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Thursday, November 29, 2018

Post # 3895 M: Harvard's Immoral Anti-Asian Admissions Policies

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A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, 
but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw  

Harvard's Racist Admissions Policy: Not a Meritocracy



Friedman On the Funding of Higher Education



Social Media Digest


Here are some of my Facebook fragments/comments:

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/benjamin-wiker/brexit-and-the-principle-of-subsidiarity/

It's well worth it to read this entire excellent article. but here are some highlights.

« ... In this instance, we should be looking at the most Catholic principle of subsidiarity, one which favors Brexit. ... the dual problem with the modern state is that its overwhelming historical tendency has been to absorb “power” from below, and to impose secular agendas from above. The modern state thereby violates the principle of subsidiarity in two ways: (1) by taking away legitimate “power” from more fundamental social, moral, and economic levels of human communities, such as the family, the neighborhood, and the village, and (2) by harnessing that stolen power to secular ideas and policies that destroy these more fundamental social, moral, and economic levels, and the faith along with it. Modern nation states are bad enough in this regard, but adding over and above that a European super-state, the European Union, and the violation of subsidiarity is even more egregious: not just the family, neighborhood, and village get subsumed into the higher order community, but now also the nation. Given what’s at stake, we would do well to understand a little more clearly and deeply the dangers involved in thus violating the principle of subsidiarity. The more concentrated power becomes at the top, the easier it is for a smaller number of people to control the levers of that power, thereby making it possible for a very few to lord it over an ever greater number of people. In the US, political power has been sucked up from the local and state level to Washington DC, and gathered into the Supreme Court. It’s that concentration of power at the top that allowed for the imposition of abortion and the gay marriage…and whatever is coming next. The danger of such concentration of political power is all the more evident in the case of the European Union. ... But it isn’t just the family and the fundamental moral order that gets quashed from above. When political power concentrates at the top, it makes it far, far easier for Goliathan economic powers to seize control, and manipulate the economic order to their own enormous advantage. In the US, we know that concentration of power in the national Congress has meant that Big Banks end up defining public policy by giving Big Money to Congress. It’s easier and cheaper to buy a handful of congressmen in influential committees than it is to bribe a far greater number of people on the state and local level. All the more so with EU’s absorption of national power into the uber-state. It’s no accident that one of the main opponents of Brexit was Goldman Sachs. ... »
[discussing my getting called to jury duty before I moved to Houston]

Ronald A Guillemette I think the first time I got called, I was unemployed in San Antonio. I recall whatever they paid barely covered parking, and it was taking time from my job search. There was this businessman there who was pissed off because he had more important work to do and said they should get the jobless to do it...Yeah, buddy; just wait until I'm on your jury... I think we finally got dismissed around lunchtime. The day was a total waste. I did get tabbed back in WV--somehow they didn't know I'm in SC.

[On the Minimum Wage]

Ronald A Guillemette Prohibition of work at lower prices is not the answer to a slow-growth economy. You always need to keep the consumer first, and the consumer benefits from greater variety and price competition, which leaves them better off. The consumer is able to consume more and/or save at lower prices. If you look, US manufacturing has never done better--but it does it with fewer, more knowledgeable productive workers. You also have more personalized, small-scale production, e.g., through 3D printing.

 The service economy has been growing relative to the manufacturing sector for several decades. Now only about 2% of the labor force is in agriculture vs. most at the nation's birth. We need to stop worrying about jobs. The profession I'm in didn't even exist when I was a kid. But the real problem is that government impedes innovation, discourages investment. We need to reconfigure our economy to our competitive advantage.
China has a rapidly growing middle-class, and there is a transition to a consumer economy similar to ours. When the economic fascists like Clinton, Sanders and Trump threaten expansion of trade, maybe even spark a trade war, it is a lose-lose proposition. Our mercantilist actions will be met by the same, aimed at products we sell them, hurting our workers.

[I was once in (libertarian) Jeffrey Tucker's FB group. I disagreed with him on multiple issues, most prominently he's anti-intellectual property.]

Ronald A Guillemette Rothbard, of course, flip-flopped on his issue, but the fact is that we have an unalienable right to migrate. Let me quote Rothbard before he lost his mind:

"Tariffs and immigration barriers as a cause of war may be thought far afield from our study, but actually this relationship may be analyzed praxeologically. A tariff imposed by Government A prevents an exporter residing under Government B from making a sale. Furthermore, an immigration barrier imposed by Government A prevents a resident of B from migrating. Both of these impositions are effected by coercion. Tariffs as a prelude to war have often been discussed; less understood is the Lebensraum argument. “Overpopulation” of one particular country insofar as it is not the result of a voluntary choice to remain in the homeland at the cost of a lower standard of living) is always the result of an immigration barrier imposed by another country. It may be thought that this barrier is purely a “domestic” one. But is it? By what right does the government of a territory proclaim the power to keep other people away? Under a purely free-market system, only individual property owners have the right to keep people off their property. The government’s power rests on the implicit assumption that the government owns all the territory that it rules. Only then can the government keep people out of that territory.
"Caught in an insoluble contradiction are those believers in the free market and private property who still uphold immigration barriers. They can do so only if they concede that the State is the owner of all property, but in that case they cannot have true private property in their system at all. In a truly free-market system, such as we have outlined above, only first cultivators would have title to unowned property; property that has never been used would remain unowned until someone used it. At present, the State owns all unused property, but it is clear that this is conquest incompatible (sic) with the free market. In a truly free market, for example, it would be inconceivable that an Australian agency could arise, laying claim to “ownership” over the vast tracts of unused land on that continent and using force to prevent people from other areas from entering and cultivating that land. It would also be inconceivable that a State could keep people from other areas out of property that the “domestic” property owner wishes them to use. No one but the individual property owner himself would have sovereignty over a piece of property."

As for Rothbard II, Hoppe et al., the great Walter Block refutes them here
 https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/22_1_29.pdf?file=1&type=document
Like · Reply · 14 hrs · Edited
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Jeffrey A. Tucker Thank you for posting this
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[I think the Twitter censors were at play here; it seemed to get an abnormally low number of impressions, and Twitter would not provide embed code for the tweet.]

@raguillem
Nov 28
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