https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1459022959754956800?
It’s actually The University of Western Ontario, or at least it was.
This is the caption that comes with the tweet: “The Canadian government has gone full authoritarian with a federal vaccine mandate and Western University is goose-stepping right along!”
Some people will do anything to get out of class.
I received a letter from an old friend who asked:
I have a friend who is a writer and artist. One of his current projects is a novel. At one point he needs to explain opportunity cost. It recalled for me that you wrote a book for kids explaining the fundamental principles of economics.
Would be willing to share the text with us?
This was my reply.
I would of course be willing to share my text with you. The title is Economics for Infants. However, not sure you find opportunity cost discussed, at least not explicitly. However, there is always this you can look at (it can be ordered by the library and the paperback is pretty cheap):
Free Market Economics, Third Edition. An Introduction for the General Reader The Elgar webpage is here. And I do notice that Opportunity Cost is discussed on four separate occasions within the book, once even using a diagram. Highly recommended, if I do say so myself. In fact, I do say so myself.
I just put up a blog post referring to the book, which I will copy below. Here is what I said:
“From The switch to green energy can be the biggest bonanza in history.
“Australia is the best placed nation on earth to be the global winner in the net-zero world, with 672,000 jobs created and $2.1 trillion in economic activity generated by 2050.
“Jobs can be created by getting rid of technology. Economic activity can be driven forward by useless and non-productive forms of “investment”.
“But living standards can only rise if the value of output is greater than the value of the inputs used up. If you think massively increasing the cost of inputs through alternative forms of energy will increase value added, and therefore living standards, you are an economic incompetent. Value added is the core concept surrounding opportunity cost, which also necessitates understanding the economic meaning of cost within economics.
“In my economics text, Free Market Economics, the single most important chapter is the third, on Value Added. No other modern textbook that I know of actually discusses value added beyond a para or two, but without value added at the core of one’s grasp of economics, you will never understand a thing that matters.”
Which reminds me of this, which I may or may not ever have sent to you before: I, Mechanical Pencil: Why a socialist economy can never work. There you find this, which is near enough the core concept of opportunity cost as it is practised in the market:
“What prices must do is reflect how much something costs. And what information about costs does is help entrepreneurs work out which is the least costly way to produce whatever it is they produce. It is important to find the least costly way to produce because the fewer resources used up in making each particular good or service, the more resources are left over to produce something else. Keeping production costs down is essential to maintaining and building our prosperity. This is why prices matter so much. If prices are properly set in the market, the revenue received by each entrepreneur will cover all the costs of production. If every producer sets their own prices, then the prices charged for every input will provide the essential guidance to entrepreneurs on how to keep production costs down.”
Whether any of this ends up in the book I may never know.
The Institute of Economic Affairs in London [the IEA] has published an article of mine on Dealing with Covid-19 in Australia. Most of it will be old news for us in Australia but I end with two paras on what needs to be done now:
Covid is disappearing as a lethal problem and is rapidly fading back into the pack as a serious disease affecting any but a relatively small handful of the population. In fact, most of those who are positively tested, are simply asked to go home and quarantine for two weeks.
What must now occur is that the Covid dogs are called off, genuinely serious cases should be dealt with in hospital as would occur if it were a bad case of the flu. Other than that, we should go back to business as usual, at least as was usual prior to March 2020. There should be no vaccine passports. No mask mandates. Our borders should be open to travel, especially our state borders, whose closure has been particularly absurd. Individuals should be permitted to do what they feel is best for themselves, as we all get on with our lives.
Unless the plan is to lock us down forever until Covid disappears, there is no alternative but to open our borders and our economies while doing what we can to care for those whom the virus infects.
Aside from all of the normal reasons not to get the vax is that your life remains exactly the same either way. That will undoubtedly change if the likes of authoritarian fools like Dan Andrews have their way, but so far, not much matters since no one can go interstate, or overseas or even into a cafe. But in the midst of all this I received this letter:
Trust you guys are well. Here is an article you may want to discuss on your blog .
