Contrary to popular belief, however, market failure theory is also a reproach to every existing government. How so? Because market failure theory recommends specific government policies – and actually-existing governments rarely adopt anything like them.
Tag: world
Why Be Good? One (Self-Interested) Reason
Remember when you helped that poor person, visited that sick person, comforted that lonely person? I doubt you went out afterwards seeing more of the badness in humanity and the world. We control our experience of life and program it with our actions, so we benefit by choosing to cast clear light.
How to Confront Big Changes in the World
Whether the world is being disrupted and displaced at a frantic pace or not isn’t the relevant question. What about your life? What’s happening there? What do you want to happen there? How can you work with changes in the world to help rather than hinder those goals?
Rainwater’s Motivated Reasoning
If a brilliant, eminent, and mainstream scholar of the 1960s could be right for such wrong reasons, the brilliant, eminent, and mainstream scholars of today could easily be mired in their own brand of motivated reasoning. Indeed, so could you. Or me. There’s no easy remedy, but the first step is being hyper-aware that we have a problem.
Going the Way of MySpace
Take the tech you’re using right now – social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Reddit are behind the times. People don’t want products shoved in their faces or domineering policing policies. Ads and bans are way too common on social media today. There are options.
You Probably Don’t Know Your Greatest Fears
Maybe the things we fear most are not the things that scare us, but the tasks which we do not imagine to be possible. And it’s only when we push the limits of the possible that we can learn more about these deeper fears.
Teasing, or Being an Asshole?
Teasing is a very delicate and almost odd activity. It can be used as a means of strengthening a relationship and having a good time, but it also is used as a veneer to jerk people around. Sometimes we even think it is one while it is kind of another, and the hardest thing to analyze is when it is truly both at the same time.
Social Events No Place For Politics
Personally, I don’t think social occasions are any place for politics. Yet politics will crop up in the most devious ways and in the least appropriate places. Having a libertarian in the mix helps unite all the pro-government people against the one who can’t embrace their government extremism. It’s our sacrifice for the cause of world peace.
A Tip of the Hat to the Forgotten Defenders of 1939-40
War is an evil, but it takes some virtue to put up resistance to tyranny. So there is some virtue to remembering the people who resisted Germany on April 9th, 1940, and on all of the ill-fated defensive fronts of 1939-40.
Incarnation: the Forgotten Second Step of Reading a Book
After going out on my own as a young man, I’ve stumbled on, chased down, or survived a range of adventures in human consciousness and action. Those things in books have actually come into my real, non-library life. I’ve learned something from all of this: you haven’t really finished reading a book until you lived it.