Episode 370 has Skyler giving his commentary on the following aphorisms written by Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski: “A fool believes in designing markets. A person of reason believes in marketing designs.”; “A consistent freedom lover is an anarchist in the making.”; “A fool deplores the fact that without the state, the poor would be at the mercy of individual charity. A person of reason delights in the fact that without the state, the poor wouldn’t be at the mercy of institutional violence.”; “Happiness: fulfillment without boredom.”; “A nationalist is someone who praises domestic illusions out of fear of confronting foreign realities.”; “A seeming ontological nihilist believes that nothing really exists. A real ontological nihilist believes that nothing only seems to exist.”
Tag: markets
Krugman and Growth Agnosticism
Krugman‘s apparent embrace of this growth agnosticism is doubly puzzling. After a lifetime of study, a brilliant Nobel laureate still lacks anything useful to say about fostering growth? How is that even possible?
Clarification of Misnomer Terminology
You’re not “progressive.” You’re RE-gressive. You’re anti-progress. You actively seek the destruction of progress and freedoms that have taken literally thousands of years of bloodshed, toil, suffering, and sacrifice to bring even this far.
Executive Orders: This is Trump’s Brain on Drugs
Healthcare would be cheaper, better, and more accessible if government got its nose out of the matter entirely — but failing that, three of these four orders make good sense. They’re also a great litmus test. They tell us who really supports freer markets in healthcare and who just pays lip service to the notion while advocating crony capitalism in service to Big Pharma.
Progressive Policies Keep Failing
I laughed when I saw The Washington Post headline: “Minneapolis had progressive policies, but its economy still left black families behind.” The media are so clueless. Instead of “but,” the headline should have said, “therefore,” or “so, obviously.” Of course, progressive policies failed! They almost always do.
Contra The Short, Simple Dismissal Of Libertarianism: Economics and Markets (31m) – Episode 330
Episode 330 has Skyler giving his commentary on the subtopic “Economics and Markets” from Mike Huben‘s “The Short, Simple Dismissal of Libertarianism“. He writes, “99% of libertarianism is obviously untrue or unacceptable for one or more of these reasons… How can we know that so easily? Here are some simple principles that make it obvious.”
Krikorian’s “Category Error”
During our last debate, an audience member asked Mark Krikorian if his arguments for restricting immigration of foreigners were also arguments for restricting the child-bearing of natives. You might think that Mark would insist that native babies are somehow better than foreign adults. How hard could it possibly be to craft such an argument? However, Mark adamantly refused to compare the worths of different kinds of people. Instead, he informed the questioner that his question was based on a “category error.”
The Problems We Must Solve Are Too Important to Reduce to Left vs. Right Politics
When considering a way forward, the discussion initially seems to be complicated because there are a lot of things that have gone wrong in the aftermath of George Floyd’s tragic death.
True Authority, Pandemics, Memento Mori, & Feminism (14m) – Episode 311
Episode 311 has Skyler giving his commentary on the following topics: where true authority and leadership comes from and why politicians don’t have it; the arbitrary classification of pandemics; how Stoicism prepares us for illness; the feminist creative energy and markets; and more.
Market Needs Freedom to Flourish
The world’s economy is being damaged by this pandemic, or, more accurately, it’s being damaged by government reactions to the pandemic. The damage is adding up; getting worse with time. The only questions are: How bad is the damage going to be? And how long will it take to recover? I don’t know the answers;…