Why You Can’t Really Keep Theological Views Confined to Sunday
Welp, in case you haven’t heard, one of the recent items to emerge from the rounds of WikiLeaks dumps is the claim that Hillary Clinton’s campaign people may be involved in Satanic rituals, such as “spirit cooking” and more sinister things involving children.
In the interest of objectivity, I’ll let a completely skeptical New York Mag writer explain the allegations, as he tries to contain his guffawing. This way you know I’m not leading the witness.
So the reaction to this particular subset of the WikiLeaks dumps doesn’t come down to “Hillary vs. Trump.” Rather, it’s closer to a division between “believer vs. agnostic.” Specifically, I have seen plenty of libertarians on social media–who can’t stand Hillary Clinton–nonetheless roll their eyes at the people claiming this is evidence of monstrosities within the Clinton circles.
Yet I think the problem here is that if you don’t actually believe the devil exists, then it’s going to be hard for you to get worked up about people doing really creepy, occultish things. After all, by stipulation (in your worldview), that’s the end of it. There is no more significance to some weird ritual, than the physical actions of the people involved.
On the other hand, if you think that there is a devil, and that there really are people who have sold their souls to achieve earthly power, then it very much might concern you to know that Clinton’s campaign chief was cordially invited to a “Spirit Cooking” dinner with this lady:
P.S. I will correct this if someone points me to a definitive refutation, but my understanding is that that gloppy red stuff is actual blood.
Tom Woods, Boss
If he didn’t believe in the NAP, Tom would be a made man at this point.
Details at WoodsContest.com.
Video From the First Contra Cruise!!!
Yes, it deserves three exclamation points. For info on future Contra Cruises, go here.
Potpourri
==> Reminder, I’m in DC to give a talk at American University at 8pm on Tuesday. Details here.
==> Tom and I tackle Krugman’s latest. Krugman argues that climate change is more urgent than the federal debt, but we use the CBO and IPCC against him. I love quoting from “the consensus.”
==> This was a great Tom Woods Show episode on Romans 13. His guest echoes a lot of the points I’ve made, but he did it all in one spot and more persuasively.
==> Scott Horton gives a good summary of why US federal government intervention in the Middle East, is kinda sorta like US federal government intervention in health care. (That’s my analogy. I’m saying look at the similarity in broad patterns.)
==> In my blog post looking at some of the debate claims from Trump and Clinton, I want you to be sure to see how abysmal the official “recovery” has been, compared to previous ones.
==> This is amusing; wait for the end. (I had nothing to do with it.)
==> If CNN were more openly in the tank for Hillary, there would be leaked emails showing how much they secretly hate her. Anyway, check out this example of how they misquoted Trump, then begrudgingly updated their story to reverse the initial headline.
STANDARD DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT LIKE DONALD TRUMP ON EITHER A PERSONAL OR POLITICAL LEVEL. But the establishment is trying to take him out and I think the whole thing is hilarious.
Moses Shall Be “Like God to Pharaoh”
During my Bible study session we came across this, in the book of Exodus:
Chapter 6…
28 Now when the Lord spoke to Moses in Egypt, 29 he said to him, “I am the Lord. Tell Pharaoh king of Egypt everything I tell you.”
30 But Moses said to the Lord, “Since I speak with faltering lips, why would Pharaoh listen to me?”Chapter 7
Then the Lord said to Moses, “See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron will be your prophet. 2 You are to say everything I command you, and your brother Aaron is to tell Pharaoh to let the Israelites go out of his country. 3 But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in Egypt, 4 he will not listen to you. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and with mighty acts of judgment I will bring out my divisions, my people the Israelites. 5 And the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring the Israelites out of it.”6 Moses and Aaron did just as the Lord commanded them. 7 Moses was eighty years old and Aaron eighty-three when they spoke to Pharaoh.
It never really occurred to me just how terrifying a figure Moses must have been to Pharaoh (and especially Pharaoh’s officials). Moses wasn’t actually saying these predictions (of impending plagues, and cutting deals for relief), instead he was presumably just standing there while Aaron relayed the messages.
