Utopia, you are standing in it!

Steven Horwitz points to an example of Helen Lovejoyism at Liberty & Power:

You’ve all seen them. Those ubiquitous TV ads where a simple little pill transforms a man suffering from erectile dysfunction, or ED, into a virile tiger who puts a smile on the face of his now beaming wife.

Well, Representative Jim Moran (D-VA) has seen them too, and you’d be hard pressed to see a smile on his face when he talks about the ads. “A number of people,” he says, “have come up, including colleagues, and said I’m fed up. I don’t want my three or four-year old grandkid asking me what erectile dysfunction is all about. And I don’t blame them.”

Comedian Louis CK (hat tip to Bryan Caplan for pointing to another Louis CK clip which prompted me to view others) sums up the Helen Lovejoyist argument against same-sex marriage. I’m not normally…

There are many reasons to oppose the various bailouts of the Greek government. Here are my two main reasons.

1. I don’t like rewarding investors who make imprudent decisions, and it really galls me to bail out the (mostly) rich people who bought Greek bonds.
2. I don’t like rewarding politicians who make imprudent decisions, and it really galls me since bailouts encourage additional imprudent behavior.

Let’s focus today on the second point.

Here’s Greece’s score for the “Size of Government” component from Economic Freedom of the World. As you can see, bailouts have actually subsidized a decline in fiscal responsibility.

And it’s worth pointing out that Greek politicians have been doing a bad job in other areas.

The burden of red tape has been, and remains, stifling.

Greece ranks at the top in difficulty in setting up and running a business among 75 countries, according…

The world is full of surprises, a fact with which rational-expectations theorists have not yet come to grips. Yesterday I was surprised to find that a post of mine from May 2016, was attracting lots of traffic. When published, that post had not attracted much attention, and I had more or less forgotten about it, but when I quickly went back to look at it, I recalled that I had thought well of it, because in the process of calling attention to Wicksteed’s anticipation of the Coase Theorem, I thought that I had done a good job of demonstrating one of my favorite talking points: that what we think of as microeconomics (supply-demand analysis aka partial-equilibrium analysis) requires a macrofoundation, namely that all markets but the one under analysis are in equilibrium. In particular, Wicksteed showed that to use cost as a determinant of price in the context of…

When Oklahoma City Council member JoBeth Hamon wassworn inearly this year, she chose to use a copy of Marxist Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” rather than the Bible.

While there’s no law or policy that requires the use of a Bible for swearing-in ceremonies, Hamon upset traditions going back to ninth-century England.

In an email to me, Hamon explained that she comes from a social services background, so she wanted to center her campaign “on uplifting voices that aren’t often at the table when our governments make decisions”— the homeless, the car-less, and so forth, from whose perspective, she claimed, Zinn told U.S. history.

“A People’s History,” she thought, “would be a good reminder of who I seek to serve.”
Implicit in the ritual of taking oaths on the Bible is the acknowledgment of the need for God’s guidance—something that U.S. presidents have signaled…

Why is Africa poor?

More than half of the world’s poorest people live in sub-Saharan Africa. Why? Why is that region so poor? There are lots of theories — some blame a “colonial history.” Others blame the weather or discrimination.

But Magatte Wade, an African entrepreneur, tells John Stossel that she knows the biggest reason from her own first-hand experience: it’s crushing government regulation. “Once you hire someone, good luck getting rid of them for any reason,” she says. Her home country, Senegal, requires government permission to fire an employee. That makes it hard to run a business. It also makes entrepreneurs reluctant to hire. Then there’s the complicated tax code. “Some people say it’s worth at least two or three truckloads of paper,” she says. Hiring an accountant to wade through that is expensive for new businesses.

Magatte started a business anyway — she makes lip balm. She has…

The request made by the Privy Council that the Queen prorogue Parliament was a clumsy and inappropriate attempt to shorten the time available for parliamentary scrutiny of the Brexit process. That much seems clear from papers submitted to the Court of Session in Cherry. It is therefore no surprise that the Inner House was receptive to the petitioners’ argument that the advice given to Her Majesty violated the conventional purposes for which prorogation ought to be used and was therefore unconstitutional (Cherry, [1]; see also Lord Sumption). Where the court erred was in concluding that the act of prorogation was itself unlawful. The intimate relationship between the prerogative power to prorogue and the supremacy of Parliament precludes such a conclusion. If, as seems correct, a response to this breach of convention is warranted, it is one that can, constitutionally, only come from Parliament itself.