I keep thinking how frustrating and exhausting it must be for you .
And this was the article he sent: Early detection, treatment behind lower rate of mortality from rare AstraZeneca-related clots which is from our ABC. And let me tell you, having come from The ABC its credibility could not be lower. Can someone who thinks they know me really not see that anything from The ABC (or The Age, or even The Australian) will never shift my opinion on anything I care about by even a micro-inch?
And since no one is dying FROM Covid with or without the vax – although there are some undoubtedly dying WITH Covid – there seems little reason to take on the additional risks being vaxxed would bring. Why I should be any more exhausted or frustrated than anyone else, I also cannot fathom.
However, there is this that has popped up this morning in one of the all-in-for-the-vax media companies, this time The Herald Sun in Melbourne: Covid vaccine: How to respond to family members and friends who are anti-vaxxers. My first choice would be a polite form of GFYS, but no one ever raises it with me personally since I tend to follow this issue as closely as anyone, and receive a mass of material every day from people who are similarly concerned about both freedom and the health consequences of taking the vax. But if you would like to see the depths to which these people go, this is from the article. This is how one might respond to someone who says: “It’s been rushed through, it’s not safe”. I take it she means all of the vaxxines when she writes “it”. Her answer:
This is a clear piece of misinformation. Nothing about the vaccine compliance has been rushed.
Ms Hooker explains: “All that has been changed and sped up is red tape and bureaucratic processes. Normally it would take months and months to get human research ethics approvals just because committees don’t meet that often. In this case the committees would meet the next day.
It’s also because of open sharing of information globally because everyone is working towards the same goal. Scientists don’t need to keep their results to themselves to publish under their own name.”
And this is from “a medical ethics expert”. The reality is that these were of course rushed, at Warp speed as was said. And this has nothing to do with paperwork, but checking on their safety through clinical trials. Beyond that, no one, but no one has any idea of the effects of any of the vaxxes two-three-five years from now. What is known is that each of the vaxxes has been trialled in the past with very negative results.
Might also send you over to Small Dead Animals where they have some quite compelling videos of Australian protests which unfortunately I cannot work out how to put up front. But go to the link: You Can Feel Australia Getting Healthier. Australia really does seem to have a particularly stupid set of leaders at the moment.
Virtually everyone at these protests has been vaccinated in the past. But this time, there is so obvious a liars’ agenda in play that if you are not hesitant it may be you who are the idiot.
Apparently Real Rukshan is also real enough to have shown up in an article written by a genuine journalist: Independent video journalist Real Rukshan’s disturbing story of his arrest in Melbourne yesterday.
With the emphasis on the the word con in all its various meanings: New restrictions on prescribing ivermectin for COVID-19. Dated September 10, 2021.
Today, the TGA, acting on the advice of the Advisory Committee for Medicines Scheduling, has placed new restrictions on the prescribing of oral ivermectin. General practitioners are now only able to prescribe ivermectin for TGA-approved conditions (indications) – scabies and certain parasitic infections. Certain specialists including infectious disease physicians, dermatologists, gastroenterologists and hepatologists (liver disease specialists) will be permitted to prescribe ivermectin for other unapproved indications if they believe it is appropriate for a particular patient.
There is then this one might consider: From Glasgow protesters gather for ‘right to try’ different treatments.
Tonya Adams says she was treated by Dr. Turner using ivermectin and claims the treatment saved her life.
“I almost didn’t make it. He prescribed me the ivermectin–without the regimen he gave me I wouldn’t be here today,” said Adams.
Bureaucrats are people with no skin in any game they oversee. That has got to change.
What is one to make of this? Furious China issues bone-chilling warning subs deal could ‘make Australia a potential target for a NUCLEAR strike’.
Chinese state media has warned Australia will become a ‘potential target for a nuclear strike’ after it acquires nuclear-powered submarines.
