Is the use of gas by Syria against its own population a vital American interest?
It’s all happening right before your eyes.
Here are the words:
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stableHeidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the tableDavid Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Freidrich HegelAnd Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as SchlegelThere’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya
’bout the raising of the wrist
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissedJohn Stuart Mill, of his own free will
On half a pint of shandy was particularly illPlato, they say, could stick it away
Half a crate of whiskey every dayAristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle
And Hobbes was fond of his dramAnd Rene Descartes was a drunken fart
“I drink, therefore I am.”
Reprinted from Instapundit.
A MUST-READ FOR POTENTIAL SNOWFLAKES: All Minus One, a beautifully illustrated and smartly abridged version of John Stuart Mill’s arguments for free speech in “On Liberty,” is just out at Heterodox Academy, which hopes it will become required reading for students before they enter college. Here’s a conversation about Mill — and why he’s more relevant than ever — with Richard Reeves, the Mills biographer who edited this book together with Jonathan Haidt.
Heterodox Academy has produced a new book based on John Stuart Mill’s famous essay On Liberty to make it accessible for the 21st century. Here’s what makes our edition special:
1) It’s just the second chapter (out of 5), because that chapter gives the best arguments ever made for the importance of free speech and viewpoint diversity;
2) We have reduced that chapter by 50% to remove repetitions and historical references that would be obscure today, producing a very readable 7000 word essay;
3) Editors Richard Reeves (a biographer of Mill) and Jon Haidt (a social psychologist) have written a brief introduction to link Mill and his time to the issues of our time, and
4) Artist Dave Cicirelli has created 16 gorgeous original illustrations that amplify the power of Mill’s metaphors and arguments.
If you would like to order a copy you can find our where at the link.
And for what it’s worth, John Stuart Mill also wrote the best economics book ever published, and for which there is a modern version as well if these are the kinds of things that interest you.
Another article for all you Keynesians out there: More Government Spending = Weaker Economic Performance. And the article notes this as well:
Why this might be you will never understand if you start from Y=C+I+G, but that’s all you are going to find in any macro text anywhere in the world.
Here’s the sub-head: Economists show increased research efforts are yielding decreasing returns. And if they mean negative returns, then I am with them all the way. Economic theory is at a lower level of competence today than in the 1850s. It is such a scandal, but once a subject matter falls into a hole the way economic theory has done, it is near on impossible for it to find its way out. The conclusions drawn from modern theory are literally classical fallacies. An economist raised any time between say 1776 and the 1930s would look at a modern text and disagree with almost every word. There would be almost no overlap between anything found in a modern text and a text written before 1930.
I wrote a paper, published by the skin of its teeth in 2015, on John Stuart Mill’s Fourth Proposition on Capital: “demand for commodities is not demand for labour”. You cannot increase the level of employment by increasing aggregate demand. Everyone once knew this. No one now does. Not one economist in a thousand can any longer understand what was plain as day for a century and a half. We keep growing because we keep inventing things. But the generation that is following behind us will find their living standards falling into a great pit, and the last place anyone will be able to find out why will be from economists.
I have mentioned this already, but perhaps another look might be of interest: What is the difference between Keynesian and classical economics? which is a reply I put up on Quora. Go have a look.
Then there’s this I did not so long ago on marginal analysis which, as presented in a modern text, is as near to empty of content as a theoretical demonstration can be. This is how I look at it which is also classical to its bootstraps.
The diagram represents my own version of the marginal revenue and marginal cost diagram. The traditional version has a series of lines many of which can never be realistically drawn (such as the demand curve), with the ultimate point to show the price-quantity configuration for the sale of a single product. The conclusion is that if a firm wishes to maximise profitability on the sale of some good or service, it will price the product just exactly where a lower or higher price would lead to a lower return over cost. Fatuous and useless, with many bits of the real world left out, such as the actual ability to work out the effect on revenue of changing a price. Modern micro truly is as useless as modern macro.
The above diagram – discussed fully in my Free Market Economics – brings in a number of crucial factors:
This is the way a business, or anyone else for that matter, makes a decision: in the present with only one’s own conjectures as a guide.
I will lastly mention a very nice note I received the other day:
Steve
Just finished reading your book Free Market Economics and wanted to congratulate you.
I have read plenty of economic texts, but yours is the best by far and helped crystalize a number of things that have been swirling around in my mind.
Great work.
It was truly appreciated. You can get a copy for yourself right here. I didn’t make any of it up myself. It is just a distillation of classical theory, the economics of John Stuart Mill and his contemporaries. It’s never been improved on and I doubt it ever will be. But so what. It is a massive improvement on that junk science we go around teaching today.
These are from Steve Hayward’s Week in Pictures. Not significant in any way, just funny.
Although this one might be a tad political:
My nitwit former friend out in California continues to send me articles from the media basically framed around how disastrous Donald Trump has been, is now and ever will be. Although he sends me one or two of these a day, I decided he was no longer my friend when he didn’t wish me a happy birthday since he obviously knows my address and thinks of me all the time. Kind of sad, really, but having become a wealthy, Porsche-driving, profit-maximising, employee-firing Silicon-Valley CEO of his own business, although also a refugee from 1956 communist Hungary, he sent me this the other day: Capitalism: A Disaster for All Seasons, from The Nation of all things. This is the sub-head which is really all you need to know:
For every San Francisco earthquake and Superstorm Sandy, some die—and others profit.
