photo from www.ecuadortimes.net
The Washington Post’s Matt O’Brien has a great article about the current situation in Venezuela. Early on he relates what can be described in philosophy as the primacy of consciousness, the idea that what you think is of greater importance than what is actually out there in reality.
It shouldn’t be this way. Venezuela, after all, has the largest
A text from my brother alerted me to a guest commentary piece in our local paper today by Tom Licata of the Ethan Allen Institute titled “Memo to the Vermont Republican Party” and I was pleased, well pleased probably isn’t the right word, to see his take on the Vermont Republican party largely agrees my own.
Private enterprise saw this book in my hands within 25 hours of my ordering it.
I was somewhat amused to read recently that Venezuela’s President Maduro blamed the pervasive shortages that country is facing on the fact that the distribution network for goods is largely controlled by the private sector. Over the past 6 years, since I met my wife who is Venezuelan, I have tried to pay attention to what is happening there, especially as she still lives there, so I know this is a laughable. It ignores the fact that about
There was another great batch of podcasts this week that are well worth listening to. This week’s podcasts cover topics from marriage without love, to advice for Japan (any country actually) to help solve economic problems, to what the new Republican congress should do first and why.
photo from truenorthreports.com
I left the following comment to a post on True North Reports regarding the latest insanity from Senator Bernie Sanders.
One thing you can say about Senator Sanders: he is generally consistent. He is a consistent statist who I think genuinely believes that people would be better off if the government made all the really important, and likely a fair number of the less important, choices . It does not matter what the choice is: what terms of employment (wages, time off, etc) will an employer and employee
Exactly a month ago, well a month and a day, a new convenience store opened here in town. It is on my route to and from work, so it is very convenient indeed. When the store opened the price on gasoline was $2.89 per gallon. In just 32 days the price has dropped $0.70 or almost 25%. Over the last year, it has fallen about an additional $1.00 per gallon, making the current price pretty close to just half of what it was last year.
Now I know that the hard work of frackers does not account for
Image from www.wired.com
According to the Wall Street Journal, Congressional Republicans have drafted a bill that “is designed to protect net neutrality—the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally—without applying the part of telecommunications law that regulates common carriers.”
I
was taking a bit of a break from writing today and came across this image in my Facebook timeline. My first reaction was to post angrily about the rather ignorant view of economics. To equate real life economics to those of Monopoly implies that the original poster was just completely clueless about economics or, and this is more likely, was deliberately ignoring those differences in order to elicit the sorts of emotional, anti-capitalism comments the post received.
Real world economics,
Well, two weeks in a row that I have been able to listen to what had been my regular podcasts. That is a good start for the new year that hopefully I can maintain. Lots of great things to listen to this week covering topics from historical novels, free speech, how we think to plays as great literature and more.
Dr. Leonard Peikoff answers questions on:
Dr. Diana Hsieh and Greg Perkins answer questions applying rational principles to problems of everyday life. While they have not posted the
A panel discussion by Dr. Yaron Brook, Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute and Dr. Daniel Pipes, Director of Middle East Forum, on free speech from 2006, about a year after cartoons critical of Islam were published in Denmark and riots protesting them broke out across the Muslim world.
Dr. Pipes makes the point that this was not really about the cartoons, but the more fundamental question of whether the West will accept some form or aspect of Sharia law. The cartoons were just the