Links

I’m Done

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , ,

Whew. Finals are over. Expect a lot more from me over the next little while. Nothing tonight, of course (I’m gonna sleeeep), but more is coming.

Thanks for all of your thoughtful comments and criticisms. I’ve got a link for the evening, and it’s an old article (2001) from the Economist. An excerpt:

The affinity of totalitarianism and economic isolation was obvious in the case of the Soviet Union and communist Eastern Europe; it is still plain today in the case of North Korea, say. But democracies are capable of oppression too. It would therefore be wrong to conclude that integration is undesirable merely because it limits the power of government, even if the government concerned is democratic. One needs to recognise that some constraints on democracy are desirable, and then to ask whether the constraints imposed by markets are too tight.

These issues are rarely, if ever, addressed by the critics of globalisation: it is simpler to deplore the notion of “profits before people”. The sceptics either insist, or regard it as too obvious even to mention, that the will of the people, democratically expressed, must always prevail. This is amazingly naive. Even the most elementary account of democracy recognises the need for checks and balances, including curbs on the majoritarian “will of the people”. Failing those, democracies are capable of tyranny over minorities.

The sceptics are terribly keen on “the people”. Yet the idea that citizens are not individuals with different goals and preferences, but an undifferentiated body with agreed common interests, defined in opposition to other monolithic interests such as “business” or “foreigners”, is not just shallow populism, it is proto-fascism. It is self-contradictory, as well. The sceptics would not hesitate to call for “the people” to be overruled if, for instance, they voted for policies that violated human rights, or speeded the extermination of endangered species, or offended against other values the sceptics regard as more fundamental than honouring the will of the majority.

Read the whole thing. I don’t agree with everything in it, but in my opinion it is a damning indictment of the anti-globalist movement. A return to the good old days of yesteryear would have catastrophic consequences for the world. See, especially, Dr Delacroix’s writings on the virtuous benefits of globalization and the self-defeating measures of protectionism.

Around the web: other civil libertarian perspectives on privacy

muricaderp Links, Politics , , , ,

1) Scroll back through Umair Haque’s Twitter feed to June 10 for a series of salty, pointed critiques of David Brooks’ recent hatchet job-cum-subsidiarity Jeremiad.

2) Three essays from Jacob Bacharach:

A) “Peeping Thomism,” an accidentally timely call for, among other things, hiring managers to grow up and cut out their censoriousness about stuff that their applicants post on social media: “But, says the Director of Human Resources and the Career Counselor, social media is public; you’re putting it out there. Yes, well, then I’m sure you won’t mind if I join you guys at happy hour with this flip-cam and a stenographer. Privacy isn’t the responsibility of individuals to squirrel away secrets; it’s the decency of individuals to leave other’s lives alone.”

B) A calm but firm call for his own demographic to stop falsely denigrating the less educated (Bacharach is a novelist by trade).

C) On David Brooks, his “conservatism,” and the amazing entitlement of certain posh people.

3) From Karen Garcia, a week-in-review summary of the PRISM bombshell. Garcia is a top-notch blogger whose archives I’ve been combing since discovering a link in one of her comments on Brooks’ “unmediated man” column. Other essays especially worth reading, on tangential but related topics, include her back story about Cornwall-on-Hudson homeboy David Petraeus and her evisceration of the covert classism of the Obamas’ 2012 Christmas message to the nation.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , ,
  1. Letting Nelson Mandela Go
  2. Nothing New About China’s New Grand Strategy
  3. Cambodia’s Orphan-Industrial Complex
  4. The Rise of Nullification

Just Testing…

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links ,

…the new link to our Facebook page. You guys can check it out here.

PS: How Companies Learn Your Secrets.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , ,
  1. Implementing ObamaCare: “Grate” expectations
  2. Further problems with ObamaCare implementation
  3. US Health Care System Doesn’t Need Price Controls, It Needs Price Signals
  4. Australians of reddit: What North American Animal Scares the F*** Out of You?
  5. Distribution of train lines around the world
  6. The End of Europe’s Welfare States

  7. Dear Class of 2013: You’re pampered, privileged and oversexed—but at least your employment prospects are dim

Around the web: class, work, and a call for the totalitarian oppression of servants

muricaderp Economics, Law, Liberty, Links, Politics

In the course of a recent internet search for “lazy millennials,” “entitled millennials,” “milliennial brats,” and the like (call it an effort at self-diagnosis, if you wish), I came across one of the most biting and clearheaded blogs I’ve found to date covering work and the workplace. Normally, everything that I find on these subjects in any medium is some combination of banal, derivative, sycophantic, foolish, and intellectually dishonest. Perhaps this is in part because, although I disclose this at some risk to my credibility, I follow John Tesh on Pinterest (but mainly to enjoy him ironically and hipster-like; he, and Wilford Brimley, are my PBR). Tesh, however, does not set the lower bound for workplace advice; browsing workplace-themed blogs at random or the book section of any office supply chain is weirder and more disgusting. Michael O. Church, then, is a welcome relief from the endless drivel, and a fine writer and political thinker to boot.

