If there is one lesson that everyone should learn from studying even the most elementary economics, and if there is one major intellectual gift that sound economists gave humanity, then it is precisely this vaccine against Orwellian superstition, according to which destruction contains any productive value.
Tag: value
I Do Not Want a “Well Behaved” Child
“Whoever wrote this and did the research is confused and did not define terms accurately. I spanked, not hit, all nine of my children and they do not hit. Never have. My grown children are well adjusted, well behaved, loving kids. I receive positive compliments about them often. Spanking is quite misunderstood.”
Crops, Currency, and Crypto
Peoples in places with a single staple grain, harvested at the same time once each year, were easy for states to subjugate and coerce. Partly for this reason, most humans resisted extensive grain farming, even several thousand years after it had been invented, and opted instead for what Scott calls a complex ‘web’ of nutrients.
Blaming Progress for So-Called Inequality
It’s bad enough when liberals are Luddites, but it’s far worse when they’re anti-tech because not everyone can have it. If they had their way, never mind cell phones or flat-screen TVs: they’d have torn down the first hut that anyone built, demanding that it be available to all instead of just the few.
Will Virtual Worlds Destroy Humanity?
People who become consumed with virtual worlds do so because they find there the hormonal rewards that are lacking elsewhere. I’ve heard it said by such a person that he’s a hero and champion in his video game, but outside his life is complete shit. How does that happen?
Immigration and Social Engineering
Social engineers of all parties and persuasions talk as though an economy is some kind of mechanism to be centrally fine-tuned and overhauled occasionally according to a plan. Even those who style themselves free enterprisers display the central-planning mentality when it comes to immigration.
Tailor Your Ideology Into Relevance
PROPOSITION: Until libertarians tailor their ideology and their actions to accommodate the common people’s nativism, nationalism, ethnic bigotry, and support for U.S. imperialism abroad and police brutality at home, they can never gain enough adherents to become a serious factor in American political life.
Lessons from Building Praxis – Part 11
There’s a fatal flaw in your plan. Your business model, or market, or pricing, or something about your crazy idea is going to stop you dead in your tracks. Of course. That’s probably why no one else has done it yet. Or maybe that’s why you’re going to succeed where they failed.
Lessons from Building Praxis – Part 8
Alright, the company is real now. But your product requires some resources that only come when you have commitments from customers… and customers require a product before they’ll commit to anything. It might be time to sell something you don’t yet have so you can get the resources necessary to build it.
Math Conundrum
Given the profundity of their differences, how could you devise rules that would separate two uniquely born creatures for purposes of making one a master and the other a slave? How do you decide that the person with the redder skin must forfeit land to the person with less red skin? Color itself, if not infinitely variable, has as many possibilities as there are living individuals on the Earth.