Picking up trash and/or glass has become a routine now, and I’ve trained my mind to give myself a pat on the back when I do this small little act of improving the world. I know it seems ridiculous. But I know that just with that small action in the beginning of my day, I defeat a little bit of the laziness behind my failure to do good elsewhere.
Tag: action
The Dangerous Deficit in Trade Understanding
I was chatting with my tobacconist the other day — I have no rabbi, no priest, no minister, no imam, no chiropractor, and no lawyer, but I do have a tobacconist — when it struck me that my trade deficit with his shop is astronomical. How could I have let this happen?
U.S. War Making: What’s in It for You?
You pay for all of this endless death and destruction, average American, but you get less than nothing out of it. In short, you are a sap for evil and designing intriguers. If you are reflexively “supporting the troops,” you might want to reconsider playing the fool and having your intelligence insulted daily in the process.
The Senate vs. Facebook: Beware Untrustworthy Partners, Revisited
Back in early 2015, when then-president Barack Obama signed an executive order on cybersecurity “information sharing,” I pointed out in a column that the federal government is the last organization any sane human being would trust to secure the privacy of his or her data. My opinion was swiftly and irrefutably vindicated: That same year produced revelations of government database breaches compromising the personal information of 22 million former government employees, 330,000 taxpayers, and 191 million voters.
Tell the Truth
Mark Twain wrote, “When in doubt, tell the truth.” That seems, on its face, to be simple enough, but what does it mean? We live in a land of lawyers, where what is the truth becomes more and more a matter for speculation. POTUS has labeled a whole genre of purported information as “Fake News.” But what does that mean? Does it mean news that he doesn’t like, or does it mean misinformation for which determinate proof of falsity exists?
Chicago
Now that I’ve been home a few days, back from Chicago, I ask myself, “How does it all work?” And I keep coming back to self-ordering and the institutionalizing of individuality. Chicago works one human encounter at a time, one negotiated transaction at a time. Mises would be happy to know that the molecules of this economy behaved according to the natural laws of human action.
America Needs More Robin Hoods
Robin Hood is a model of an ethical outlaw. He broke bad laws by doing what was right for the right reasons. His story has been misrepresented. In the original tellings he didn’t “rob from the rich and give to the poor,” but took back property that had been stolen through taxation and returned it to its rightful owners.
The Philosophical Toolbox
I’m not saying that philosophy as a whole is without contradiction, however through years of weeding through different philosophies and theories I was able to find what works best for me. A collection of tools with which anyone can use to truly test whether an idea, concept, law, or edict is just, fair, and equitable. In no particular order I’d like to present a few of the tools I use use when trying to make a consistent, rational, and logical judgement or claim.
Statism’s First Casualty Is the Truthful Use of Language
States engage not only in conquest, plunder, and oppression, but also—in order to create conditions in which the populace is rendered less likely to resist a state’s abuses or rebel against it—in pervasive bamboozlement. Those who support the state ideologically tend to engage in chronic misrepresentation of what the state does and how it does it. So, not only war—the characteristic state action—but statism in general makes truth the first casualty of its claims, proposals, programs, and projects.
First They Came for Backpage
In 2016, after a court slapped down the attempts of Kamala Harris (D-CA), then attorney general of her state and now a US Senator, to prosecute Backpage for “pimping,” I suggested that merely dismissing the charges was not enough. I am still of that opinion.