Read it.

It is difficult to compare 1840 to 2015, so much of what we have today didn’t exist then.  But, they had to move people and goods from place to place as we do now.  They had farms then as we do now. They used wagons pulled by horses, mules or oxen.  We use cars and airplanes. They used muscle power to farm, we use tractors, combines, grain carts, and trucks powered by petroleum fuels. In 1840 crude oil and natural gas production and use were rare. Coal was used in manufacturing, but steam engines were still in their infancy. So the world in 1840 was fossil fuel free for the most part. Biofuels, that is burning wood and dung, were common. Windmills would not appear until 1854. Hydropower was not in common use until after 1849. Solar power had not been invented yet.

The cost of gasoline can be seen on the sign at any gas station, but what is its value?  Using gasoline or diesel saves us time and manual labor. It also saves air, water and waste pollution. Let us not forget that the automobile was lauded as a great environmental improvement after the “Great Horse Manure Crisis” of 1894. Nothing like having horse manure up to your knees to help you appreciate gasoline!

Read it.

Well, when it comes to education, the schools couldn’t get it done, either. So, I’m doing it myself. The big difference is that I have to keep sending the education “experts” checks because they work for the government and the government gets cranky when you decline to pay for its services, no matter how dubious the quality. But it’s still worth it, because the results are so much better when my wife and I do it ourselves.

In many way, teaching my son is easier than laying a tile floor or installing a stove because the kid actually gives me feedback. If I screwed up installing the stove (I didn’t), I’d have to find out the hard way. My son isn’t shy about saying, “I don’t understand.” He’s just as good at saying, “I get it and I’m bored; can we move on?” If you care enough to listen, that makes it a hell of a lot easier to do it right.

Read it.

Would it be “racist” of me to suspect that ever since the War Between the States, every political move designed to protect the “oppressed” was also designed to enhance federal power? Is it paranoid to ponder whether under all the nonsense we hear about civil rights and hate crimes and terrorism are convenient covers for what is essentially a bald-ass, butt-naked power grab?

Read it.

Is war good for anything? In the long run, the Stanford historian Ian Morris argues, it’s good for almost everything. In War! What Is It Good For?, Morris makes the case that war has played an essential role in mankind’s development and in the growth of human well-being. The book endorses not just strong government but imperialism; as applied to recent history, this translates into strong support for the historic role of the British Empire and the current global policies of the United States.

Veni, Veni, Emmanuel

Read it. And watch the video.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Whenever I’m reading a science fiction story that involves an alien species, I put it down if the alien species isn’t at least as strange as the Japanese.

Read it.

Guns don’t kill people – video chat kills people.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Dude, take the hint: This is not the girl for you. Think of yourself as having dodged a .50-cal bullet.

One often reads of people who aren’t confident that they’ve really learned a foreign language until they ‘start thinking in it’.

Feh. I don’t think in English, or any other language. I think in ‘me’.

If you see me hesitate before speaking, it’s the process of translation. This can sometimes be pretty heavy lifting, since the brilliance of my thought is usually such that mere human language is inadequate to contain it.

So whatever you hear me say — or write — is never as good as the original. Trust me.

Consider that before you make a response.

Read it.

The Slippery Slope Argument is often called the Slippery Slope Fallacy, usually by those favorably disposed toward the bottom of the slope and anxious to get there as quickly as possible with a minimum of tumbling and bruising along the way. But it is really neither a fallacy nor an argument.

History is replete with examples of “give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile.” The pre-war course of Hitler’s micro-aggressions provides a nicely Godwinesque illustration of a slippery slope. Give ’em a Saarland, and they’ll take a Bohemia. Recall also that Griswold v. Conn. legitimized the sale of contraceptives to married couples only, precisely on the grounds of the privacy of the marriage bond, and the thought that this might lead to unmarried couples using contraceptives was dismissed as slippery slopitude. Ho-ho, that will never happen! Likewise the forecast was poo-poohed that such availability would eventually weaken the whole concept of marriage and turn women into sex objects. And yet, here we are. So too the late Daniel Pat Moynihan’s “defining deviancy down.”¹

Read it.

