“Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination."
~ a Random Thought of Thomas Sowell
[Hat tip Bob Jones]
“Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination."
~ a Random Thought of Thomas Sowell
[Hat tip Bob Jones]
"The Government never foresaw the land-use forces they were unleashing with the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS)...."The bottom line is that [so-called] carbon forestry is now far more profitable than sheep and beef farming on nearly all classes of land. We are indeed on the cusp of the greatest rural land-use changes that New Zealand has seen in the last 100 years."~ Keith Woodford, who says 'The ETS is both a gold mine and a minefield'
“If a UBI let employers off the hook entirely from the idea that a job should be something a person can live on, it could make it easier to hire people for fewer hours on a casual or fleeting basis. […] There is a danger in seeing job insecurity as an inevitability to which we must adapt, when in some cases it is simply a regulatory failure to which we should respond.”There are three problems here that relate to the way we look at economic and political relations in the 2020s.
"There are no economic miracles. Rather there are countries held far below their potential due to bad government policies. South Korea in the early 1960s was one example, while China under Mao was another. In the Korean case, economic success resulted from following the recommendation of US policymakers. In the German case, economic success came after domestic policymakers ignored the advice of US policymakers and freed up domestic prices (in 1948).
"The common thread is that almost all economic 'miracles' involve some form of economic liberalisation. What looks like a 'miracle' is the rapid growth after the removal of growth constraints."~ Scott Sumner, from 'Doug Irwin on the Korean miracle'
"Individual man is born into a socially organised environment. In this sense alone we may accept the saying that society is--logically or historically--antecedent to the individual. In every other sense this dictum is either empty or nonsensical. The individual lives and acts within society. But society is nothing but the combination of individuals for cooperative effort. It exists nowhere else than in the actions of individual men. It is a delusion to search for it outside the actions of individuals. To speak of a society's autonomous and independent existence, of its life, its soul, and its actions is a metaphor which can easily lead to crass errors.
"The questions whether society or the individual is to be considered as the ultimate end, and whether the interests of society should be subordinated to those of the individuals or the interests of the individuals to those of society are fruitless. Action is always action of individual men. The social or societal element is a certain orientation of the actions of individual men. The category end makes sense only when applied to action....
"Within the frame of social cooperation there can emerge between members of society feelings of sympathy and friendship and a sense of belonging together. These feelings are the source of man's most delightful and most sublime experiences. They are the most precious adornment of life; they lift the animal species man to the heights of a really human existence. However, they are not, as some have asserted, the agents that have brought about social relationships. They are fruits of social cooperation, they thrive only within its frame; they did not precede the establishment of social relations and are not the seed from which they spring.
"The fundamental facts that brought about cooperation, society, and civilisation and transformed the animal man into a human being are the facts that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than isolated work and that man's reason is capable of recognising this truth. But for these facts men would have forever remained deadly foes of one another, irreconcilable rivals in their endeavors to secure a portion of the scarce supply of means of sustenance provided by nature. Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs."~ Ludwig Von Mises, from 'Human Cooperation,' in his book Human Action
"For decades social critics in the United States and throughout the Western world have complained that 'property' rights too often take precedence over 'human' rights, with the result that people are treated unequally and have unequal opportunities. Inequality exists in any society. But the purported conflict between property rights and human rights is a mirage—property rights are human rights."
~ Armen Alchian, from his entry on 'Property Rights' in The Concise Encyclopaedia of Economics
"We, and others, have operated in some of the most Covid-ravaged countries in the world and we have kept our Kiwi staff Covid-free for more than a year and a half because of the protocols that have been put in place by the businesses we work with. . .
"What we have learned from our experience over the past year and a half is that businesses have a huge interest in keeping their people safe from Covid and they can do it faster than governments..."
~ Ian Taylor, from 'NZ needs business help to get ahead of virus'
There's something nasty in the way warmists gloat whenever there's a natural disaster -- a bushfire, a hurricane, a flood -- something evil in the glee which these disasters are reported, always with a link to 'global warming, almost alway revelling in the human tragedy as a 'payback' for our comfortable lifestyles driven by high energy use.
No surprise to hear that these ghouls are also fantasists. On top of similar studies elsewhere comes three from Australia, affirming ...
... there has been no significant change in natural disasters, precipitation, or bushfire across Australia for the last several decades.
“Here we utilise an Australian natural disaster database of normalised insurance losses to show compound disasters are responsible for the highest seasonal financial losses. … There has been no temporal trend in their frequency since 1966.
"The predominant and most predictable driver of climate-related disaster events is not anthropogenic global warming, or CO2 emissions, but the El Niño Southern Oscillation."
No wonder, really, because how could a one degree rise in 150 years possibly cause any such acceleration of disaster on the scale regularly claimed by warmists.
No, our planet is not totally safe. It has always delivered natural disasters, situations which are beyond our ability to cope. But rather than take this already unsafe planet and make it more unsafe, our abundant use of energy takes this unsafe planet and makes it safer. The more energy we have, the less we have to fear.
