by Michael Munger, AIERJune 5, 2024.
Extract:
This seems paradoxical. The trading system has produced consistent and widely shared results among the population. Yet having to participate in a system in which everyone plans, saves, invests and designs an “individual quest for happiness” overwhelms the very people who should be seizing all the new opportunities that the system has revealed to them.
I think the explanation of the paradox is simple: Everything difficult has been banished. Just as our physiological immune system needs threats to mature and avoid attack, our sense of business effectiveness must confront and overcome challenges to become effective citizenship.
Children are told that they can do anything, that they are personally powerful and important. But they never have the experience of daily efforts and failures; In fact, they are advised to avoid anything that might “trigger” them, or allow them to play or act on their own, as documented by authors ranging from Jonathan Haidtmentioned above, to Lenore Skenazy. So young people are overwhelmed with anxiety: If they do anything other than cure cancer or become a U.S. senator, they have failed. But they don’t know how to build a nest box from scrap wood. They don’t know how to fix a toilet or how to change the inner tube on their $6,000 mountain bike. They are helpless, but charged with an exaggerated sense of destiny and their own importance.
HRD comments when I read this: One of my proudest accomplishments at the Naval Postgraduate School occurred one afternoon about 15 years ago when I saw a distinguished (and by distinguished, I hear he had gray hair and looked old, which shows how I look now) in the parking lot with a flat tire. I asked him if he wanted me to help him. He did. I hadn’t changed a tire in over 30 years, but I remembered all the steps well and we were both on our way in less than 15 minutes.
HRD now comments: I hesitate to dispute Michael’s observations because, after all, he is closer to the young students than I am. So my 5 counterexamples will probably seem weak, because they are related to self-selection. A local organization I’m involved with called the California Arts and Science Institute (CASI) hosted an event for young people – everyone from elementary school students to college students – last Wednesday. My friend François Melese spoke to three of them; I talked to two of them – both of them were in college, one at Monterey Peninsula College and the other at UC Berkeley. I came away very impressed, as did François. I know the danger of anecdotes. What I would say is that the danger of following Mike Munger’s point of view is to tell yourself that there is no point in showing up to such events.
by Roger Pielke, Jr., The honest brokerMay 20, 2024.
Democrats – not all, but many – have left the IPCC behind in favor of an extreme view of climate and extreme events. Republicans – not all, but many – find themselves much more in tune with the conclusions of the IPCC on climate and extreme events. Likewise, I suppose that explains why, in recent years, I have been invited to testify by Republicans.4
Of course, consistency with the IPCC (or not) says a lot about policy preferences. Democrats remain the party championing action on climate policy and Republicans remain much less supportive. Of course, the key question here is: what action? I argued for a long time that there are unexplored opportunities for greater bipartisan support for pragmatic energy and adaptation policies that would accelerate decarbonization and reduce vulnerabilities – but that’s a topic for another day.
Comment:
Classical Liberals at Stanford asked Roger to speak on Zoom last month. Very impressive.
by John V. Walsh, antiwar.comMay 27, 2024.
Sometimes a book is compelling not only because its arguments are strong, but also because of who the author is. It would not be surprising to come across a book written by a socialist or a Sinophile who paints the false portrait of China that adorns the American media. But Joseph Solis-Mullen, the author of The false Chinese threat and its very real danger, is neither socialist nor sinophile.
Solis-Mullen is a libertarian in the mold of Randolph Bourne and Justin Raimondo. Therefore, he is classified as conservative in our poor political taxonomy. But his book is not written to appeal to people of the same political persuasion. It is written with only one thing in mind, the interest of the American people and, dare I say, humanity in general, including China. It is therefore of great use to people across the political spectrum who feel our people are being misled by false Chinese threats. He can answer your or your friends’ questions about China in a way that the average American can understand.
Comment: I do not completely dismiss the Chinese threat, but I think it has been exaggerated. Certainly, if they try to threaten us with trade, they have a strange way of doing it, which is that their taxpayers give us money in the form of subsidized exports. As Milton Friedman once said, “Why should we reject foreign aid? » Especially when foreign aid goes to consumers rather than our wasteful governments.
by Christopher J. Snowdon, Quillette, June 6, 2024.
Extract:
The central assumption at the heart of Orwell’s political writings of the mid-1930s was that capitalism was doomed to failure and would most likely be replaced by totalitarian socialism of the type that is satirized in 1984. Despite his contempt for capitalism, Orwell saw the world caught between a rock and a hard place. “Capitalism leads to welfare queues, rush to markets and war,” he wrote in 1944. “Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship and war. The only alternative, in his view, was a planned economy that preserved democracy and allowed the freedom of the individual, but he became increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for his libertarian brand of what he called democratic socialism. as the 1940s progressed. In fact, he saw “no practical way of doing it.”
This explains why he was so discouraged about the world’s prospects in the last years of his life and why he decided to write 1984. But he was wrong. Capitalism did To survive, subsequent communist revolutions proceeded along the same lines as those of the USSR, and the Orwellian version of democratic socialism was not necessary to prevent totalitarianism from sweeping the planet. It turned out that there was not a direct choice between democratic socialism and communist (or fascist) totalitarianism. There was a third way.
The 1944 quote is also taken from his review of two booksone of which was that of Friedrich Hayek The road to serfdom.
Judge Napolitano, Judging freedomYouTube, June 5, 2024.
Ritter says three U.S. government agents took him off a plane about to leave for Russia and stole his passport without explanation. They wouldn’t tell him who sent them, and when asked, they told him the way to get his stolen property back was to contact the State Department.
