Utopia, you are standing in it!

When I debated Amy Wax a few years back, I noted that one issue with conservative demands to return to a different family regime is that most people don’t want to do it. I noted that in American society, you can definitely join a group with strong norms against pre-marital sex and strong against divorce. It’s called the Church of Later Day Saints – the Mormons. Even though people are free to join this religion, it remains small. According to this Pew report, it’s only 1.7% of the population. And it’s no mystery – the LDS requires a lot of investment in terms of time and money.

I was reminded of the left wing version of this point: socialists will often argue that kibbutz, or communally organized farms and residences in Israel, show that an egalitarian society is possible and it works. My response is similar: there is…

I recently had the pleasure of attending a workshop on Austrian economics at Texas Tech University. The conveners have asked people to reflect on Austrianism and how that tradition addresses sociality. Some of us offered criticisms while others explored and expanded Austrian ideas. In addition to writing my own piece, which uses spontaneous order theory to think about autonomy, I spent a lot of time thinking about the social position of Austrianism within the economics profession.

Classic Austrianism (1800s-1940s): There was a time when Austrianism was a Big Deal in economics. The early figures were extremely influential and their ideas were assimilated into the mainstream. For example, Carl Menger was a big proponent of marginal utility theory, which is now econ 101. Another example is FA Hayek. In polls of economists, his article, The Use of Information in Society,remains one of the most mentioned and it provides the standard…

I thought that I was done discussing the debate on intersectionality theory between Jacob Levy, Phil Magness and myself. Well, 200 Proof Liberals (a new successor blog to Bleeding Heart Libertarians) has a post by Jess Flanigan. She argues that there are multiple version of intersectionality theory and that it’s easy for libertarians to accept the mellow version, which they never opposed anyway, but there’s a serious issue with the more hard core version:

Rojas’s point is that it’s a mistake to equivocate between these two conceptions of intersectionality. If the theory (T) refers to the first definition (T1), then it doesn’t seem like classical liberals should oppose it, but it’s also not clear how many classical liberals do oppose it. If it’s the second definition (T2), then they should clearly oppose it because T2 is directly opposed to classical liberalism. Levy doesn’t make the case that T2 is…

In the history of commerce, there’s never been a financial scam that comes anywhere near rivalling subsidised wind power.

There aren’t many businesses where a major source of revenue is being paid to NOT produce what it is that your business is meant to produce.

STT is at a loss to find many other current examples that match the profligacy of paying what are called “constraint payments” to wind power outfits, so that they won’t deliver power to the grid when the wind is blowing.

And were not talking small beer, either. Over the last decade, British wind power outfits have collected over £650,000,000.

We covered the story in this recent post: Priceless: Scots Forced to Pay Wind Farms £650,000,000 To NOT Generate Power

Now, here’s another take on what simply has to be the biggest scam in history.

Sutherland windfarm operators paid a total of £63m to turn off turbines