Positive Liberty

My co-blogger at Positive Liberty, D.A. Ridgely, was on top of this first.

Here is the New York Times story.

And here is Ed Brayton’s post with links to the Texas Freedom Network’s live blogging.

And here is John Fea’s post.

From the New York Times: Continue Reading »

Well, it’s not actually moving. It just looks like it is, in one of the most compelling optical illusion I’ve ever seen. Found here.

A New Zealand woman drove over her husband.

Twice.

The conservative bloc of the Texas Board of Education has approved some 160 revisions to the state’s social studies curriculum by a vote of 11 to 4.

As further proof that libertarianism belongs to neither Team Red nor Team Blue, and notwithstanding dubious historical, legal and religious claims the Board has insisted upon, I’m pleased to see there’s some good news in the approved curriculum, too. To wit:

In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.”

Also, the Times reports:

The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest purchasers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has been diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.

Let’s have a round of applause for the digital age!

I hate Facebook. Facebook gives me Friends, but all I really want are friends.

I feel like I have to have Facebook because everyone expects me to have it. Going without Facebook is sort of like going without a phone back in the 1980s. You just barely can’t do it. Facebook is much worse than a phone, though, because you’ve always been free to ignore your phone with no guilt whatsoever. Back in the 80’s you wouldn’t even necessarily have an answering machine, and that was some serious freedom. Facebook doesn’t run on freedom. It runs on guilt.

My mother-in-law has this habit of starting conversations with all the things she assumes I’ve seen on Facebook. “I guess you probably saw that L—– is getting over her car accident,” she says. “You should visit her sometime.”

“I didn’t know she’d had an accident. Was it bad?”

My mother-in-law is appalled. “How do you not know about it?” Continue Reading »

It’s a rare enough occurrence, although not unknown, that it’s worth pointing out. The judge allegedly lied under oath and accepted payoffs. The vote in the House was unanimous, which is gratifying. He was appointed by Clinton, but the Democrats aren’t about to take a fall for a mere District Court judge.

Eugene Volokh posts the articles of impeachment at the Conspiracy.

Will Porteous resign before there can be a trial in the Senate? I’m sure the Senators would appreciate not having to take time to prepare for and conduct a trial. As would Obama, presumably, since it would be just one more obstacle in the path of accomplishing his legislative agenda.

Based on this report from the Congressional Research Service, it looks as though Porteous would retain his pension if he resigned, but not if he is convicted in the Senate. However that judgment seems to be based only on a DOJ opinion from 1974, concerning Nixon. Since the Constitution is silent on the issue of pensions, and there’s been no authoritative Court ruling, I’d say the jury–so to speak–is still out on that issue.

[Warning: This is a long one.]

In my post about charter schools I wrote,

There is a persistent tendency among educators, and left-leaning folks in general, to claim that education is a distinct type of good, so that unlike other goods, a competitive market is an inferior way to produce it.

In response, commenter BSK wrote,

As to whether or not education is a distinct good, I think it certain ways it is, but I’m not knowledgeable enough on economic theory to know whether it matters or not. I would argue that education is different than some other goods because there is a major vested interest in its success as a whole.

First let me say that my formulation was inexcusably sloppy. There is a category of goods that competitive markets do not produce well—public goods. Continue Reading »

Are your investments insufficiently risky?

How about placing a bet in a derivatives market for motion pictures.

Since making a bet on a movie so is about the closest any of us will ever get to being actual show business producers, here’s possibly the funniest four minutes in the history of motion pictures (the next five minutes are pretty good, too):

NPR’s Diane Rehm show–the best political talk-show in existence, in my opinion–had Diane Ravitch on today to talk about her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. I only heard a few minutes, as I was driving my kids to school, but I heard her make two claims that are fundamentally flawed: that charter schools are not successful because their test scores are not better than public schools, and that “publicness” (my word, not hers) is not part of the problem with education. Oh my, oh my. Continue Reading »

A commenter named “Rap” — who apparently has Christian Nationalist sympathies — left the following comment at Positive Liberty:

Here’s a thought, why not let the founders speak for them selves? Why should one “expert” or another edit what they actually said? Oh, I know…because it doesn’t fit in the elitist progressive agenda. After all they know more about the founders than the founders did of themselves. For example George Washington said to his mother after a big battle at fort Necessity and a new appointment:”The God to whom you commended me, madam, when I set out upon a more perlious errand, defended me from harm, and I trust He will do so now. Do not you?” Oops! The ACLU is going to be all over him! Wait…he’s dead. So I guess they will just keep hiding what he and the other founders said from our children!

I responded, yes by all means, let the Founders speak for themselves. Not phony “experts” like David Barton or Peter Marshall. Or this commenter him or herself. The quotation s/he tried to pass is nowhere to be found in Washington’s official writings. Continue Reading »

“A Plea for Alcibiades, or, How to Philosophize with a Bottle,” over at the League. It will help if you’ve already read Plato’s Symposium.

My anti-capitalist friends are persuaded that really big corporations have managed to free themselves from the competitive pressures of the market, the original “too big to fail” argument.* I remember a friend from grad school who hated Starbucks because it was “so big that no one could compete with it.” In his mind, they’d always been big, apparently having sprung full grown from the head of Zeuss or something. And he continued to insist that there was no other place near the University of Oregon to buy coffee, even after I pointed out that we had enjoyed coffee together in the UO bookstore, the bagel shop, the pub, and—wait for it…—the coffee shop two doors down from Starbucks. All of these were on the same block.