One of Church’s favorite concepts is “libertarian socialism.” Outwardly, this may sound as ridiculous as the UK being governed by a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, but what he proposes, a government safety net beneath a dynamic private sector, is exactly what most Western governments have attempted, with varying degrees of success, since the Second World War. Church’s proposal avoids by a wide margin the sclerosis of command economies (which, in extreme instances such as North Korea’s, causes an outright death spiral), but it also renders moot the sclerosis of large, ossified corporations, with their legions of marginal-to-useless bureaucrats, layers of political intrigue, and penchant for regulatory capture. His model is for an advanced sort of Jeffersonian yeomanry as an alternative to, and eventually a replacement for, the Hamiltonian model that predominates today. Here’s one of his critiques of the current system: Continue reading →

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links
  1. How Parents (kind of) Around the World Describe Their Children
  2. Why Indian-Americans dominate Spellings Bees
  3. Fracking is Pitting OPEC Members Against Each Other. It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Bunch of Cartel Members.
  4. A Closer Look at Botswana’s Developments
  5. Antarctica without its Ice Caps

Around the Web: Disappearances

muricaderp History, Links, Politics , , , , ,

1. Ron Unz, founder and editor of The American Conservative, skewers the mainstream American media for dropping the ball on all sorts of major scoops, including:

2. Richard Nixon’s abandonment of hundreds of surviving American prisoners of war after the end of hostilities, at a time when he had declared that all surviving POW’s had been repatriated; and

3. John McCain’s exceptionally weird and disturbing role in the decades-long stonewalling of investigations into the fate of these men and efforts to repatriate any survivors.

4. On a separate but similar topic, a discussion of some possible fates of Indian independence leader and Axis collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose, aka Netaji, officially died in a plane crash in Taiwan, but is widely believed to have died in the Soviet Gulag, to have disappeared into civilian life in asylum in the Soviet Union, and to have lived into his eighties as a “mysterious holy man” in Uttar Pradesh.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links, Politics , , , , , , , , ,
  1. Are you a liberal imperialist? Stephen Walt asks the question and lists ten signs that you may be one.
  2. Will Obama attack Syria in the face of so many domestic scandals?
  3. Libertarians care about more than just themselves. Bryan Caplan explains why.
  4. Big Country Blues.
  5. Great post on civil society and its work exposing police corruption. Don’t forget that police departments are now heavily unionized…
  6. Human Rights and Democracy Statistics. A short, informative video by a Swedish epidemiologist and statistician.
  7. Ha. Ha.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , , ,
  1. Danny Huizinga riffs off of Dr Gibson’s article on mathematical models in economics
  2. Longtime reader –Rick shares some eye candy of another kind
  3. Shang Jun and Wu Xia, advocates for free trade in China, take EU protectionists to task
  4. French philosopher and economist Guy Sorman asks What is the West?
  5. Economist Scott Sumner on Swedish liberaltarianism

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History, Links , , ,
  1. A Brief History of IRS Political Targeting.
  2. Listen to the fascists sing.
  3. Philosopher Kevin Vallier’s response to a hatchet job on FA Hayek in a stale (and apparently desperate) Left-wing publishing outlet.
  4. Political scientist Samuel Goldman’s response to the same hatchet job.
  5. The aforementioned hatchet job (in The Nation).
  6. Monkey Gone to Heaven.

Climate Change Worse (No Matter How You Look At It)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Links , ,

In some places, it’s much warmer than usual. That’s so many instances of climate change, of course.

I some places, it’s much colder than usual. That’s also evidence of climate change.

Good technical article in the Wall Street Journal of  5/8/13  to remind us that  CO2 is plant food. The more CO2 the more plants, and the more food for humans. It’s by NASA astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt and W. Happer, a professor of Physics at Princeton.

Words of Wisdom

Brandon Christensen Economics, Links ,

From Tyler Cowen:

This is a post about Jamaica and also about macroeconomic inference.  If you are tempted to write a post in response, criticizing me on the grounds that I am postulating a historical equivalence between the United States and Jamaica, or if you try to cover your tracks with semantics, by suggesting that I am “implying” such an equivalence, or implying some other mistake, or if you are committing any number of other fallacies or equivocations in response to this post, put on the dunce cap and go to the back of the class.  Please consider this a general warning to be attached to everything written by me on this site.

I just liked this because Dr Cowen is usually very polite, and if there is one thing I enjoy in this world, it is watching polite people dish out some wholesome snark casserole for the masses to devour. Read the whole thing.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , ,

Hey all, I’m entering into a tough stretch at school, so my posting will be minimal for the next little while. Before I get to the cool links I’ve been reading, I thought I’d highlight Evgeniy’s recent piece on the chemical warfare taking place in Syria. If I am not mistaken, it is the rebels – al-Qaeda and Hizbollah – who are responsible for using chemical weapons. These are the same rebels that Dr Delacroix advocates the United States not only support morally, but militarily as well.

You can spot weak reasoning – morally as well as logically – when a person starts to hurl epithets like ‘isolationist’ or ‘pacifist’ around even after the other side insists that their position is anything but.

  1. Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware.
  2. China: Year Zero. 1979 and the Birth of an Economic Miracle.
  3. “Of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor.”
  4. GMO Opponents are the Climate Skeptics of the Left. Not quite. Climate skepticism is rooted in scientific inquiry and politics, whereas the anti-GMO backlash is rooted in superstition. Nevertheless, a good read.

Y’all have a great week!

Interesting Thread on Reddit Between True Believers and the Devil

Brandon Christensen Links

You can find it here. As always with reddit, pay attention to the dates and times.