Most people who are rich chose their parents wisely. Bill Gates might not have ever figured out 1960s-style computer science but he had the foresight to pick a father who is one of the richest, most prominent lawyers in the state of Washington. And before he and Paul Allen made the deal with IBM that gave them a monopoly on the PC operating system, Bill had the foresight to choose a mother who was personally acquainted with John Opel, CEO of IBM Corporation. None of this would have worked if Bill hadn’t been willing to take tremendous personal risks. Should Microsoft have failed, of course, Bill Gates would have had nothing to fall back on but a million dollar trust fund from his mother’s parents (bankers) and the resumption of his degree program at Harvard College.

Lord Ridley looks at the Zuckerberg ‘charity’ kerfuffle.

We have reached new depths of cynicism when a couple say in a letter to their newborn child that “our hopes for your generation focus on two ideas: advancing human potential and promoting equality” and some people can only sneer. Much of the carping is deeply confused. The Zuckerbergs have been criticised for not handing their shares to a tax-deductible charitable foundation now, which would net them a big tax break up front, and in the very same breath for not handing over their fortune in tax.

Welcome to my world.

The greatest beneficiaries, by far, of vast business ventures such as Facebook are not the founders, but the customers. When Lancashire entrepreneurs made cotton textiles affordable for all, it was all who benefited; when Rockefellers did the same for oil, or Carnegies for steel, again the overwhelming majority of the benefits flowed to the customers. One study, by William Nordhaus, found that entrepreneurs end up with less than 3% of the societal value that they have created. Some goes to financiers, but the vast bulk of the benefit turns up as consumer surplus.

Likewise with today’s magnates: the fortunes amassed by the Messrs Gates, Jobs, Bezos and Zuckerberg are as nothing to the value that has been captured by their willing customers in the form of better services delivered far more cheaply and easily.

So let’s ditch the zero-sum mentality and remember that an entrepreneur who makes something that was once a preserve of the rich cheaply available to ordinary people has done an act of philanthropy through his business, even if he also makes a fortune in the process. To reach the number of followers anybody can now have on Facebook once required either a large sum of money to spend on paper and stamps and secretaries, or an even larger sum to buy a newspaper or a radio station.

Good luck convincing the Usual Suspects that. Let’s start with Hillary Clinton.

Read it.

This makes an interesting contrast to Scott Adams’ Master Persuader analysis.

Tyler Cowen has a new wrinkle on the ‘gun control’ debate.

Sarah Hoyt reflects upon evolution and politics.

In a way when the left started its long march through the institutions they were just practicing ancient hunting practices, with Western Civilization as its prey.

Now their long march might or might not come to fruition, but you can’t avoid realizing that for people whose ideas are at best silly and at worst downright harmful, they’ve achieved remarkable success by taking over what they could and grooming their kids to take over more.

…

However, again, for a philosophy whose proudest achievement is the killing of a hundred million human beings (and that’s lowballing it, as Colonel Kratman says) to take over those many institutions and not to be laughed out of polite (or worse, impolite) society is a testimony to the effectiveness of the long march.

Read it. And watch them.

Read it.

IN this age of terror, we struggle to figure out how to protect ourselves — especially, of late, from active shooters.

One suggestion, promoted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security, and now widely disseminated, is “run, hide, fight.” The idea is: Run if you can; hide if you can’t run; and fight if all else fails. This three-step program appeals to common sense, but whether it makes scientific sense is another question.

…

A vivid example of freezing was captured in a video of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. After the bomb went off, many people froze. Then, some began to try to escape (run), while others were slower on the uptake.

This variation in response is typical. Sometimes freezing is brief and sometimes it persists. This can reflect the particular situation you are in, but also your individual predisposition. Some people naturally have the ability to think through a stressful situation, or to even be motivated by it, and will more readily run, hide or fight as required. But for others, additional help is needed.

Those who have been properly trained, either deliberately or through combat experience, will not freeze but rather react, typically in a violent counterattack.

Read it.

The chief benefit of a business school is that it gives training and practice in working with a team — including how to compensate for the slacker(s) with which every team seems to get saddled — and in making presentation to a group without choking.

The law school trick of the Study Group is also vastly underused by undergraduates.

Read it.