A New Front in My War Against Scott Sumner
BTW for newcomers: The reason I attack Scott so much is that he writes on issues I care about. E.g. I don’t think Bryan Caplan is winning in his debate with Michael Huemer on why we can kill bugs (if we can), but I have little to say on such matters.
On a carbon tax, on the other hand… here’s my summary:
I don’t think Sumner (let alone the average EconLog reader) realized just how tenuous his case was. Most people assume that if you are already vaguely worried about climate change, then a revenue-neutral carbon tax tied to, say, a combination of payroll and corporate income tax cuts, plus rebates for poor households to help them deal with higher energy prices, would be a no brainer. And yet the standard models in this literature show just the opposite. Writers urging libertarians and conservatives to consider a carbon tax should review the literature before picking up their keyboards.
P.S. I was not being sarcastic when I thanked Scott in the comments for his blogging on “monetary offset.” Once he pointed it out, a lot of commentary on Congress vs. the Fed seemed silly, but I probably wouldn’t have realized it had Scott not pointed it out.
Obama: Health Insurance Premiums Could Fall By 3000 Percent
This happened years ago, but I missed it. Now this video is making the rounds for obvious reasons:
So it’s funny that critics are calling this a “lie,” when it’s so much more than that.
(I googled and apparently the White House said afterwards that Obama had misspoken, and meant to claim a $3,000 reduction in premiums.)
I often defend people who say dumb things on camera, claiming that until you’re in front of a crowd, you don’t realize how sometimes your brain can freeze up. But on this one, I have to say–unless it was a mistake in a teleprompter and he was reading it–that this is D-U-M dumb. Even if someone absentmindedly says a price could drop 3,000% without catching himself or raising an eyebrow, that shows a gross ignorance of math and/or business.
For years I have not fully bought into the standard right-winger talking points that Obama was an empty suit, but I think I may have overestimated him.
Washington State Carbon Tax Ballot Proposal Shows Why Right Should Reject a “Deal”
In my latest IER column, I quote from a very revealing Vox article. It is crystal clear that progressive Leftists–whether we’re talking the nerdy wonks or the activist boots on the ground–want nothing to do with a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
I also try a different analogy to get people to see why these state-level carbon taxes are window dressing, and that it’s misleading to calibrate their tax rates to the “social cost of carbon”:
The analysis underlying the “social cost of carbon” implicitly assumes that the associated tax is levied globally. If instead only some jurisdictions levy the carbon tax, then we have to worry about “leakage”—when businesses and individuals transfer their emissions to outside, untaxed jurisdictions.
It should be clear that Washington State itself levying a carbon tax, even a draconian one, will not significantly affect global greenhouse gas emissions, particularly over the course of decades. As such, the “optimal” carbon tax when a state like Washington acts unilaterally is much lower than what the concept of the “social cost of carbon” implies….(The Vox article itself shows a chart indicating that the state of Texas alone has about nine times the carbon dioxide emissions as Washington State.)
For an analogy, suppose someone saw people dropping litter on a beach, and wanted to levy a fine to discourage this behavior. Now people could argue about the appropriate size of the fine; make it too little, like 10 cents per infraction, and it wouldn’t solve the litter problem. But make it too big, like $10,000 per infraction, and tourists might stop going to the beach altogether for fear of accidentally losing a napkin in the wind and having to pay a huge penalty.
Yet we can all agree that whatever the “right” level of the fine would be, it would be nonsense to apply that same dollar fee to only a small section of the beach that covered, say, one-one thousandth of the total surface area of the sand. It is clear that such a policy would be idiotic, because people would simply make sure not to set up their blankets on that tiny fraction of the beach, and would otherwise continue with their normal behavior.
This is analogous to Yoram Bauman’s proposal. His carbon tax would apply to Washington State, which has about 0.3 percent of the total habitable land surface area of planet Earth….Advocates are mixing in hopes that they will achieve copy-cat policies all over the globe in order for their suggestion to make any sense, even taking their own climate models as given.
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