As part of a new three-way alliance with the UK and US, Australia will be given the technology to build at least eight nuclear-powered – but not nuclear armed – submarines as the West counters China’s growing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the ‘AUKUS’ alliance ‘seriously damages regional peace and stability, intensifies the arms race, and undermines the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.’
There is also this to bear in mind.
China is believed to have between 250 and 350 nuclear weapons, compared to American’s arsenal of 5,800 and Russia’s total of 6,375.
In July satellite photos emerged which appeared to show China building a huge missile silo base in the desert town of Hami, northern Xinjiang province.
Researchers believe the site could expand to 110 silos, which can be filled an intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads.
Nuclear-POWERED submarines are not a nuclear threat to anyone. They are entirely defensive and can never be anything else. But threatening to aim nuclear weapons at Australia is not the actions of a peaceful neighbour under any circumstances whatsoever.
This is the statement William Jennings Bryant was to deliver at the end of The Scopes Trial on the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools in 1923. Having now come across this for the first time, I have a new respect of Bryant that I had never had before.
But as you read this, ask yourself whether any of this will have any grip on a people who are no longer Christian, and where their enemies on the left absolutely reject Biblical authority. Socialism is about the supposed equal sharing of what can be produced without any moral or spiritual guidance offered by the underlying philosophical framework. Socialism is now the ethos of the very rich who have no more interest in sharing what they have with others than the court of Louis XVI was interested in sharing with the peasantry of France in 1792. But in our day, our aristocrats pretend they are on the side of the peasantry which makes them utterly secure against a revolutionary tide. The speech is found here.
Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessel. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endanger its cargo. In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before. Man used to be content to slaughter his fellowmen on a single plane, the earth’s surface. Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times as bloody as it was before; but science does not teach brotherly love. Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future. If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene. His teachings, and His teachings alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world.
It is for the jury to determine whether this attack upon the Christian religion shall be permitted in the public schools of Tennessee by teachers employed by the state and paid out of the public treasury. This case is no longer local, the defendant ceases to play an important part. The case has assumed the proportions of a battle-royal between unbelief that attempts to speak through so-called science and the defenders of the Christian faith, speaking through the legislators of Tennessee. It is again a choice between God and Baal; it is also a renewal of the issue in Pilate’s court.
Again force and love meet face to face, and the question, “What shall I do with Jesus?” must be answered. A bloody, brutal doctrine–evolution–demands, as the rabble did 1,900 years ago, that He be crucified. That cannot be the answer of this jury representing a Christian state and sworn to uphold the laws of Tennessee. Your answer will be heard throughout the world; it is eagerly awaited by a praying multitude. If the law is nullified, there will be rejoice wherever God is repudiated, the savior scoffed at and the Bible ridiculed. Every unbeliever of every kind and degree will be happy. If, on the other hand, the law is upheld and the religion of the school children protected, millions of Christians will call you blessed and, with hearts full of gratitude to God, will sing again that grand old song of triumph:
“Faith of our fathers, living still, In spite of dungeon, fire and sword; O how our hearts beat high with joy Whene’er we hear that glorious word–Faith of our fathers–Holy faith; We will be true to thee till death!”
How will a modern conservative prosecute the case for a moral order when no moral code beyond Marxism exists for the vast majority of the population?
A discussion of The Scopes Trial is found here in which Bryant’s speech is partically quoted, and not surprisingly with only an entirely veiled reference to Biblical beliefs. This is what is quoted, and this is about as far as one might go in the modern world to reference the teachings of the Bible.
Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessels. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endanger its cargo….If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene. His teachings, and His teachings alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world.
No political leader in the West would be able to say anything like that and continue to hold office.
From Lucianne.com right now.
I thought about putting the word “vote” in quotes, but Democrats could not care less. And whatever may happen, it won’t affect anyone within the US for at least five years, so why worry? We should worry, but even we have at least five years before whatever happens happens. It won’t be good, but che sera, sera as they say.
Law of Markets 