"A Arte da Fuga" ("Die Kunst der Fuge", BWV 1080) é uma obra-prima de Johann Sebastian Bach: um único tema musical persegue-se, a si mesmo e as múltiplas variações, num diálogo musical intenso desenvolvido a diversas vozes, rico de simetrias, inversões, ritmos e tempos diferentes. Fugas para aartedafuga@gmail.com
.. It is a global feeding frenzy to get other people’s wealth without earning it and without having to provide any value to anyone ..
Governments love the issue because it provides a good excuse for more taxes, regulation and bureaucracy. Scientists love it because it provides grant money and subsidies, as well as fancy trips to exotic locales on someone else’s dime. Government bureaucrats love it for that too (actually, everyone involved loves it for that). Socialists love it because it shows the evils of capitalism. Environmentalists love it because it shows the evils of civilization. Religious leaders love it because it shows the evils of humanity. Statists love it because it seems to be a problem that can only be solved with a bigger state. Corporations love it because they can get government subsidies to pretend to invent “green” products that people can pretend will solve the non-existent problem. Guilt-ridden middle class liberals love it because it helps them to feel alive for a few brief moments before the emptiness returns. Celebrities love it because it gives them a feel good issue to advocate for in order to assuage their guilt over their own extreme wealth and lavish lifestyles. Pretty much every member of the political and intellectual class has a stake in this issue surviving, and so it probably will. Judah Cohen himself is in on the scam and has managed to mix in a bit of the military-industrial-complex for flavor.
.. one need not be a global warming scientist to see the problem here for environmental zealots. One need only apply some basic logic.
The first problem is that the theory is totally unfalsifiable. If warming proves warming and cooling proves warming, then warming does not actually mean anything. Any weather phenomenon can be used to show that the AGW theory is valid. When winter is cold and snowy: global warming. When winter is warm and rainy: global warming. When weather events seem to confirm the AGW theory, these weather events are trotted out as evidence in arguments claiming that AGW is a huge problem. When weather events seem to show the opposite, two arguments are typically made by proponents of the theory ..
Another problem is that the AGW theory is untestable because global warming is impossible to control for. If man-made CO2 is in fact responsible for the claimed warming of the atmosphere, how could you ever know it? How can you control for the entire planet earth? How can you ever know what conditions would be if things were another way? ..
.. Given this problem, what AGW scientists do is create computer models to make their “observations” .. the models completely failed to predict the cold and snows of recent winters .. As we saw with the climategate scandal, many of these so-called “scientists” are not above messing with their computer code to get the results they want.
These are far from the only problems with the AGW theory. There are many more. There are serious issues with the methods of observing, collecting, storing and interpreting temperature data ..
More than half of likely voters don't want the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate the Web as it does radio and television, according to a survey from Rasmussen Reports.
.. the sorts of regulatory decisions that the FCC intends to make under the new net neutrality rules are inherently arbitrary. Some practices will be shut down; some won't be pursued at all thanks to uncertainty. Others will be tweaked to please agency overseers. Some people will like the agency-approved outcomes better, some won't. FCC officials have argued that the rules are designed to prevent anyone from picking winners and losers. Yet by giving the agency the power to determine which network management practices count as unreasonable, picking winners and losers is essentially what these rules give the FCC the power to do.
Politicians and bureaucrats on both sides of the border do not accept free market economics, for the implication of free market economics is that the government should have less power over the economy, including the money supply ..
We find that most economists .. think that the government – when advised by them – is wiser than the mass of producers, who then act as consumers. The masses act in their own self-interest, and most economists think that Ph.D.-holding economists have far better judgment as advisors to bureaucrats than citizens do.
This is why mercantilism persists. Economists believe that people act in their own self-interest, and most people believe that they can use state coercion to feather their nests more than other people can use state coercion to pick them clean.
Mercantilism .. appeals to men's egos. Men think of themselves as very clever politically .. They cannot trace the effects of political interference with the economy. Even when they see that politics is stripping them of the liberty and their wealth, they reassure themselves: "Our side can do better at the next election."
