Potpourri
==> This is the feel-good story of the week. (I have particular interest in this one, because the heroine of this tale is good friends with some of my libertarian activist buddies. So it is neat to see her being Internet celebrity for a while.) Of course, this poor guy must now be terrified. He is expected to show up at a party with 100+ attractive women and he has no idea what to do. I’m being serious; this would be like if those goofy guys making YouTube videos asking models to go to prom with them actually got “yes” for an answer. Worst thing that could happen.
==> Alex Tabarrok discusses the Ferguson report.
==> Somehow this came up during a conversation I had with Tom Woods. It suddenly made sense of my life:
The Symphony No. 8 in F Major, Op. 93 is a symphony in four movements composed by Ludwig van Beethoven in 1812…. When asked by his pupil Carl Czerny why the Eighth was less popular than the Seventh, Beethoven is said to have replied, “because the Eighth is so much better.”
==> At Mises CA I walk through a Salon piece from a former Ron Paul fan who now says Honduras proves libertarianism doesn’t work. My favorite part of my response:
Let me hit that again from another angle. If there had been a government-funded airport, then it would be coherent to point to it and say, “See? The market wouldn’t have built that.” This is what statists in the U.S. often do, when it comes to football stadiums and dams that only exist because of tax support. There, the proper response is Bastiat’s “seen and unseen.” But at least it’s understandable that people could look at an existing building that the State produced, and count that as evidence in favor of the usefulness of the State.
Yet this writer pointed to an empty lot as evidence that the Honduran government was better at building airports than the private sector.
Just like in a lot of other countries, in Honduras, it’s the system, not the people, who are at fault: crime is extremely high because the state does nothing to stop it, but bribery incidence is low since the people themselves aren’t that corrupt. Just look, for example, at Mexicans in America, typically exemplary Mestizos with low homicide perpetration rates, and contrast them with Mestizos in Honduras with the highest homicide victimization rate in the world. Little genetic difference. Huge differences in actions which can be influenced by incentives.
enterprisesurveys.org/data/exploreeconomies/2010/honduras
For some Honduran business-related regulations, see:
doingbusiness.org/data/exploreeconomies/honduras/#paying-taxes
BTW, chief obstacle for Honduran firms is “political instability”, second place is [apparently, institutional] “corruption”.
“All in all, I think it’s probably for the best that this guy abandoned his support for libertarianism and is now producing articles for Salon.”-Agreed.
IIRC, he rejected libertarianism in 2008-9 because he thought the crash was caused by reckless free-market greed. Because America is 100.00% free-market, guys, and the invisible hand of the state only exists when convenient. I’m confident in saying he was never a real libertarian. A real libertarian would have used the crash as proof of the danger of having a state-backed monopoly with full control of the size and composition of the monetary base with enormous potential for discretion and mismanagement. BTW, I’m no libertarian, though I have sympathies.
Pretty sure he never was a serious libertarian, given his own description of his philosophy boils down to “look out for number one.” Suffice to say the liberty movement didn’t lose one of its shining lights there.
A person who has never run these simple and fundamental concepts through their mind, a) The NAP or b) Central Banking as a statist abomination, is not and will probably never be a libertarian.
I don’t think that will hold, Roddis, If Libertarianism grows what it means to be Libertarian will probably change and 30 years from now we will be calling ourselves classical libertarians to separate ourselves from the statist usurpers who will have stolen the moniker. We’ll be left with the no true scottsman argument like petty communists.
This is why anarcho-capitalist or libertarian-anarchist are so much hetter. They’re harder to corrupt.
“Yet this writer pointed to an empty lot as evidence that the Honduran government was better at building airports than the private sector.”
Yeah, and only the government can provide efficient ambulance and firefighter services because nobody seems to want to move to the side of the road for fear of getting ticketed when Joe Sixpack wants to save someone’s life or property.
Yet this writer pointed to an empty lot as evidence that the Honduran government was better at building airports than the private sector.
No, it’s evidence that if the government leaves building an airport to the private sector, it doesn’t get built.
I think it’s a better argument than pointing at an existing government built airport and claim that the private sector wouldn’t have built it, because we don’t know if the private sector would have built it. We *do* know the private sector did not build the airport in Honduras, because it isn’t there.
Now that doesn’t prove much of course, because maybe the airport shouldn’t be built (the resources should be invested elsewhere), or maybe the government is blocking construction by the private sector.
You’re badly in need of a “necessarily” in your first paragraph, but otherwise spot-on.