It’s almost as if they think capitalism causes earthquakes and hurricanes, and for all I know that is what they really believe. But why I mention this at all is something he just sent me this the other day: How Trump lost Ann Coulter. It’s from CNN so you already know it’s slanted and inane, but if they are willing to say a nice word about Ann, it must be truly terrible about PDT.
The right-wing rabble-rouser Ann Coulter recently declared at a talk at Columbia University that the President was a “shallow, lazy ignoramus” and that she’s now a former Trumper. “If he doesn’t have us anymore, that’s what he should be worried about,” Coulter later told The New York Times. “He’s not giving us what he promised at every campaign stop.”
It really is astonishing that Ann has gone so 180 on Trump, and if this is really what she thinks, the words “shallow, lazy ignoramus” really do apply to her. The fact of the matter is that there is very little PDT is trying to achieve that I do not agree with. That he is finding it difficult given the opposition from the Democrats, the media and half the Republican Party is incredible to watch, but that he is succeeding on much of it and making progress on most of it, still feels like a political miracle. I might imagine that one day I will come to the conclusion that it was too great a task for anyone to achieve, but I doubt it will ever cross my mind that anyone else could have done anywhere near as well.
AND SPEAKING OF HUNGARY AND CALIFORNIA: Interesting that all this is going on while Hungary and California are so in the news for exactly the same issue: open borders, on which they represent the two extremes of the moment. First Hungary where there was a landslide win for its border protecting President and his party.
Hungary’s Orban wins third term in power…
From the first story:
The rightwing nationalist prime minister projected himself as a savior of Hungary’s Christian culture against Muslim migration into Europe, an image which resonated with millions of voters, especially in rural areas.
“We have won, Hungary has won a great victory,” a jubilant Orban told a large crowd of cheering supporters near the Danube river in Budapest.
“There is a big battle behind us, we have won a crucial victory, giving ourself a chance to defend Hungary.”
According to preliminary results with 93 percent of votes counted, National Election Office data projected Fidesz to win 133 seats, a tight two-thirds majority in the 199-seat parliament. Nationalist Jobbik was projected to win 26 seats, while the Socialists were projected as third with 20 lawmakers.
And then this, a million miles from Silicon Valley if you aren’t interested in looking we have this today: California. Sh*thole if you will pardon the expression.
California is no longer the American Dream. For native born Americans, it is the American Nightmare. A cautionary tale of what happens when you combine open borders; a pathetic welfare state; and radical liberal politicians who see taxpayers as targets to be fleeced and illegal aliens as their core constituency.
44% of Californians don’t speak English at home. It is a foreign state inside America. Soon expect to see employment ads that say, “Americans not wanted.”
California is following “the Mexican model” – ie a population with a tiny sliver of super rich elites at the top…and everyone else is dirt poor. Just like Mexico, the middle class is becoming extinct in California. This is the express train to hell.
Thanks to illegal immigration (which is always a net negative)…thanks to the joys of diversity (which doesn’t always work)…thanks to liberal politicians and voters…
Here, just for emphasis, are some pictures to go with the text.
My nitwit former friend out in California continues to send me articles from the media basically framed around how disastrous Donald Trump has been, is now and ever will be. Although he sends me one or two of these a day, I decided he was no longer my friend when he didn’t wish me a happy birthday since he obviously knows my address and thinks of me all the time. Kind of sad, really, but having become a wealthy, Porsche-driving, profit-maximising-to-the-hilt Silicon-Valley CEO, although also a refugee from 1956 communist Hungary, he sent me this the other day: Capitalism: A Disaster for All Seasons, from The Nation of all things. This is the sub-head which is really all you need to know:
For every San Francisco earthquake and Superstorm Sandy, some die—and others profit.
It’s almost as if they think the capitalists cause the earthquakes and hurricanes, and for all I know that is what they really believe. But why I mention this at all is something he just sent me this the other day: How Trump lost Ann Coulter. It’s from CNN so you already know it’s slanted and inane, but if they are willing to say a nice word about Ann, it must be truly terrible about PDT.
The right-wing rabble-rouser Ann Coulter recently declared at a talk at Columbia University that the President was a “shallow, lazy ignoramus” and that she’s now a former Trumper. “If he doesn’t have us anymore, that’s what he should be worried about,” Coulter later told The New York Times. “He’s not giving us what he promised at every campaign stop.”
It really is astonishing that Ann has gone so 180 on Trump, and if this is really what she thinks, the words “shallow, lazy ignoramus” really do apply to her. The fact of the matter is that there is not a single thing PDT is trying to achieve that I do not agree with. That he is finding it difficult given the opposition from the Democrats, the media and half the Republican Party is incredible to watch, but that he is succeeding on much of it and making progress on all of it, still feels like a political miracle. I might imagine that one day I will come to the conclusion that it was too great a task for anyone to achieve, but I doubt it will ever cross my mind that anyone else could have done anywhere near as well.
And you know what? He might even succeed. As for the Ann Coulters of the world, these fair weather friends are political idiots of which there is an endless supply.
Law of Markets 