The economic philosophy of this religion of "Next Time for Sure" is mercantilism. This religion is widely believed. It appeals to the larceny in men's hearts, of which there is a never-ending supply at zero official price. It has a statement of economic faith: "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote."
At first blush, the mercantilists' call for "free trade but fair trade" sounds reasonable. After all, who can be against fairness? ..
The bottom line is that what's fair or unfair is an elusive concept and the same applies to trade.
Mercantilists have absolutely no argument when we recognize that trade is mostly between individuals. Mercantilists pretend that trade occurs between nations such as U.S. trading with England or Japan to appeal to our jingoism .. Trade occurs between individuals in one country, through intermediaries, with individuals in another country.
Via Heritage, os seguintes gráficos levantam questões importantes:
Over this period there have been more than 30 major changes in the tax code .. Yet during this period, federal government tax collections as a share of GDP have moved within a narrow band of just under 19% of GDP.
Why? Higher taxes discourage the “animal spirits” of entrepreneurship. When tax rates are raised, taxpayers are encouraged to shift, hide and underreport income. Taxpayers divert their effort from pro-growth productive investments to seeking tax shelters, tax havens and tax exempt investments. This behavior tends to dampen economic growth and job creation. Lower taxes increase the incentives to work, produce, save and invest, thereby encouraging capital formation and jobs. Taxpayers have less incentive to shelter and shift income.
Advocates of free trade have long argued that its benefits are not merely economic .. Free trade makes it more profitable for people of one nation to produce goods and services for people of another nation than to conquer them. By promoting communication across borders, trade increases understanding and reduces suspicion toward people in other countries.
Open trade makes war a less appealing option for governments by raising its costs. To a nation committed to free trade, war not only means the destruction of life and property. It is also terrible for business, disrupting international commerce and inflicting even greater hardship on the mass of citizens .. As the 19th century Frenchman Frederic Bastiat said, "When goods cannot cross borders, armies will."
.. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has pointed out what he calls the Big Mac thesis: that no two nations with McDonald's franchises have ever gone to war. A nation open enough and developed enough to be a profitable home for an established international franchise such as McDonald's will generally find war an unattractive foreign policy option.
Paul Krugman – que na sua versão colunista é profundamente demagógico mas não é estúpido – já percebeu de onde vem a principal ameaça ao verdadeiro “pensamento único” intervencionista dominante na esfera do Estado. Por entre distorções várias, Krugman lá vai dando mostras de compreender de onde vem o real perigo para o consenso keynesiano que conduziu aos resultados que estão à vista.
Ron Paul thought it was a terrible mistake for Greenspan to fuel the housing bubble, for government agencies to encourage banks to lower their lending standards, and then for the Treasury (as well as the Fed) to bail out the big banks from their mistakes.
Krugman, in contrast, recommended that Greenspan blow up the housing bubble, and his only criticism was that Greenspan began raising interest rates to quell it, rather than simply jawboning the speculators. Krugman continues to downplay any role that the government had in encouraging reckless lending. Further, Krugman was in favor of bailing out the banks, who he thinks acted recklessly.
So if we are going to look at the current, dismal economy and blame somebody's policies for it, surely we can acquit Ron Paul. That doesn't by itself prove that Ron Paul's views are correct, but it certainly casts doubt on Krugman's constant claims that he himself has been a beacon of clarity over the years with his accurate Keynesian modeling.
Social panic and millenarian movements are well known, not only from medieval times, but also as continuing in different forms during modern times — as panics and as bubbles, the madness of crowds and so forth. What surprised many of us at the first realisation of the phoney nature of the science was that this could happen so comprehensively and convincingly within modern science.
1. Now that modern science has usurped religion as the new principle validation of public knowledge, such corruptions should be expected. .. Only recently has science commanded such enormous power. And power corrupts.
2. The public fear –> public funding cycle generated explosive growth of the pseudo-science of Climate Change. .. Scary scenarios generate public fear, public fear generates funding for more research, and if the new research generates more public fear then the science will continue to expand ..
