My Roast of Stefan Molyneux at PorcFest 2011
This happened in June 2011. It’s pretty self-explanatory.
These Keynesians Make a Lot of Sense…
Sorry I’ve been so sparse with the blogging, but I was traveling most of last week, and now I have to dig out of a “day job” hole. I am wondering if this is what insanity feels like, because lately I’ve been agreeing with the Keynesian side of internet arguments.
The first one centers on whether John Cochrane made a fool of himself by sorta citing Ricardian Equivalence to argue that stimulus packages even in principle couldn’t raise (nominal) Aggregate Demand. Krugman & Co. have been going nuts, and Scott Sumner has defended Cochrane on grounds that (I think) contradict Sumner’s own view that fiscal policy can indeed raise Aggregate Demand. (I tried to clarify this, but Sumner’s answered doing his best impression of a Sphinx.) I’ll think more about it, but if I had to answer right now, I’d say Krugman wins.
The second one involves Jeffrey Sachs’ recent piece on libertarianism. Steve Horwitz got upset and thought it fed into a stereotype, but I actually had no problem at all with it (besides the fact that Sachs didn’t want to be a “libertarian” so defined). Here’s what Sachs said:
Yet the error of libertarianism lies not in championing liberty, but in championing liberty to the exclusion of all other values. Libertarians hold that individual liberty should never be sacrificed in the pursuit of other values or causes. Compassion, justice, civic responsibility, honesty, decency, humility, respect, and even survival of the poor, weak, and vulnerable — all are to take a back seat.
Yep, that’s it. And just to make sure there’s no misunderstanding, Sachs even spelled it out:
By taking an extreme view — that liberty alone is to be defended among all of society’s values — libertarians reach extreme conclusions. Suppose a rich man has a surfeit of food and a poor man living next door is starving to death. The libertarian says that the government has no moral right or political claim to tax the rich person in order to save the poor person. Perhaps the rich person should be generous and give charity to the neighbor, the libertarian might say (or might not), but there is nothing that the government should do. The moral value of saving the poor person’s life simply does not register when compared with the liberty of the rich person.
Yep. Just like if Sachs or any of his readers took their kids to the playground, it would never in a million years occur to them to say, “Johnny, today we’re going to feed some homeless people, so go take the lunch from that chunky kid over there, even if he doesn’t want to share.” No, that would be stealing, and no parent would ever tell his kid it’s OK to steal, even though by so doing it might allow us to achieve other worthy goals.
I understand why Horwitz is upset, because he thinks too many self-declared libertarians reject even private altruism/concern for the weak/etc. I am concerned by that too. But the solution isn’t to get mad when somebody like Jeff Sachs comes along and gives a perfectly reasonable description of the libertarian position. As Daniel Kuehn said, after reading Horwitz’s objection to Sachs’ description:
If the difference between those in the classical liberal tradition that call themselves “libertarian” and those in the classical liberal tradition that consider themselves non-libertarians is not making other priorities take a back seat to liberty then what the hell is it that defines libertarianism?
No major blogger or politician is going to come out and say, “Other things equal, I hope poor people starve to death.” Also, no pundit in America will say, “Freedom is overrated.” What makes libertarians stand out is that we say, “We really mean it when we say that liberty is the highest political end. You can’t take people’s property against their will, even if you think (falsely, by the way) that in so doing, you will prevent poor people from starving.”
Indeed, some of us are such zealots that we even think it would be wrong to tax people to prevent an asteroid from destroying the Earth. Take that, Sachs!
Sci Fi Geek Fact Check
Bryan Caplan desperately wants there to be more to life than arguing with Robin Hanson over population growth, so he believes in the existence of aliens (Martian, not Hispanic) despite serious evidence against it. Part of Bryan’s case was this claim:
Our powers of detection are bad enough to overlook hundreds of billions of planets. Detecting intelligent life will be vastly harder than detecting planets – maybe prohibitively harder.
That sounded like a bogus claim to me, so in the comments I asked if anyone could justify it. One guy said:
Non-directional electromagnetic communications (radio, TV, etc) follows an inverse cube law (I think, though it might be inverse square) meaning we can’t detect anything at what we would consider realistic power levels from more than a light year or so away. So, in order for us to detect intelligent life, they would either have to come here or send a coherent beam communication directly at us, one of 100 billion stars in the galaxy. Furthermore, it’s entirely possible that their communication isn’t even something we would recognize as a signal, like a stream of neutrinos using muon neutrinos as 0 and tau neutrinos as 1 the way we use high/low current for digital communications today. Not to mention that they might not be as outgoing as we are.
So detecting extrasolar life is hard because a.) they have to be intentionally trying to talk to us (among the 100 billion other possible stars) and b.) we would have to recognize that they are trying to do so.
We wouldn’t be able to detect ourselves from any of the planets we’ve found so far.
Does that sound right to people? Haven’t we been deliberately sending out probes and broadcasting messages for decades, with the express purpose of demonstrating our intelligence in things that would (we hope) be universally recognizable? Did all of the scientists working on those projects fail to consider that a guy could blow up their efforts in 5 seconds in an EconLog comment?
The Thrill Is Gone, Daily Show Edition
Aww too bad. At first I was elated that the Daily Show was going after somebody who had been a hypocrite in her attack on the Tea Party, but this skit totally breaks down. It is clear she knows what’s going on and is just happy to be on the show. It makes me wonder about all the previous pieces that were like this, but less obvious.
European Conspiracy Bask
Attention all European readers: Can you please describe the big-picture processes by which Berlusconi, Papandreou, and Zapatero were replaced? In particular, I want to know if there was a regularly scheduled election, or if there was a challenge to their party (which could happen at any time) and then their replacements weren’t elected.
For example, the Wikipedia article on the new Italian Prime Minister says:
On 9 November 2011, Monti was appointed a Lifetime Senator by Italian President Giorgio Napolitano.[13] Mario Monti was seen as a favourite to replace Silvio Berlusconi to lead a new unity government in Italy in order to implement reforms and austerity measures.[14] On 12 November 2011, following Berlusconi’s resignation, Napolitano invited Monti to form a new government.[15] Monti accepted the offer, and held talks with the leaders of Italy’s political parties, saying that he wanted to form a government that would remain in office until the next scheduled elections in 2013.[16] On 16 November 2011, Monti unveiled a technocratic cabinet, and was officially sworn in as Prime Minister of Italy.[17] He also appointed himself as Minister of Economy and Finance.[18][19]
So am I right to conclude that the Italian people never voted Monti into office?
Please explain how all this works. In the United States the elites pick our leaders too, but they at least put on a show where we vote for them at regular intervals. This European system is foreign to me. (We also would have accepted, “…is Greek to me.”)
Jon Stewart on Ron Paul in New Hampshire
I think the existence of Jon Stewart is the single best argument for gay marriage. (I want to marry him.)
Watch Mises Circle Live, This Saturday!
Here is the link to the live webcast of this Saturday’s Mises Circle in Houston. And here are the details.
And Good Day to You Too, Sir
Heh. Sam sends this clip along, asking, “Why haven’t I heard of this before?” Indeed.
P.S. Don’t tell me this is old news. Of course it is. But I hadn’t heard it, so I’m guessing a lot of you haven’t, either.
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