If all the year were playing holidays;
To sport would be as tedious as to work.
William Shakespeare
Chart of the Day: The Effects of Economic Liberalization in East Asia
Image of the Day
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| Via the Libertarian Catholic |
Every once in a while I'll reference one of my favorite topics, usability. (This was a major issue with the ObamaCare marketplace rollout, e.g., misleading error messages; it required you to jump many hoops before you could even see a quoted price, etc.) The only positive part of my last year in academia as a visiting professor at ISU is I got to teach the graduate course on human factors in IT. At that time, even in my interdisciplinary field of MIS, those of us interested in human factors/ergonomics were a barely visible group of maybe a couple of dozen academics. Of course, there was a much wider audience, e.g., in engineering and psychology. There are a number of researchers who influenced me; one is Donald Norman who wrote a highly readable volume (later retitled) called The Psychology of Everyday Things, and design principles for minimizing user errors. To this day, I'll note some simple mistakes in everyday life, e.g., pulling vs. pushing on a door, why I popped open my car trunk by mistake, etc. Quite often we engage in activities with certain expectations.
I'll give a simple example to make my point from today. I ran out of copy paper this weekend and needed to pick up a new ream, so I went to my nearby WalMart. I went to their computer section and quickly found printers, cartridges, cables, etc.,--everything but paper. I double-checked because I had bought some paper there a few weeks earlier. I then thought, did they have an office supply section and where is it? I did find some paper there, of course, but I tended to conceptualize paper with printers. There are some interesting studies from Patricia Wright that bear on similar issues.
In my latest software post, I describe tongue-in-cheek my usability issues with the initial setup and use of a Garmin GPS device. I'm often an early adopter of gizmos, but felt printouts from Google Maps were sufficient. However, I've reconsidered after a recent move when I got lost finding a gas station off a snowy exit and a recent trip to Pennsylvania where troopers had closed off an exit ramp in the direction of the airport from the interstate and I had to find my way back to the loop from an exit which led to a maze of one-way streets without any relevant signs for a turnaround.
Classic Dirty Politics
Facebook Corner
(Mises.org). See Salerno quote above.
This used to be called communism. Maybe you can explain why promoting class envy has become a tenet of laissez faire?
Not communism. Even a casual reading of the quote shows "ruling class", "taxpayers", "coersively". The market profits by voluntary transactions. The government taxes at the point of a gun. The taxpayers don't necessarily lust for the power of political whore; they just want the government to stop stealing ever so much more from their pockets and to be left the hell alone.
It is all about distractions, now. They know Ron Paul woke some people up, and they are scared to lose their evil grip on the people. Thankfully, big brother is way too stupid to even pull off a false flag, now. The banksters are getting ready to wipe the U.S. out to a third world country, and I expect that in just a few years. There is just no public greatness anymore, so it is all over, in my opinion anyway.
Stop this crackpot "bankster" conspiracy bullshit; this country has badly regulated/overregulated banking from the get-go, and policies like deposit insurance are morally hazardous; we've several times the number of bank failures than Canada. The Fed is what you need to worry about (in addition to political whores); it's not because they are brilliant schemers but because they don't know what the hell they're doing
There are, I believe, just wars, and a time to intervene or support our friends. That said, there are forces at work around the globe, .....notably the oligarchs and the 1% that benefit immeasurably from war, both directly and indirectly........We need to be cognizant that there are those who even now are prospering from pitting us, one against the other, which necessarily removes the 1% from close scrutiny, as we occupy ourselves with our own discord and rail at the divisions the 1% have engineered......Von Mises understood this..........
Bullshit! Knock off the idiotic socialist crackpot "oligarch", 1% conspiracy. Mises would be the first person to disavow you associating him with this crap. In "The Anticapitalist Mentality" Mises wrote " “Capitalism grants to each the opportunity to attain the most desirable positions which, of course, can only be attained by the few … Whatever a man may have gained for himself, there are always before his eyes people who have outstripped him … Such is the attitude of the tramp against the man with the regular job, the factory hand against the foreman, the executive against the vice-president, the vice-president against the president, the man who is worth three hundred thousand dollars against the millionaire, and so on.” In other words, envy is a VICE, not a virtue.
(Reason). Do third-party candidates add variety and serve as a check on the major parties, or do just spoil things for the real candidates?
I gave mixed feelings. Despite the trite opinion that I endlessly hear from libertarians that there are no differences between the Dems and the GOP, clearly they don't remember the 111th Congress, ObamaScare, Dodd N Frankenstein, the doubling of the publicly-held debt while Obama reneged on Gitmo, the Patriot Act and doubled down on drones and Afghanistan. The other tedious point is the GOP is trying to legislate social policies, although I am unaware of any such initiative, particularly any that could survive a Senate filibuster or Presidential veto.
That being said, it is hard to run against Santa Claus. The burden is on the libertarian and conservative coalition to provide a positive agenda on limited government. Moreover, whereas I understand the Democratic attempt to divide and conquer the coalition, I don't have a lot of sympathy for GOP candidates who seem to think that Libertarian Party candidates suck away their votes. If they lose, it's more that they failed to turn out their base than convert the Libertarian voters. However, personally I think libertarians who in a close election will not vote for the most viable alternative to the Statist Dems are making a mistake.
(Reason). On Tuesday, Arkansas voters will have a chance to reject prohibition and support individual rights when they vote on Issue 4.
According to the amendment that ended prohibition, each state has the power to regulate alcohol as it sees fit. The Feds have no say. I like that.
Prohibition violates individual rights on the local, state or federal level. Intervening in the voluntary market transactions of others--I don't like that.
Whaaaat? Religious people trying to use the government to enforce their will on others? No way!
Actually, moron, do some research on the temperance movement. You'll find out the progressive moment had a lot to with that, and whereas some Protestant groups were part of the movement, Catholics and other religious groups were not.
I don't ever want to see a town like Mountain View forced to allow liquor stores to build. You would destroy everything good about that town. Based on your argument it's my right to get laid anytime I want, should we build a whorehouse in every town just to accomodate my needs ?
No, what you are describing is tyranny of a local majority. If you are prohibiting transactions between voluntary parties (short of infringing on the lives and property of other people). It's one thing to regulate drunken aggression or related threats to public safety (e.g., DWI), but you have no right to regulate what a merchant carries or a customer buys; what the consumer does on his own property is his business.
Arkansas doesn't have prohibition, it just has counties that choose not to allow the SALE of alcohol within their borders. You can get it somewhere else and consume it at your leisure. The only problem with that system is that monied folks on the edges of those dry counties spend a lot of money lobbying to KEEP those areas dry.
Those of us who believe in limited government (e.g., common defense/safety and justice) do not believe government at any level should be able to restrict where you can buy or sell products or services; the market will decide whether or not a business is successful.
thought this was about cannabis... who cares if these counties want to prohibit ANYTHING... the problem is one size fits all FEDERAL tyranny, not local.
You don't get it. There was a NINTH amendment before there was a TENTH amendment. There is no such thing as a federal-only libertarian: what we have here is a hypocrite.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Michael Ramirez via IPI |
Linda Ronstadt, "Easy For You To Say"