3. The social and environmental sciences legitimated activist-science. .. The distinction between science and policy, and between science and political interest became blurred. In this atmosphere, the involvement of advocacy groups (WWF, Greenpeace etc) in the scientific process was condoned and encouraged ..
4. Noble Cause or ‘Virtuous’ Corruption .. This is where we would have scientists genuinely believing in the truth of AGW quite prepared to manipulate, distort and misrepresent their research ..
Libertarians set themselves apart from other political thinkers by habitually denying that government should do things. Denial is therefore at the heart of libertarian thought. Thanks to pop psychology, unfortunately, "denial" has come to mean "refusing to admit the truth" rather than "refusing to admit what others claim." But denial is still a concept worth holding onto.
Once you appreciate the role of denial in libertarianism, you're ready to categorize it. Playing off of pop psychology, I find it most useful to think about six stages of libertarian denial.
Stage 1: Deny the problem exists. Ex: When someone complains about Chinese imports, the libertarian says, "What's the problem? They're selling us cheap stuff."
Stage 2: Blame the problem on the government. Ex: "Sure, Third World poverty is terrible. But without their governments' statist economic policies - and our immigration restrictions - they'd already be rich."
Stage 3: Admit that the government didn't cause the problem, but insist that government action would only make the problem worse. Ex: Opposing price controls for grain after a severe drought. "The market is making the best out of a terrible situation. You're going to destroy the incentives that will get us out of this disaster."
Stage 4: Concede that government action wouldn't make the problem worse, but say that the cure is so expensive that we're better off just living with the problem. Ex: Opposing handicap accessibility regulations. "It's going to cost 1% of GDP. For that price, we could give every handicapped person three full-time helpers."
Stage 5: Admit that government action could solve a problem at a low cost, but claim that the libertarian principle is more important." Ex: "Freedom means tolerating the very views that you find most abhorrent - even Satanism."
Stage 6: Yield on libertarian principle, but try to minimize the deviation. Ex: "Yes, government has to supply some roads. But we can still fund them with user fees, not taxes."
Since at least 1998, however, no significant warming trend has been noticeable. Unfortunately, none of the 24 models used by the IPCC views that as possible. They are at odds with reality.
Karl Popper, the late, great philosopher of science, noted that for something to be called scientific, it must be, as he put it, "falsifiable." That is, for something to be scientifically true, you must be able to test it to see if it's false. That's what scientific experimentation and observation do. That's the essence of the scientific method.
Unfortunately, the prophets of climate doom violate this idea. No matter what happens, it always confirms their basic premise that the world is getting hotter. The weather turns cold and wet? It's global warming, they say. Weather turns hot? Global warming. No change? Global warming. More hurricanes? Global warming. No hurricanes? You guessed it.
Nothing can disprove their thesis. Not even the extraordinarily frigid weather now creating havoc across most of the Northern Hemisphere. The Los Angeles Times, in a piece on the region's strangely wet and cold weather, paraphrases Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist Bill Patzert as saying, "In general, as the globe warms, weather conditions tend to be more extreme and volatile."
While the differences between the two parties are not entirely non existant, all in all they resemble each other more than not ..
Under the classic definition of socialism as “ownership of the means”, we would have a difficult time classifying either the platforms or the actual legislation of either major American political party as even faintly socialist. With few exceptions, both support the ownership of the means of production by monopoly corporations. Corporatism is much more closely associated with fascism, than state socialism.
Both parties are obviously for “big” government, but they vary in how to confiscate the funds to create and sustain expansion of the state .. Both believe in the former methods along with high deficits; the promise of future laborers to pay back the debt of the state. Both parties are fiscally extremely “liberal”, in the sense that they believe the state and its Siamese twin the financial sector, should grow liberally on the backs of the workers. They are both conservative in that they both believe in “conserving” the hallowed and failing financial wards of the state at all costs.