Progressives and Terfs are both wrong: sex differences in behavior have biological roots – men and female brains are different. I mean, if male rhesus monkeys like toy trucks and females rhesus monkeys don’t, as they do, it’s hard to attribute to social pressure. Boys are much more likely to like rough-and-tumble play, blah blah blah. The stereotypes are true. Trans men aren’t little girls inside, anymore than someone with a Napoleonic complex is ‘really’ Corsican. They’re just crazy. Now that craziness probably has some biological origin, but we don’t understand it. Even if it does, it is likely that the form of that craziness is shaped by social influences, just as Malays run amok with a bloody kris rather than going postal with a Glock.

It is possible to support a theory with implications you don’t like if it happens to be true. Although maybe that’s a guy thing.

If you want to make your stupid dream real, you need to have a realistic picture of the world. If you want a society in which men and women have the same brain, or one in which feminism actually works, you would have to make it so, with advanced biological engineering. John Varley writes fiction: so did Joanna Russ.

I’m sure you’ve seen the breathless headlines “Guns Now Killing as Many People as Cars!!!!!!” in the Drive-By Media. (Of course, actual humans had no role in these killings, except as victims. I suppose Society’s To Blame.)

Reason magazine actually gives us some context:

Read it.

Year after year here in our Dusty Little Village (DLV), the education establishment puts an initiative on the ballot to increase property taxes for schools. For eight years and counting, it has failed. It will fail again.

Most of us Geezer-Americans have scant interest in donating even more to educate half of Mexico or to fund all the Diversity Drones and special programs whose gentle ministrations crank out the annual crop of psychotic ninnies infesting our colleges.

Read it.

Yair Elbaz sent to Russ and me this very interesting interactive graph from McKinsey Global Institute. It arrays more than 750 paid occupations in the United States according to their average hourly wage rates* and the estimated percentage of how much of these workers’ tasks can be automated with existing technologies. Not surprisingly, the occupations that are most able to be automated – that involve the performance of the greatest number of tasks that can be automated with existing technologies – are generally at the lower end of the wage scale. The percentage of a surgeon’s tasks that can be automated is lower than is the percentage of a baker’s tasks that can be automated.

Read it.

The 61 tattoos that are across Iceman Ötzi’s body are the oldest tattoos known to man, according to new research.

And look what it got him – an arrow in the back and a death in the snow, pursued by enemies.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Sarah Hoyt debunks some myths.

The idea that if you gave everyone enough food and time and free schooling they’d all become erudite and thinkers can be disproved by a stroll through your local Welfare hub.  Go on, I dare you, go down and start a little discussion on Kantian philosophy.

But it’s an idea that remains a myth on the left which has lost all other classical liberal ideals (like, you know, individual freedom) but holds fast onto this idea that education will somehow make a progressive out of everyone.  (Patently ridiculous as they’ve been indoctrinating several generations now, and it still won’t take the way they want.  That cold slap of reality counteracts it.  Which is why they advocate more cowbell.)

Read it.

Our company was born out of my own experience as the owner of seven franchised ice cream stores. But years before I owned a chain of quick-service retail establishments, I worked at one. I worked at McDonald’s, where I slung french fries, scrubbed high-chairs, and worked the drive-thru for $6.40/hour (Canadian!)

This investor that sat in front of me was successful. Wealthy. Smart, really smart. He attended an elite private school, and earned two different degrees from separate Ivy League institutions.

But he had never worked at McDonald’s before.

And I bet he had never known anyone that had.

It made me feel a bit like a savant. Here was this brilliant, successful man, who knew 2X or 3X more about many things than I did. But I knew 100X or even 1000X more about a huge part of the world that he had never really experienced.

There are 20 million retail workers in America, with two million of them working at McDonald’s and Walmart alone. Call it whatever you want: “the middle class”, “the working class”, “blue collar workers.” Whatever euphemism you choose, the fact is that a huge portion of North American workers are supporting themselves and their families by working for an hourly wage, often close to the minimum, in retail or hospitality.

Read it.

A look inside Communist Chinese society.

Before the communists marched in, my great-grandfather had already lost everything to gambling debts, except for a few houses left to his sons in his will, including grandpa’s. “Not too bad,” grandpa recalled. “The people in the neighboring village who won our land were later beaten to death during the Land Reforms.”