You’re badly in need of a “necessarily” in your first paragraph
Not necessarily… 🙂
What I mean is: if you want to argue “if the government leaves building an airport to the private sector, it doesn’t get built”, you’ve got one data point in support of that.
However it is true that if you want to argue “if the government leaves building an airport to the private sector, it doesn’t necessarily get built”, this one data point is all you need to prove it.
“Of course, this poor guy must now be terrified. He is expected to show up at a party with 100+ attractive women and he has no idea what to do.”
This is only the case if he has been brainwashed to think attractive women are somehow superior to anyone else for that reason.
It’s not that the women are superior; It’s that the men who have a better chance of getting those women are superior.
Those women have more options than do other women.
None of them are intrinsically ‘superior.’ The other men are ‘superior’ in the same way Aryans were superior due to their purer blood. The whole thing is just a farce.
There is no “intrinsic” value being posited here. Superior and inferior are perfectly reasonable concepts that are used to described subjectively determined individual value scales, or “ranking”.
Yes, we do rank each other in terms of the utility we bring to each other. Your choice for who you become friends with, intimate with, colleagues with, are to you those who are “superior”, whereas those you do not choose are “inferior”.
The men who stand a better chance of getting with women who most men would find attractive, are very much superior….to those women, and that was the only context under consideration here.
Yes, thank you.
And if this guy doesn’t get some, I’m calling BS on these chicks.
Who loves you, #DancingMan?
😀
It’s good to see Twitter being used for something other than getting people fired.
People getting fired up!
I would have been happier for this guy if he had said, “Thank you, but no thanks. Nobody can ‘body shame’ me; all shame originates with each individual’s ego. I’m responsible for my own feelings of self-worth. I shouldn’t have perceived someone else’s laughter as a negative reflection on myself.”
Ben,
So you’re saying your happiness depends in part on how this guy reacted?
Oooooooooooh!
Yeah, you’re right. I’m choosing to be my own buzzkill.
Not really.
What you first talked about was the dancing guy’s (and your own) valuation of self, of self-worth. Self-worth is something different from the actions of others of which you derive utility.
You saying you would find utility, as it were, if the dancing guy said a certain phrase or behaved a certain way, does not constitute a performative contradiction against your first post about you implying you would find utility if the dancing guy said “You can’t body shame me” to the cameramen which is itself derived from egoism or individualism. You can have it both ways here. You can say you would be happier if the dancing guy was instead not passive against haters and should not feel shame, AND you can say your own feeling of self-worth is not predicated on or dependent on the dancing guy’s behavior.
Now if instead you said something like “I would feel a higher degree of self-worth if the dancing guy found his own self-worth to be higher than it he showed”, THEN Josiah’s rhetorical tactic (slightly reworded of course) would have been a good burn. But his missed the mark. You too are talking about different things. The individual determining his own self-worth by being active against haters, on the one hand, and the individual finding utility if they saw someone behave in a certain way.
Don’t worry, you’re not being inconsistent.
“Body shaming is awful …”
Unless you’re older than her dad.
*Takes a bow*
Oops. That link wasn’t created properly. Here it is again.
“Body shaming is awful …”
Unless you’re older than her dad.
*Takes a bow*
Yeah she blew it. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the advances or the request for “pics of mah feet” rather, she didn’t like the particular guys who were sending them. It didn’t sound like she was against creeps per se more than she was disappointed they weren’t her kind of Christian Grey type creeps.
I know, right? She was like, “He was telling me what he’d like to do to me, so I clicked on his profile pic” (rough paraphrase).
Anyway, I’m in love.
It depends on what you mean by ‘body shaming’. If it means pointing and laughing at people for being fat, that is different from making a general statement that being fat is unhealthy and cumbersome in many ways. I’m not sure which one you are talking about.
Dr. Murphy, have you ever done a duet of Islands in the Stream? If yes can you direct me to the footage and if not I would like to put in the request.
Beethoven: excellent quote. Unfortunately nonacceptance is, like a good counterfactual, not proof.
Reminds me of a description of the difference between jazz and pop. Pop is playing 6 chords to thousands of people, jazz is playing thousands of chords to 6 people.
The 8th Symphony has always seemed far more unified as a piece than the 7th. I have never quite understood how the 2nd movement of the 7th fits with the other three, and yet I still prefer the 7th to the 8th by a wide, wide margin.
It is the odd numbered ones that are more popular.