There are many arguments both for and against IP and most people have an opinion on the matter. My favourite of these arguments, found in the book Against Intellectual Property, by Boldrin and Levine, is that there are few really famous English classical composers (as compared to German ones, for instance), not because the English are congenitally unmusical — though some may claim this! — but because intellectual property laws were most developed in England during the golden age of classical music. Hence, innovation in music was stifled to death in England by the straitjacket of intellectual property, particularly copyright, leaving us with Elgar as the sole Englishman playing up front in a world cup final of composers, up against a Germanic first eleven of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Strauss, and Wagner in goal.
Taken together, the documents collected in this volume present overwhelming evidence that classical liberalism deserves serious attention in any account of the American struggle for civil rights and a colorblind society. Rather than serving as the villains caricatured by Malcolm X, Manning Marable, and others on the left, classical liberals provided essential intellectual, political, moral, and financial firepower in the battles against slavery, Jim Crow, imperialism, and racial classifications. With Race & Liberty in America, these largely unsung heroes are finally getting some of their due.
The U.S. economy is overwhelmingly a service economy, specializing in producing ideas and in performing high-skilled operations. Yes, Mr. Hoch’s socks say “Made in Swaziland,” but who developed the computer software to operate the loom that wove the cloth used to make his socks? Who designed the loom itself? Who figured out how to transform crude oil into the elastic in the socks? Who devised the method for pooling risks so that the Swaziland factory is profitably insured against fire and that the cargo ship carrying his socks to America is profitably insured against sinking? Who supplies the banking services for the factory to receive and make necessary payments? Who’s the architect that designed the department store where Mr. Hoch bought his socks? The list of such questions can be greatly extended.
Most of these services were undoubtedly supplied by non-Swazis, including Americans. Without them Mr. Hoch’s socks would be a darn sight more pricey. But services, by their nature, don’t come with labels attached. In fact, Mr. Hoch’s socks – and nearly everything else that he consumes – should be labeled “Made on earth,” for they truly are global phenomena.
.. the "buying local" system requires everyone’s effort around you, yours included. While buying "Made On Earth" opens up a wide array of happy pursuits towards which the local resources can be applied more fruitfully.
The factory floor is no longer contained within four walls and one roof. Instead, it spans the globe through a continuum of production and supply chains, allowing lead firms to optimize investment and output decisions by matching production, assembly, and other functions to the locations best suited for those activities. Because of foreign direct investment, joint ventures, and other equity-sharing arrangements, quite often "we" are "they" and "they" are "we." And because of the proliferation of disaggregated, transnational production and supply chains, "we" and "they" often collaborate in the same endeavor. In the 21st century, competition is more likely to occur between entities that defy national identification because they are truly international in their operations, creating products and services from value-added activities in multiple countries. There is competition between supply chains, but only after there is cooperation and collaboration within supply chains.
Admitting that there is no difference in the political philosophies of the contending candidates, should I not choose the "lesser of two evils?" But, which of the two qualifies? If my man prevails, then those who voted against him are loaded down with the "greater evil," while if my man loses, then it is they who have chosen the "lesser evil." Voting for the "lesser of two evils" makes no sense, for it is only a matter of opinion as to which is the lesser. Usually, such a decision is based on prejudice, not on principle. Besides, why should I compromise with evil?
If I were to vote for the "lesser of two evils" I would in fact be subscribing to whatever that "evil" does in office. He could claim a mandate for his official acts, a sort of blank check, with my signature, into which he could enter his performances. My vote is indeed a moral sanction..
La Sociedad no existe. Es el constructo teórico mediante el cual damos nombre a un proceso intersubjetivo donde las acciones (siempre individuales), persiguiendo fines (siempre personales, particularistas o no) ..
El Estado no existe. Es el constructo teórico mediante el cual damos nombre a la estructura impersonal de la que se sirve un orden político contingente en su tendencia a domeñar a un grupo de individuos dentro de cierto espacio físico ..
Todas estas ideas tienen importantes implicaciones en varios aspectos del estudio superficial de la formación de los órdenes sociales, las reglas de mera conducta y la acción racional del individuo.
What is "group think"? It's the opposite of individuality. Individuality resides in the independent use of your mind. "Independent" means objective, which means you independently use a rational method of thinking about people, situations and events.