…

One day, four young men came into the house when only my grandma and two of her young kids were in. They told grandma, “Give us the pans and everything made of iron. Good news, from now on, you don’t have to cook at home, we will work together, eat together, the children will study together and play together. We will take the iron to make steel.” My grandma secretly hid a pan in the haystack, and cried to her husband when he came back. She said, “I heard the children will also be shared in the People’s Commune.”

It turned out the children weren’t confiscated, but soon the People’s Commune collapsed. Half of grandpa’s possessions had already been confiscated and redistributed, and even the bark of the trees in the yard were boiled and eaten by hungry villagers Grandpa had to take down the ink painting on his wall, and put up Chairman Mao’s portrait in its place. But that was fine by him. He loved Chairman Mao.

Mark Steyn on the latest GOP debate.

On Channel 9 in New Hampshire, there’s a Bush ad every ten minutes: That’s an expensive way of keeping a guy at 3 per cent in the polls.

Sean and I also addressed the way Trump has re-framed the debate. For the first time, immigration is being discussed in terms of what it does or doesn’t do for the people who are already here. Without Trump, the immigration portion of a GOP debate would be Jeb! arguing with Marco about whether the “pathway to citizenship” should be two years or six months.

Read it.

Police say no one was injured when the car plowed through the entrance at the golden-domed monument, and the incident is under investigation. A motive is currently unclear, though early reports suggested the man was ‘incoherent’.

Read it.

Searching for possible explanations, we encountered a training manual of the former Russian KGB.8 According to this manual, KGB operatives were instructed to keep their weapon in their right hand close to their chest and to move forward with one side, usually the left, presumably allowing subjects to draw the gun as quickly as possible when confronted with a foe. Indeed, under “Chapter 2–Movement,” the manual gives the following instruction: “When moving, it is absolutely necessary to keep your weapon against the chest or in the right hand. Moving forward should be done with one side, usually the left, turned somewhat in the direction of movement.” We wondered whether this could explain President Putin’s gait, since he had received KGB training earlier in life.9 If this were true, then it would be reasonable to expect a similar gait “abnormality” in other Russian officials who might have received similar instruction during weapons training by the KGB or other military or intelligence agencies. We therefore performed a YouTube search for videos of other Russian officials, with surprising results.

Read it.

Birth tourism — illegally spending just enough time in America so your child can exploit America’s naive birthright citizenship rule — demonstrates the cash scarcity value of American citizenship that America’s leadership seems intent on giving away to random foreign grifters.

On the other hand, at least these people have money and are willing to spend it in the U.S. I have no reason to think that they’re doing it just so their kids can come to America some day and shut American workers out of low-paying jobs, while a random subset of them goes on to commit mass murder in a suburban school or mall. So we’ve got that going for us.

Read it.

But you knew that.

Read it.

The point being, of course, that the ergonomics of smartphones as reading devices are not only kind of rad, but historically so.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

The Other McCain is not afraid to ask the hard (well, easy, really) questions.

You can read the whole thing, and you can also read Steve Berman’s commentary at Red State, which begins: “Nobody argues against the fact that there needs to be diversity at the top of large companies, but . . .”
Uh, what?
Is it a “fact” that “diversity at the top” is a “need”? I am skeptical. Why should anyone care whether the executive suite is “diverse”? Are the Japanese executives at Toyota worried? And why does Steve Berman limit this “diversity” requirement to “large companies”?
How large does a company have to be before the “need” for “diversity at the top” becomes a “fact”? If a family of Mexican immigrants opens a taco stand, should they be required to hire a Korean assistant manager for the sake of “diversity”? Does anyone complain there are “too many” Italians working at the pizza restaurant?

This reflects earlier articles I’ve referenced regarding ‘diversity’. Is there a unique ‘African-American’ or ‘Hispanic’ perspective on physics? Latin? Microbiology? Greek? Organic Chemistry? Russian? Meteorology? Babylonian epigraphy?

Businesses exist for exactly one reason, to make profit. Anything that contributes to the goal of making profit is good, and anything that distracts from that goal is bad. Period.

Companies do not exist for the sake for the employees. Nobody has a “right” to a job at any company, because if the company does not make profit, the company will go bankrupt and then everybody will be unemployed. Your employment is therefore a function of your daily contributions to the goal of making profit.