Especially comforting news when you know the rate of disasters aren't increasing. And won't be.
"As an indication of how much better wealthy countries are at resisting flood and tempest, look at July’s floods in the city of Zhenghou, which were reported by Western media as a kind of cataclysm – the sort of climate change-induced event from which the world must save itself. Those floods killed 219 people. By contrast, in the much-poorer China of 1975, 26,000 people were killed by a typhoon in the surrounding Henan province."[Hat tip GWBF Newsletter]
~ Ross Clark, from 'The West Has Doomed COP26 to Failure'
"Every gesture of resistance which is void of either risk or impact is nothing but a cry for recognition."
~ Stefan Zweig, from a 1941 interview
"Welcome to Renewables-World where we spend $3.3b to get half a million in benefits."~ Jo Nova, from her post 'Renewable bandaid burns money: New transmission line alone costs as much as new advanced Coal Plant'
"As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X or, in the better case, what A, B and C shall do for X... What I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. he is the man who never is thought of. He is the victim of the reformer, social speculator and philanthropist... He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays..."
“It is plain that the Forgotten Man and the Forgotten Woman are the real productive strength of the country.”
~ William Graham Sumner, from his The Forgotten Man + Other Essays
Someone on Twitter was asking why everyone felt the need to tell the world where they were twenty years ago when terrorists destroyed the twin towers. Yes, it affected everybody -- it seems almost all of us around at the time have or had only one or two degrees of separation at most from those buildings -- but it did seem to smack a little more of self-indulgence than commemoration.
So I did like Robert Tracinski's take on things.
PS: Pretty sure the 'Flitcraft Parable' appears in The Maltese Falcon not The Thin Man. But you should read both anyway just to make sure.
"Over time, some men trade their passion for domesticity."
~ from a review essay of Graham Parker's Struck by Lightning
"In short, postmodernism is relativism run riot, skepticism on stilts. In terms of the culture wars, it informs the arguments of those who think that American society is inferior to others and on the decline, that there are no 'Great Books' of a higher order of merit than others, that science and technology are socially constructed and are not making genuine progress, and that modern free-market economics has lowered living standards. As Hicks notes, there is a contradictory tone to all this — all cultures are equal, but ours stinks; all truth is relative, except the unquestionable po-mo truth; no race, class or gender is superior, but middle class white males are clearly inferior; and no books are superior, except, of course, those by third-world authors. Where does this farrago of resentment come from?"Hicks rightly views postmodernist philosophy as the most recent manifestation of the reaction against the Enlightenment, what we might call the Counter-Enlightenment..."
~ Professor Gary James Jason reviewing Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism
"There are intangible reasons to justify say a year or two at university as a bridging experience between childhood and adult status. But otherwise, unless studying for a traditional career such as medicine or law, to a very large degree trusting and unworldly kids attending university today are victims of a gigantic fraud.... luring the simple-minded seeking letters after their names....
"The modern university is today largely a scam, exploiting the vulnerable with its ever expanding range of non-intellectual bullshit degrees.... academic nonsense, in which the participants waste their lives at public expense, pointlessly pursuing esoteric imaginary elements of their utterly bogus purported field of study.... [while universities are] transforming themselves into competitive commercial enterprises while maintaining a veneer, largely imagined, of being intellectual institutions."
~ Bob Jones, from his post 'The Contemporary World's Biggest Fraud'
Artist Michael Newberry with a painting from his Eudaemonia series
“So many disciplines add to our evolution—philosophy, psychology, sciences. . .—but none of them are ends in themselves except for art. . . . It is art that lights the fire for us to push and grow, it is art that refuels our spirit when it is exhausted and can’t do more, and it is art that rewards us for a job well done and life well lived.”~ Artist Michael Newberry, from his stunning new book Evolution Through Art
"Capitalism is a system of class harmony, in which the accumulated wealth of the capitalists, i.e., their capital, is the source of the supply of products and the demand for labour, and progressively enriches wage earners.
"The result is that today the average wage earner in a capitalist country has a higher standard of living than did the kings and emperors of the past, such as Augustus Caesar, Louis XIV, and Queen Victoria."~ George Reisman. For proof, see his Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics
"Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing.... Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy."~ Robert Heinlein, talking through his character Jubal Harshaw in his novel To Sail Beyond the Sunset
"Integrity is the principle of being principled, practicing what one preaches regardless of emotional or social pressure, and not allowing any irrational consideration to overwhelm one's rational condition."~ Thomas Becker, from his article 'Integrity in Organisations: Beyond Honesty and Conscientiousness,' paraphrasing Leonard Peikoff (p. 242)
“'There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to the public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute not common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all'.”~ Judge's verdict, delivered in Robert Heinlein's excellent, and once-again topical, 1949 novella 'The Man Who Sold the Moon'