In this…

If you read The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels give a poetic account of how societies evolve. Western society moved out of antiquity into feudalism and then into capitalism. In their view, capitalism is so exploitative and unstable that revolutionary forces will topple the system and impose state control over the economy. Ideally, the state itself will wither and you’ll get an idyllic communist society.

But we now know that’s wrong. The industrialized nations of the West never turned to socialism, though they did institute welfare states in the 20th century. Instead, more rural societies like China and Russia were the biggest customers of Marxism. And very few socialist states of the 20th century remained socialist in the classical senses. Socialism, and communism, was not the end of the story.

So what did we get? If you follow someone like Francis Fukuyama, you might believe that liberal capitalism is…

One this date in History: February 13, 1689. William III-II & Mary III declared joint sovereigns of England, Scotland and Ireland.

William III (Dutch: Willem; November 4, 1650 – March 8, 1702), also widely known as William of Orange, was sovereign Prince of Orangefrom birth, Stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic from 1672 and King of England, Ireland and Scotland from 1689 until his death in 1702. It is a coincidence that his regnal number (III) was the same for both Orange and England. As King of Scotland, he is known as William II. He is sometimes informally known in Northern Ireland and Scotland as “King Billy”.

William inherited the principality of Orange from his father, William II, who died a week before William’s birth. His mother, Mary, was the daughter of King Charles I of England. In 1677, he married his fifteen-year-old first…

James II-VII (October 14, 1633 – September 16, 1701) was King of England and Ireland as James II and King of Scotland as James VII, from February 6, 1685 until he was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The last Roman Catholic monarch of England, Scotland and Ireland, his reign is now remembered primarily for struggles over religious tolerance.

However, it also involved the principles of absolutismand divine right of kings and his deposition ended a century of political and civil strife by confirming the primacy of Parliament over the Crown.

King James II-VII of England, Scotland and Ireland.

James inherited the thrones of England, Ireland and Scotland from his elder brother Charles II with widespread support in all three countries, largely based on the principle of divine right or birth. Tolerance for his personal Catholicism did not apply to it in general and when the English and Scottish…

I can’t resist a bit of Schadenfreude about the New York Times, as both Andrew Sullivan and I recently criticized it for mixing opinion with news, and becoming unacceptably “woke”. This week, the paper screwed up in its desire to go after a Trump appointee, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. When Kavanaugh was having confirmation hearings, my judgment was that he was probably guilty of sexual malfeasance, but on character issues alone I didn’t think he deserved confirmation. There was no need, then, to adjudicate a “he said/she said” conundrum. Others differed, but I thought Kavanaugh was unfit for the bench.

Last week two authors of a “News Analysis” piece in the NYT, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, both Times reporters, dropped a few bombshells about unreported or uninvestigated sexual harassment by Kavanaugh; these are detailed in their upcoming book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation.

Unfortunately…

Last week the governor of California signed into law a good vaccination bill, Senate Bill 276, which stipulates a standardized procedure for requesting medical exemptions from childhood vaccination:

By Duggan Flanakin ~

For decades, the solar industry benefited from generous federal, state, and local subsidies to increase its footprint. Yet these generous subsidies ignore the costs of disposal of solar panel waste.

Things may be changing. In May 2018, Michael Shellenberger, a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and Green Book Award Winner, wrote in Forbes that the problem of solar panel disposal will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment because it is a huge amount of waste which is not easy to recycle.

Shellenberger was citing comments, published in the South China Morning Post, from Chinese solar expert Tian Min, general manager of Nanjing Fangrun Materials, a recycling company in Jiangsu province that collects retired solar panels. Tian called his country’s solar power industry “a ticking time bomb.”

This is not really news. The Associated Press had reported in 2013…

Steven Crowder reveals how veganism is not only bad for animals and the environment, but actually worse than cannibalism.