That ought to be carved in stone in a prominent place at every business school in the world.

Where legitimate authority is uncertain or disputed, we find what Hobbes called bellum omnium contra omnes (“the war of all against all”), and the identity-politics mentality of “diversity” is symptomatic of this societal drift toward anarchy. Why should anyone care that the CEO of Sam’s Club is a black woman? And why should she care whether the suppliers are white males? Sam’s Club exists to make profit, as do the companies that manufacture the products that are sold at Sam’s Club, and as long as everybody is making profit, so what? The people who are calling for a boycott of Sam’s Club are reflecting the same mentality as those who want to boycott Donald Trump’s businesses because they don’t like Trump’s opinions on immigration. The idea that everything is political — that everything should always be up for a vote or otherwise subject to political influence — and that we are victims of “social injustice” if things don’t go our way, must ultimately lead to anarchy and civil war.

Preach it, brother.

Sarah Hoyt reflects on the fact that, not only is the future not evenly distributed, the present isn’t either.

I’ve long since realized that I grew up somewhere between medieval England and Victorian England.  Tudor England feels about as familiar to me as the present day which is why I like visiting now and then.

But even in Elizabethan England, there were different time zones, by which I don’t mean the artificial time declarations (though they went by the sun, so it was different too) but more that different parts of Britain at that time were in different “places” historically.

…

The borders of Scotland are “centuries behind” Tudor England on the road from tribalism to a modern state. This in turn means a lot of other things about it are “primitive” as the poor character keeps suffering through.

…

I’m here to tell you that understanding another culture — or even understanding that another culture really exists, and they’re not just sort of playing at it — is REALLY hard.  Humans are very good at absorbing the conditions they’re born into and internalizing them as THE conditions, i.e. the only true ones, and then thinking of everything else as a bizarre variation.

…

For me, who grew up in one culture, entered another when I went to school (think of it as being raised in Apalachia then joining mainstream culture.  I had to learn almost completely different language.)  and then came here for a year, went back for four while dating someone neither Portuguese nor American, then came here to live.  It gives you a very clear vision of both cultures.  And it makes it very obvious it’s not all just “pretending” to be different.

It still stuns me that in that time and in that place, intelligent well read men could believe this clap trap of “one world” and government and religion both withering away leaving behind this human being that if he ever existed would be truly alien.

Read it.

But there seems to be a broader fissure underlying this discussion: why don’t people at the 90th percentile of the income distribution feel particularly rich?

The answer is simple: because any Americans who are richer than this cohort are so much richer.

Read it.

Books, it turns out, were not only among the first commercially produced Christmas gifts; the book business played a central role in turning Christmas into the commercialized holiday that we know today. “Publishers and booksellers were the shock troops in exploiting—and developing—a Christmas trade,” Stephen Nissenbaum writes in The Battle for Christmas, his social history of the holiday. “And books were on the cutting edge of a commercial Christmas, making up more than half of the earliest items advertised as Christmas gifts.”

Starting in the 1820s, when Christmas was still largely a day of feasting and religious observance, publishers helped pioneer the concept of giving mass-produced goods as presents, inventing an entire genre of books, called Gift Books, designed to be presented to loved ones at Christmas. These were typically anthologies of poetry, fiction, essays, and drawings, with the contents of each volume tailored to appeal to a specific audience. “Gift Books were available at every price range and for every conceivable market—demographic, religious, political, and cultural,” Nissenbaum writes. “There were Gift Books for children (in fact, for boys and girls separately), young men, mothers, Jacksonian Democrats, proponents of temperance and abolitionism, even members of men’s clubs.”

Scott Johnson at Powerline waxes philosophical.

The rise of Barack Obama is a sign of the indifference of history to the well-being of the United States and, his Nobel Peace Prize to the contrary notwithstanding, the world. If history gave a damn, Barack Obama would still be voting “present” in the Illinois legislature, just to prove his existence to an indifferent universe.

