Utopia, you are standing in it!

It is my great pleasure to finally fulfill my earlier promise to blog about professor Ronald H. Coase (1910 – 2013) in my Great Minds of Our Time series.

As I blogged earlier, “Here is prof. Coase’s 2003 Coase Centennial Speech (500MB QuickTime file, recommend downloading it before you watch it) from Ronald Coase Institute’s online material section.” I now can say I have watched or listened to the video more than three times now, and I am sure I will still learning from it when I watch it again.

I am going to use a different approach to blog about professor Ronald H. Coase for this Great Minds of Our Time entry. Here is my Top 10 list,

1. Ronald is a really funny and sharp witted man as we clearly can see from his 2003 Coase Centennial Speech.
2. Well, he does have a Nobel…

In his book Intellectuals and Society, Dr. Thomas Sowell points out that we live in times where intellectuals have quite a bit of influence and he provides an in depth look at the intellectual class.

According to Sowell, the high point of intellectual influence was the period between the 1960’s and 1980’s. However, intellectuals somewhat regained influence under the Obama Administration. Sowell also had something to say in his book about environmentalists too. He states:

Everything from economic central planning to environmentalism epitomizes the belief that third party elites know best and should be empowered to over-ride the decisions of others.

Nowhere was this more apparent when Paul Ehrlich advocated for policies geared to shrink populations by enforced sterilization based on his irrational claim that the availability of Earth’s resources to feed people would soon plummet due to overpopulation. Worst part about it, Ehrlich still predicts doom is right…

Otmar Issing in this Proj Synd piece says there is no thing as Green monetary policy:

“Haredim” refers to ultra-Orthodox Jews, who constitute over 10% of the population of Israel. There are also many in New York State. They willingly live a cloistered life, having very little contact with other communities or even with less orthodox Jews.  In fact, they’re the most cloistered religious community I know of, though Jehovah’s Witnesses and some Islamic communities can be pretty cloistered, with all of these having the practice of disowning those who leave the faith.

The worst part of all such groups, and especially the Haredim, is their inculcation of the religion in children who never have a choice. This propagandizing, and forcing children to live in a restricted way, is considered by Richard Dawkins to be child abuse, and I agree. If I had my way, children wouldn’t be forced to adopt a religious belief until they had the maturity to choose, but that’s hardly…

I like to think I made this up myself, but I suspect that somebody—I can’t remember who—gave me this idea. It goes something like this:

You can gauge someone’s ideological credibility by examining their reaction to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. 

That is, if someone respects Hirsi Ali for her activities—activities that have put her life in danger from extremists Muslims—her ideas, her eloquence, and her dedication, they’re likely to have views that are, in general, ideologically compatible with my own. If, on the other hand, they decry her for “Islamophobia” or for irrelevant issues like her marriage to a conservative, then you should be very cautious.

Remember, this is a touchstone and a potential red flag for me and for those who generally agree with me. I have in fact lost a friendship after someone who had never read a word by Hirsi Ali—and couldn’t name any of her books—started criticizing…

Anthony Watts, founder of wattsupwiththat.com and a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute, talks about why the surface temperature record is flawed.