, a creative person's far-out idea/business, . . .
- Embracing a willingness to try new things and keep all options on the table (including the option to walk away)--for example, just a slight geographic expansion in one's willingness to relocate can have a large impact on their employment options
- Learning diverse skills--good for career options, building networks, and knowing something that randomly comes in handy for the right time/right place
- Not burning bridges; rather err on the side of putting oneself "out there"
- Buying risk when others are risk averse and in increasing proportion to that aversion
- Playing the lottery? Maybe, but...***
Sunday, June 28, 2020
Well, We're Movin' On Up
What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it. –Andy Warhol
Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort. [...] [T]he capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses. –Joseph Schumpeter*
- Mobile phones
- Umbrellas
- Personal computers
- Toilet paper (notice how it required a pandemic and government intervention to make this temporarily drop off the list)
- Cloud storage
- Fast food and fast casual
- Casual clothing
- Payment processing
- Individual consumer-level tools (but not tool collections)
- Basic plumbing
- Video and music entertainment content
- Online shopping (especially important in quarantines)
- Corrective eye surgery such as LASIK
- Small package shipping speed
- Email
- All but the most exotic of beverages from bottled water to soft drinks to tea to coffee to beer to wine to liquor
- ... I could go on and on, but Qwern already has done so for me...
Sunday, June 21, 2020
Partial List of Wisdom From Classic TV
Sunday, June 14, 2020
Things That Can Both Be True - Mind-Blowing Partial List
- One is against the drug war (wants to completely legalize all drugs) and is against the use of most currently illicit drugs.
- One believes that prostitution should be legalized and that prostitution is morally wrong and culturally damaging.
- One finds many of the actions and policies of the Trump administration have been bad and many of the actions and policies of the Obama administration ON THE SAME ISSUES were bad.
- One wants the best for low-wage workers and one is against the minimum wage.
- One desires a strong, vibrant job market and one views jobs as an economic cost rather than a benefit.
- One believes the government-commanded lockdowns were absolutely bad policies and voluntary social distancing is absolutely good behavior in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- One thinks the United States of America is a great country and the U.S. government with the support of the people of the United States has done many very wrong things.
- One believes a highly successful person worked very hard while being very smart and they benefited greatly from luck.
- One sees college education is very valuable to college graduates and it is not the best option for a very large percentage of college attendees.
- One thinks college education is valuable to society and society would be better off with a lot less college education.
- One strongly supports freedom of speech and strongly disagrees with the specific speech that freedom of speech is protecting.
- One believes that the use of fossil fuels meaningfully contributes to a negative effect on climate change and that the use of fossil fuels has been a wonderfully positive thing for humanity and the Earth.
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
Partial List of Meaningless, Vague Phrases
Saturday, May 2, 2020
Partial List of The Best Ways to Die
- As a martyr
- In a noble sacrifice
- For a crime one didn’t commit
- By plunging into a black hole
- In vain fighting for a great cause
- During a peaceful sleep after a life well lived
Sunday, April 26, 2020
Partial List of Reasons I Can’t Take You Seriously
- You were giving Trump credit (completely dismissive) as the economy was very good 2017-2019, but completely dismissive (strongly blaming Trump) as the economy fell into depression-level problems in 2020. [related]
- You gave Obama credit (didn’t recognize a connection or basically denied it was the case) as the economy recovered following the Great Recession, but refuse to give Trump credit (basically attribute to Trump) as the economy is quite strong for the first three years of Trump’s presidency.
- You were pro (anti) war under Obama but are the opposite under Trump.
- You were fine with (up in arms about) Obama’s trips such as Hawaii and Michelle’s trip to Spain but are the opposite about Trump’s such as Mar-a-Lago.
- You were nonchalant (worried) about Obama’s extensions of executive power but the opposite about Trump’s.
- You were a strong supporter (opponent) of free trade but reversed positions when Trump came into office.
- You want to severely limit and control immigration (guns) based on a few tragic examples but you do not want to do so for guns (immigration).
- You identified and were upset with (lived in denial about) the corruption in the Obama administration but you deny (identify and are upset with) the corruption in the Trump administration.