Obama has repeatedly availed himself of the supposed argument from “history” to express his high-minded disapproval of men and events in lieu of doing anything serious about them. In the cases of Putin and Assad, who have suffered the indignity of Obama’s occasional disapproval, history seems to be having the last laugh. What about Obama’s signing the United States on to Team Islamic Republic of Iran under the JCPOA? Obama is jumping on to the wave of the eighth century and taking us closer to the end of history. In this case it won’t have a happy ending. Someone needs to undo what Obama has done.

Read it.

The list of schools where students can get a decent education has been dwindling for some time. And atmospheres of political correctness are nothing new. But with the second coming of ’60s radicalism — met this time with weak-willed administrators caving to long lists of student demands — the issue is whether there are any universities where dissenting students have half a chance.

Few and far between.

By the way, if your child is set on an Ivy League education, you may be particularly worried. The wrong Halloween costume at Yale can create a campus-wide uprising. At Brown University, people who want to engage in free inquiry now have to join a secret society. For the record, Shields says that Harvard has more ideological diversity on its faculty than the rest.

I would not send my child to Yale, although I enjoyed my years there.

Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine lists the problems with ‘diversity’.

Few would deny that some racial diversity in a student body is worthwhile. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say they want to see African-American students nearly vanish from elite college campuses.

But it’s easy to question whether a given level of African-American representation in a student body is necessary to achieve diversity as the concept was always understood (see Notes 1 and 2). Stated differently, it’s probably impossible to show objectively that the levels universities strive for are necessary for this purpose.

Attempts to do so, for example by analyzing black representation on a classroom-by-classroom basis, descend into farce. Why must there be a black student in, say, a physics class? What, Chief Justice Roberts wanted to know, is the unique black perspective on physics?

Why, for that matter, is a black needed in any particular class? It would be terrible to attend college and never hear from a black student. But where’s the need to hear from one on the subject of Charles Dickens, David Hume, or the Catholic Reformation? And what if the black student in that class doesn’t speak up?

Read it.

What if extinctions were only temporary? Yes, we’re talking “Jurassic Park”-level science. It’s called de-extinction, and Dr. Mike Archer, a paleontologist, is trying to make it happen.

Read it.

According to a big crop of recent studies, you’re sexist and you hate the poor. Well, not you personally. Except – quite possibly you personally, actually, even if you believe otherwise. In one study, men liked the idea of dating a hypothetical smart woman, but were less keen on actually meeting a real one. Another found that both sexes judge women, and only women, to be less credible when they’re angry. A third found widespread subconscious bias in favour of rich people, even among those who denied it; a fourth concluded that food tastes better in sexist packaging – “big and filling” for men, “light and healthy” for women. And as we know from research into “implicit bias”, being on the receiving end of such prejudice (being female, poor or black, say) doesn’t mean you don’t also harbour it yourself.

An astonishing admission to read in the pages of the Guardian, Voice of the Cultural Marxist Crust and Tribune of the Politically Correct.

Findings like these typically trigger outrage that such antediluvian attitudes persist. But here’s a troubling thought: what if our getting righteously cross about them makes matters worse? The psychological pitfall here is known as “moral satiation”: the act of calling out others for their prejudice makes you feel you’ve done your job, and need do nothing more, whereas in fact you’ve probably just solidified your own unwarranted assumption that you’d never fall prey to such biases. Something similar happens now that every online hothead is fluent in the previously specialist language of cognitive biases and logical fallacies. There’s no easier way to avoid introspection than to accuse someone else of a bias or fallacy – even though seeing yourself as less vulnerable to them is another cognitive bias. The caller-out glides smugly off into the sunset, confident their morality’s in splendid working order.

A more telling description of the ‘progressive’ Left has never been penned.

The deeper problem here is that we think of prejudice and bias as anomalies – occasional brain glitches that need stamping out, and from which good people can reasonably aspire to be free. Yet all the evidence suggests they’re basic tools of human reasoning: we must make snap judgments, on the basis of various shortcuts, or we’d be unable to function. Seen this way, hiring a talented teacher over a useless one is still a form of discrimination; the difference is that it’s fair and sensible, while discriminating on the basis of skin colour isn’t.

Except when it is — cf. the preponderance of studies on human bio-diversity and IQ.

Read it.

Well. There it is.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, is worth quoting in full.

