Courtiers and trappings. When the founders drafted the Constitution, they ignored the main evil — the king was not dead. We are still in the European mindset that arose out of the Medieval Age and the dementia of Hobbes.
Category: Nobody Asked, But
Boys Will Be Boys
We anarchists tend to think that government itself is bad, that a plethora of bureaucrats are bad, that politicians are creeps — and so they are. But the worst part of any human endeavor are those who cannot follow objective, natural rules of not invading the lives of others, in narcissistically treating any circumstance as their Xanadu.
Crisis Management
Recently, Forbes magazine published an article listing four rules of crisis management. The rules were illustrated with examples from the current hullabaloo over the confirmation of the appointment of a Supreme Court Justice.
Evolution by Learning
Any person has two sources of stimuli by which she gains knowledge, the experiential and the referential. And in both sources, there are granules of true or false information — code versus noise.
Evolution by Voluntaryism
I recently wrote about how choices in education (not the institution, but the natural process) arise in the individual, only to ripple among the species. I am not, however, promoting collectivism.
Chaos and Order
If you stand for a bit of contemplation, on the edge of my driveway, looking into the first part of the forest, a forest that stretches for 80 acres, and at the outer edge of which my woods conjoin with the woods of neighbors, you will see what most would call “chaos.”
War Game Florence
Why do soldiers and their equipment blossom like dandelions whenever there is a natural disaster? Could it be that the state can never resist an opportunity to show who is in charge?
The Good Place
This morning I was listening to an older but still excellent iTunes University segment from Robert Higgs. It got me to think about markets versus government. Perhaps we think too often of these as mutually exclusive spheres. But what if Murphy’s Law is true — that if things can go wrong, they will?
Causes and Consequences
Again, I will remind myself and the reader that Ockham’s Razor, while championing simplicity, is actually a call for the optimum. My understanding of Friar William’s admonition is that the simplest explanation which fits all the facts is the most likely to be true. There is implied in this that the explanation also must be complex enough to fit all the facts.
Anonymous
The “senior official” who penned the anonymous opinion / editorial piece, published by the New York Times, is not a “coward,” but he or she is certainly a goner. The tragedy is that we should be hailing this person as a hero, not hunting this person like an escaped convict.