Wal-Mart, of course, is the great behemoth of the retail market, so it ought to be wholly immune to competitive pressures, being able to–as John Kenneth Galbraith would say–create consumer desires so there would always be demand for their supply.

And yet it seems it isn’t so. Continue Reading »

Friend and co-blogger Jason Kuznicki was quoted in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on the Fred Phelps/hate speech case:

The only remaining rationale for censoring hate speech — or a similar incendiary expression of opinion, such as flag-burning — is that it inflicts emotional pain. But the Cato Institutes’ Jason Kuznicki makes quick work of this by asking a few simple questions: How are we supposed to measure emotional pain? If we could measure it, what level of pain would be sufficient to trigger punishment? If a news organization broadcasts a hateful message to Jews and gays simply by reporting on a demonstration by the WBC, then should the news organization also be held liable for damages? What else should we ban? Continue Reading »

Friend and blogbrother Ed Brayton appeared on the Rachel Maddow show to discuss the Rep. Stupak & “The Family” controversy.

Here is my friend, blogfather, and former co-blogger, Timothy Sandefur speaking on the Privileges Or Immunities Clause at Cato’s forum on on McDonald v. Chicago. (He wrote Cato’s brief for the McDonald case.)

Also, if you watch Sandefur, please stick around for Doug Kendall’s speech. See Doug on McDonald’s oral argument at Balkinization here.

Finally, the Volokh Conspiracy did outstanding work blogging the Privileges or Immunities Clause. See here.

Would you believe a student who, among his five citations, cites his own FaceBook page twice?

The Prince, Chapter 6, “Of New Dominions Which Have Been Acquired By One’s Own Arms and Ability.”*

Today we come to a change in focus, essentially a new section, in The Prince. The first 5 chapters focused on the different types of principalities and how they can be established and held. The answer to the last question seems to be, “ruthlessly wipe out every possible claimant to princehood. In this new section Machiavelli focuses not so much, as the title of this chapter would lead one to believe, on the new dominion/territory itself, but on the person who has acquired it, and the means of acquiring it. In this chapter the focus is on acquiring territory through one’s own skill, chapter 7 is about acquiring territory through luck or through the assistance of the real conquerors, chapter 8 is about acquiring territory through “villiany,” chapter 9 discusses those coming to power though “the favour of his fellow citizens” in a civic principality, 10 is a sidestep to compare the strength of different types of principalities, 11 discusses ecclesiastical principalities, and that completes the second section (as I would divide it, anyway), because after that he changes focus to discuss different types of armies. Continue Reading »

The more I think about the eternal recurrence, the less I’m sold on it. Let’s all agree to bracket the question of God’s existence for the moment and reconsider the original claim about the nature of time. I suspect there’s an area of strong agreement to be had among theists and at least some non-theists. (And personally, I was hoping we could move away from the tiresome question of God’s existence altogether.) Here’s the quote once again:

If time is infinite on both ends, then we have infinite rolls of the dice of probability. That means, however infinitesimally small the probabilities that brought “you” into existence, with enough rolls of dice, “you” will come into existence again, and again and again forever. And if time is infinite in reverse, “now” isn’t the only time “you” existed.

Accordingly, “you” have always existed and always will.

But this really, really doesn’t follow, does it? Say I have a perfectly functioning CD player (yes, I’m an old fart). Say that it has a limitless supply of energy and that it will never wear out. I use it to play my favorite piece by J.S. Bach (currently it’s the Ciacona from Partita No. 2).

Then I take out the disc and put in Led Zeppelin II. (Before you ask: Yes, it’s an infinitely durable disc.)

How long do I need to play Led Zeppelin before it turns into Bach? A long time? A very long time? Forever?

Would it help if I put it on shuffle?

Is there any reason to believe that every part of the long, long track of the universe recurs? Can’t it be that only some parts do, and others do not? Clearly it can be so — there’s nothing about a very, very long time that will turn Led Zeppelin into Bach, and thus there’s no saying that I won’t have to listen to Led Zeppelin forever.

The problem here is that the analogy to rolls of the dice is fundamentally flawed. Some parts of the universe might as well be random, for all we can tell, but that “for all we can tell” speaks more to human ignorance than it does to the true inner workings of things. Analogies to dice probably don’t do the universe justice, because it appears that not everything is random. Add even a little constraint, and some things just aren’t going to repeat.

Okay, so it isn’t Scientific American, let alone a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal, but Popular Science has just put its entire 137-year archive online for free browsing. Pretty damned cool.

I finally made my way over to the David Library in Washington’s Crossing (not too far from where I live). I think one reason why I haven’t been spending more time there is so much of what I am looking for is available online.

If you are looking for newish stuff, then copyright law prevents complete free access. However, given the late 18th, early 19th Century is “public domain,” the originals from that period are freely available.

For instance, at the library I found a letter from William Livingston, Governor of New Jersey (1776–1790) during the American Revolutionary War and a signer of the United States Constitution, where he seems to deny the Trinity to the very orthodox Jediah Morse. Continue Reading »