While it’s true that Milton and Rose Friedman, along with other libertarians and free-market conservatives who often use “free to choose” as a shorthand descriptor for a free society, believe that such a society results over time in better outcomes than are likely to be generated by less-free economic arrangements, it is emphatically untrue that the Friedmans – or any other respected libertarian writers – ever argued or even implied that free markets lead to something close to an earthly “Garden of Eden.”  The Friedmans understood, and all other respected free-market advocates understand, that our world is one of trade-offs and not “solutions.”  And so, indeed, as the options among which we are free to choose become both more numerous and more attractive, the costs that each of us incurs when exercising our freedom to choose rise.  If for no other reason, such a world cannot possibly ever be an “earthly paradise.”

Moreover, the case for a free society is very much a case for minimizing the prospect of large-scale harm that is always at risk of being unleashed when societies are directed from the top.  It is not a case that promises paradisiacal outcomes.  Free-market advocates recognize that people differ in their tastes, their risk preferences, their judgments, their self-discipline, their talents, and their opportunities.  And, therefore, free-market advocates recognize and accept the reality that many people will make not only choices that others judge to be ‘wrong,’ but also make choices that those who make such choices themselves later judge to be wrong.

Free-market advocates prefer to let even unwise adults remain free to choose than to use the state to oblige adults to choose as elites would have them choose.  There is nothing utopian about such a vision of society.  And by falsely accusing free-market advocates of being utopian, it’s as if Akerlof and Shiller are phishing their readers for phools into buying a faulty case for greater government intervention.

Freedom: It’s not the best thing; it’s the only thing.

Peter Nicholas, in the Wall Street Journal, gives us a synoptic view of a strange duck.

In making himself a viable candidate for the party nomination, though, Mr. Sanders is sounding more like a liberal in the Franklin D. Roosevelt tradition than a classic socialist.

Well, there are some of us who consider Franklin Roosevelt as being sufficiently a classic socialist as to make no difference, but never mind.

Few in the movement expect that Mr. Sanders, should he win the White House, would quickly usher in an economy organized around socialist principles.

By which I assume they mean ‘more than it already is’. The reason they’re so sanguine is that, looking back at how much socialism has crept into American government through people who were socialist at heart if not in name, if they actually get somebody who embraces the name of socialist, the socialization of America can only get faster. I can see their point.

But they see his candidacy as a vehicle to broaden understanding about democratic socialism.

There’s an oxymoron for you, ‘democratic socialism’.

In his speech, Mr. Sanders said he didn’t believe the government should “own the means of production.”

Then he’s not a socialist, and is cripplingly ignorant of what socialism means. I’m more inclined to think that he’s lying, but that’s me.

Gavin McInnes reacts badly to modern mores.

A millennial walked into my office this week looking like a simpleton with a court date. He had a cheap suit on with square-toed shoes and his hair lay flat on his forehead like Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber. His shirt came straight out of the dirty laundry and the collar on it was so crumpled it sat over his blazer like a pile of used condoms. When I began to list the dozens of fashion crimes this young man had just committed he stared at me like a Papua New Guinean being shown how to open a tin. I’m beginning to think young men have been dressing wrong for so long, they no longer know what’s right. I came of age in the ’80s when mods set the template for how to dress, but today all they have is Reservoir Dogs and Men in Black. Those guys don’t even use pocket squares.

Preach it, brother.

Read it.

As the saying goes, “All roads lead to Rome.” Folks at the moovel lab were curious about how true this statement is, so they tested it out. They laid a grid on top of Europe, and then algorithmically found a route from each cell in the grid to Rome, resulting in about half a million routes total. Yep, there seems to be a way from Rome from every point.

Read it.

The Wall Street Journal actually does some journalism, unlike the knee-jerks of the rest of the Drive-By Media.

Executive Summary: People are tired of the Political Correctness straightjacket into which they have been crammed by the existing Ruling Class, and they rejoice to see somebody who’s willing actually to say what they’ve been thinking. The don’t like where the country is today, they hate Barack Obama, they hate the mainstream media, they’re suspicious of Muslims, and they don’t buy the media meme that it’s unreasonable to feel that way.

“Right now the establishment Republicans just died,” Mr. Luntz said.

And good riddance.

Read it.

I’ll bet they’re really great wings.