Published 2014-03-04
click here to view
Blog
International Trade – THE IOWA CAR CROP
Steven Landsburg, The Armchair Economist
THE IOWA CAR CROP
http://www.walkerd.people.cofc.edu/Readings/Trade/iowacarcrop.pdf
“International trade is nothing but a form of technology. The fact that there is a place called Japan, with people and factories, is quite irrelevant to Americans’ well-being. To analyze trade policies, we might as well assume that Japan is a giant machine with mysterious inner workings that convert wheat into cars.”
Thoughtful Article on Immigration
From:
Social Theory and Practice
Volume 36, Issue 3, July 2010
by: Michael Huemer
Is There a Right to Immigrate?
Immigration restrictions violate the prima facie right of potential immigrants not to be subject to harmful coercion. This prima facie right is not neutralized or outweighed by the economic, fiscal, or cultural effects of immigration, nor by the state’s special duties to its own citizens, or to its poorest citizens. Nor does the state have a right to control citizenship conditions in the same way that private clubs may control their membership conditions.
Click here for full article: Is There a Right to Immigrate?
Another reason to always remember that “The End Do Not Justify the Means”
From The New York Times:
The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson From Auschwitz
How a single episode of a 1973 BBC series taught a young boy one of the most powerful moral lessons of the 20th century.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/the-dangers-of-certainty/
Thanks to Barbara Scolnick for providing the link.
Ivan Eland writes: Gates Memoirs Illustrate How Militaristic the U.S. Has Become
Americans lavish praise on the military largely out of guilt from standing by and letting their politicians send the armed forces to pointless wars in foreign hellholes.
Worth Reading
Insanity is knowing what not to do but doing it anyway
The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?… And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we’d achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq…. All of a sudden you’ve got a battle you’re fighting in a major built-up city, a lot of civilians are around, significant limitations on our ability to use our most effective technologies and techniques…. Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq…. Now what kind of government are you going to establish? Is it going to be a Kurdish government, or a Shi’ia government, or a Sunni government, or maybe a government based on the old Baathist Party, or some mixture thereof? You will have, I think by that time, lost the support of the Arab coalition that was so crucial to our operations over there.
– Dick Cheney, Speech to the Discovery Institute [1992]
Thanks to
Future of Freedom Foundation for supplying this text.
Ben Shapiro tries to answer – “Why Socialism Is on the Rise”
Why Socialism Is on the Rise
By Ben Shapiro · Jan. 8, 2014
Brian Wright Ordeal in Northville
My friend Brian Wright tells of a recent interaction with the law in Northville MI.
Casting of Ant Colony
Social Justice
At Bleeding Hearts Libertarians
there is a lot of discussion about the importance of Social Justice, rectification of past injustices, and the need for establishing institutions that maximizes Social Justice.
My take:
A happy life is a journey not a destination. The initial condition for each person should be when that person declares emancipation from the parents. Any injustice that is present at that point is due to the parents conceiving and raising the person in an unjust world. Rectification for injustices before emancipation should be ignored.
We should consider the world at the transition from dependence on our parents as our initial condition, and enjoy developing the best path to seek happiness from there. Otherwise we are filled with envy, and in turmoil trying to seek retribution for historical injustices.