Anyone who engages in "group think" surrenders his responsibility to reason for himself. To one degree or another, the group thinker relies upon the conclusions of others to tell him what's true, rather than himself.
You have to challenge your errors in thinking when they occur, correct them, and start establishing your life based on reason rather than the opinion of the majority. The opinions or conclusions of others are no longer the standard. The individualist internalizes the question, "What do I think, and what's the proof for what I think?" This has to replace the group thinker's habitual concern with, "What do others think?"
The neighborhood in West Texas had destroyed grass caused by the remarkable proliferation of this monstrous black pig. No one knows for sure where they came from. Some say they walked from Mexico. Some say they are indigenous but just recently out of control. No one doubts that they are a serious problem.
A new Internet service provider is in town .. The company drives up its trucks, digs holes in people's yards, .. destroying private property. The company never asked permission of homeowners .. The company negotiated a deal with the city and absorbed unto itself a much-coveted "utility easement," which grants the legal right to the company to dig into private property.
Legal or not, it is animal-like behavior. It's one thing when it is done by wild pigs. We can trap them and kill them in an effort to defend our rights against the brutality of nature. But when identical forms of destruction are sponsored by the state, we are talking about a form of brutality that is purely man-made.
The forces that save us from the destruction wrought by pigs can themselves, under the wrong legal conditions, behave very much like pigs — and when they do, they can't be surprised when the public wants to trap them, kill them, and eat them for dinner.
Seinfeld ran for nine seasons on NBC and became famous as a “show about nothing.” ..
It is the simplicity of Seinfeld that makes it so appropriate for use in economics courses. Using these clips (as well as clips from other television shows or movies) makes economic concepts come alive, making them more real for students. Ultimately, students will start seeing economics everywhere – in other TV shows, in popular music, and most importantly, in their own lives.
.. this popularity has led to many people using the “Austrian” label to refer to their views on issues beyond those involving the analytical framework they bring to economics.
So as a help to those who want a clearer understanding of what Austrian economics IS so as to also help understand what it is NOT, I would suggest a reading of co-blogger Pete Boettke’s entry on “Austrian Economics” at the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, which is precisely the sort of source that responsible journalists could look at. There, he offers 10 propositions that define Austrian economics. I will list them below, then offer a few comments afterward.
1. Only individuals choose. 2. The study of the market order is fundamentally about exchange behavior and the institutions within which exchanges take place. 3. The “facts” of the social sciences are what people believe and think. 4. Utility and costs are subjective. 5. The price system economizes on the information that people need to process in making their decisions. 6. Private property in the means of production is a necessary condition for rational economic calculation. 7. The competitive market is a process of entrepreneurial discovery. 8. Money is nonneutral. 9. The capital structure consists of heterogeneous goods that have multispecific uses that must be aligned. 10. Social institutions often are the result of human action, but not of human design.
Austrian economics IS a set of analytical propositions about the world and how to study it. It is NOT a set of policy conclusions or settled interpretations of history.
The fact that consumers have demands, and that they can go elsewhere if you fail to meet them, makes producers accountable. We see this in every sector of the economy. Provide a product or service that people don’t want, take away one that they do want, or charge more than they are willing to pay, and they will kick you right in the bottom line.
Regulations are an attempt, crude and usually unsuccessful, to imitate the accountability inherent in competitive markets. So as long as you allow market forces to work .., and you allow people to allocate their own money rather than taxing it and spending it through the state, regulations are not only unnecessary they are generally counterproductive.
If a .. organization becomes corrupt or inefficient, taxpayers can easily redirect their donations to better-run competing organizations. The accountability is built into the system’s design ..
There is no evidence that layering government regulations on top of this market accountability system improves outcomes, and ample evidence that heavily regulated .. systems perform badly.
Fair Trade is not capable of pulling 400 million people out of absolute poverty as free trade has done in recent years ..
Fair Trade provides a fraction of the help to poor people that is provided by global philanthropy (probably about 0.02%) ..
.. the extraordinarily effective Fairtrade Foundation publicity machine is partly funded by the British Government and the European Union – yes, that very same European Union whose tariffs do so much to keep the poorest of the poor ever poorer .. Principles do come at quite a price.
