Utopia, you are standing in it!

“FREE TO CHOOSE” 1: The Power of the Market (Milton Friedman)
Free to Choose ^| 1980 | Milton Friedman

Posted on Monday, July 17, 2006 4:20:46 PM by Choose Ye This Day

FREE TO CHOOSE: The Power of the Market

Friedman: Once all of this was a swamp, covered with forest. The Canarce Indians who lived here traded the 22 square miles of soggy Manhattan Island to the Dutch for $24.00 worth of cloth and trinkets. The newcomers founded a city, New Amsterdam at the edge of an empty continent. In the years that followed, it proved a magnet for millions of people from across the Atlantic; people who were driven by fear and poverty; who were attracted by the promise of freedom and plenty. They fanned out over the continent and built a new nation with their sweat, their enterprise and their vision of a better future.

For…

Butter wouldn’t melt? Don’t you believe it…

Ask a Columbo fan about their very favourite scenes and it’s odds-on that a flash of Columbo rage will rank pretty highly in their estimations.

In terms of his real personality, the Lieutenant is something of an enigma. He keeps his emotions in check most of the time, so it’s hard to know what he really thinks of a given scenario or a given person. However, there are those rare occasions when circumstances force his inner character to be revealed, and inevitably these are scenes to treasure.

Of particular interest is a bout of Columbo rage – the rarest Columbo reveal of all. There are plenty of times he could flip out, particularly as he meets low lives galore who treat him with disdain, but the Lieutenant inevitably retains an enviable emotional equilibrium and a cool head. How he maintains his composure with Paul…

Parliament voted on the evening of 1 April in a series of indicative votes to determine what, if any, alternative plan for withdrawal from the European Union could command the support of the House of Commons: all plans put forward again failed to command a majority. In a recent intervention, John Finnis has suggested that the government should prorogue Parliament until after 12 April in order to terminate the current parliamentary debate. Mark Elliott has offered a critique of the broader implications of this argument, namely the claim that such a course of action would be ‘(…) wholly legitimate as a matter of constitutional principle.’ Elliott concludes that parliamentary control of the process is entirely legitimate and in keeping with the British constitution. This piece adds to this analysis by elaborating why the prorogation Finnis advocates under these specific circumstances would be, as Elliott summarily puts it, ‘(…) an…

I’ve just finished Nadine Strossen‘s 2018 book, HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, one of 16 volumes in the series “Inalienable Rights,” edited by University of Chicago constitutional law professor Geoffrey Stone.  Click on the screenshot to go to the book’s Amazon site:

Strossen was president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1991 to 2008—their first woman president. She’s now a professor at New York Law School. She’s always been a civil-rights lawyer, and this is her third book on the topic. Given her expertise and position at the ACLU, she was an excellent person to write this book.

I recommend it to all of you who want to read a succinct (186 page) argument for why hate speech should be neither outlawed nor censored by the government. (Strossen also argues—and I agree—that although censorship of hate speech is prohibited in

RE rent seekers aren’t satisfied with $trillions in wind and solar subsidies, now they want $trillions for power grids to the middle of nowhere.

The Australian wind industry has a habit of spearing its turbines way beyond the back of beyond. Increasingly remote wind farm locations require serious upgrades to transmission infrastructure, adding hundreds of $millions to transmission costs, that would have otherwise been avoided, had Australia simply stuck with conventional generators and not squandered $60,000,000,000 in subsidies to intermittent wind and solar.

As any first-year physics student will tell you, transmitting electricity over distances results in a mathematically predictable loss of the power transmitted, over any given distance. The greater the distance, the greater the absolute loss.

Just like the value of prime real estate, the most beneficial situation for generating capacity is all about location, location, location.

In the main, conventional generators are sited close enough to…

Almost thirty animal rights hoodlums have been arrested in connection with activities they conducted at Queensland, Australia animal farms in which, according to the Brisbane Times, some of the criminals trespassed on private property and chained themselves to farm equipment or even stole animals too.

Last Tuesday, police charged 11 people on 18 charges, including unlawfully entering farming land (trespass) and drug offences.

Another eight have also been charged with entering farming land (trespass) after the latest arrests.

The total 19 accused offenders, six men and 13 women, were due to appear in the Warwick Magistrates Court on various dates during the next several weeks.

Eight more people have been charged after protesters allegedly entered the Lemontree Feedlot at Millmerran, 82 kilometres south-west of Toowoomba, and took pictures of cattle on March 23.

This on top of animal rights thugs conducting mass harassment of animal farms that took place…