Notes and observations. Diversions and digressions. All done far too infrequently.
Friday, June 25, 2010
The ZaZa Pizza King, Don Michele Caruso has died
Thursday, June 17, 2010
"Loss is nothing but change."
Loss is nothing but change. In this Universal Nature rejoices and by her all things come to pass well. From eternity they came to pass in like fashion and will be to everlasting in other similar shapes. When then do they say 'all things ever came to pass badly and that all will ever be bad'? So no power it seems was ever found in so many gods to remedy this, but the world is condemned to be straitened in uninterrupted evils? - Book IX, Number 36. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Glaeser: The Economics of Libertarianism
I always find it refreshing to take a quick, clean intellectual shower in the cold, pure waters of libertarian thought, but I find myself most interested in the murky areas on the edge of libertarianism, which Professor Miron explores with aplomb. Libertarians are rarely anarchists. Almost all of them believe in some form of state power, at the very least the protection of private property and the enforcement of contracts. Many of them, including Milton Friedman, are quite comfortable with larger exercises of state power, including the redistribution of resources to those who have less. Professor Miron writes that “anti-poverty spending is the most defensible kind of redistribution,” because “the goal of this redistribution – helping the poor – is reasonable and the costs of a well-designed limited anti-poverty program (e.g., a negative income tax set on a state-by-state basis) are modest.”
But once the need for public action is accepted, things start getting very muddy and we can’t rely on either a love of liberty or fear of the state for guidance. Consider the purely hypothetical case of a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The traditional libertarian would argue that regulation is unnecessary because the tort system will hold the driller liable for any damage. But what if the leak is so vast that the driller doesn’t have the resources to pay? The libertarian would respond that the driller should have been forced to post a bond or pay for sufficient insurance to cover any conceivable spill. Perhaps, but then the government needs to regulate the insurance contract and the resources of the insurer.
Even more problematically, the libertarian’s solution requires us to place great trust in part of the public sector: the court system. At times, judges have been bribed; any courtroom can be influenced by the best attorneys that money can buy.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Looking for a clip from today's World Cup game between Italy vs Paraguay game, I found this ditty!
Melodramatic isn't enough to describe this video.
Embed has been disabled by request. The conspiracy continues...
UPDATE: The video has been removed from YouTube.