But in others, the answer is not so clear. When it comes to Christmas trees, for instance, which is better for the planet: the long-lasting artificial kind, or the freshly cut, pine-scent-and-sap variety?
.. The resources used to make artificial trees — plastic and metal — have a high extraction cost, and most trees are made in China, meaning they need to be shipped thousands of miles before they reach American shores.
Most faux trees have a lifespan of about six to 10 years .. At this point, they’re off to the landfill .. artificial trees are largely made from polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, which is in most cases prohibitively expensive to recycle ..
The Social Network is a wonderfully entertaining film. It may also be – and if it is, it will only have been by accident – the most pro-market film ever produced.
.. it is a case study in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial vision. At the very core of what made Facebook was the vision of its founding genius, Mark Zuckerberg. What he wanted was to make it into not just the vast networking social phenomenon it turned out to be, but also, in itself, the essence of cool ..
.. It shows how we live in the kind of society where anyone can have an idea and turn it into a vast ocean of wealth – although this example is clearly at the extreme end of such possibilities ..
The laws of economics have no geographic border and no expiration on time. The laws of economics hold across time and place .. the pure logic of human action is neither time specific nor country specific.
.. What happened in Greece, what happened in Ireland, what is happening in Portugal, and will happen in Spain, is not limited to those countries or to problems in 2010. The western democratic states have attempted to live in the denial of economic laws for decades .. But what is wrong with Portugal is also what is wrong with California, let alone the other "PIGS" countries.
As you watch the events unfold in Europe and also right here in the US recognize that the policies that have resulted in the situation are a consequence of men .. denying the laws of economics .. The laws of economics hold over time and across people. Denial of the laws by popular vote or strike or clever thought experiments does not deny the laws of economics themselves. It just produces things like the Great Depression, or the Collapse of Communism, the Failure of Development Planning, and the fiscal crises that is plaguing the PIGS at the moment.
Many Americans often assume that ‘the people’ derive their power from the Constitution, but the reality is actually reverse; the Constitution, in fact, derives its power from the people. Our duty (which some have forgotten) has always been to protect the rights and liberties inscribed on those pages of parchment ..
Many in our society, instead of taking on the responsibility of preserving their freedoms, have instead handed it over to the trappings of government. The fatal error here is obvious; the corporatized and over-centralized political landscape of America’s government today does not hold the same values as the people it is determined to lord over. We have witnessed the parasitic possession of our system, know it to be corrupt, yet still seem to expect this bureaucratic monstrosity to cradle our liberties in good faith!
Government is a tool; a mechanical apparatus that can be used to either preserve freedom, or annihilate it. Its use depends upon those men who wield it, and the men who wield our government today certainly do not have the expansion of freedom in mind.
No law ever created in the history of mankind has solved the underlying problem it was created to address.
Murder laws do not solve the problem of murder. Rape laws do not solve the problem of rape. Robbery laws do not solve the problem of theft. Fraud laws do not solve the problem of fraud.
Financial regulations do not solve the problems of cronyism, moral hazard, counterfeiting, or wealth disproportionately being moved into the hands of politically connected industrialists/financiers.
By and large, most laws don’t even reduce the problems they were created to address; they generally make the problems in society larger than they would have been otherwise; they transfer problems from one area of society to another.
The failures of privatisation, often revered by socialists as providing great examples of capitalism failing, may seem at first like evidence that the public sector can do a better job than the private sector in certain instances, but when we look deeper into the issue we find out that this so-called ‘privatisation’ is nothing more than a bastardisation of real free enterprise, and actually allows us to reinforce our proof that state-controlled industry is only ever woefully wasteful and inefficient.
.. Instead of controlling the company that runs the rail service, they now sanction contracts to various private companies, a process of franchising services .. In private industry this works effectively because the franchisor has to make sensible decisions, or else face the prospect of their business failing .. When a government privatises an industry this is not the case.
The government has no incentive to run an efficient company. They have a monopoly on the industry; they decide who gets the contracts and if the service is failing they face no competition due to the coercion they use to maintain control of the industry .. private interests are not to blame here.
Contemporary economics grew out of the scientism of the early 20th century. It simply had to be a science like physics, susceptible to the same scientific method. But that isn't true .. to apply the methods of the natural sciences to human action is a category error.
I am deeply concerned about climate change .. but I am most concerned about bad economics. Bad economics drove the business cycle and delivered us into our present plight. Bad economics leads to mass malinvestment of production goods and widespread over-consumption. Bad economics discourages saving and encourages long-term dependency on a state which cannot fund the demands placed upon it. Bad economics floods the world with new money, giving it first to the wealthy, further impoverishing the poor.
When Robert J. Samuelson published a Newsweek column last month arguing that high-speed rail is "a perfect example of wasteful spending masquerading as a respectable social cause," he cited cost figures and potential ridership to demonstrate that even the rosiest scenarios wouldn't justify the investment. He made a good, rational case—only to have it completely undermined by the evocative photograph the magazine chose to accompany the article.
To their most ardent advocates, and increasingly to the public at large, these technologies aren't just about generating electricity or getting from one city to another. They are symbols of an ideal world, longing disguised as problem solving. You can't counter glamour with statistics.
The problems come, of course, in the things glamour omits, including all those annoyingly practical concerns the policy wonks insist on debating. Neither trains nor wind farms are as effortlessly liberating as their photos suggest. Neither really offers an escape from the world of compromises and constraints.
.. o ministro da Ciência condenou “a tolerância do Parlamento relativamente à criação e funcionamento das ordens profissionais em Portugal” ..
Para Mariano Gago, “conseguir libertar o país da tutela das ordens profissionais na entrada das profissões é um elemento fundamental, sobretudo em período de crise económica”. “O que se está a passar é uma canibalização do mercado de trabalho em torno das profissões qualificadas, em que os que estão instalados criam uma fronteira para ninguém mais entrar ..
Se, felizmente e para já, em Portugal e na Grécia as reacções das massas divergem perante o estertor oficioso de asneiras, alucinações e mentiras comuns, vagamente conhecidas como "Estado social", a extrema-esquerda atribui o facto aos nossos brandos costumes.
Durante seis anos, os governos do eng. Sócrates apresentaram uma quantidade incomensurável de medidas de estímulo à economia. Em consequência, afundaram-na com estrondo. Ao que parece, as medidas de estímulo à economia anteriormente apresentadas não incluíam as 50 medidas de estímulo à economia apresentadas agora.
.. constatamos tratar-se de medidas que de facto já existiam, medidas que nunca chegarão a existir, medidas de fiscalização impossível, medidas de implementação improvável, medidas com efeitos a longuíssimo prazo, medidas destinadas a financiar clientelas, medidas irrelevantes, medidas insuficientes, medidas absurdas, medidas prejudiciais, medidas assustadoras e, decerto por inércia, medidas razoáveis.
A única medida de estímulo à economia que o Governo deveria apresentar seria a jura de que não voltaria a apresentar mais medida nenhuma e deixaria a economia em paz. Isso, porém, não se espera de um Governo socialista. Ou, no infeliz caso nacional, de qualquer outro.
He .. behaved like any unauthorized music sampler, mash-up artist, or file-sharing college student. He recirculated other people’s music—sometimes with attribution, sometimes not—with often minor changes. He cribbed material, borrowed music to plug gaps in his work, and reused his own creations with an abandon that would shame a freelancer for Demand Media.
This punkish intellectual property scofflaw was Johann Sebastian Bach, master of the baroque style, spiritual father of modern Western music, literal father of a family of musicians, and inspiration to working creators everywhere. He was also —maybe not coincidentally—a serial user of other people’s work ..
.. German writers produced more books and made more money than their English counterparts. Through the middle of the 19th century, the German book market produced and sold roughly five times as many books as the British. The advantage was interrupted only by the Napoleonic occupation, and it did not end permanently until after 1848, when Germany began to enforce consistent copyright rules.
If the Irish are, in effect, no longer sovereign, I wonder if it is time for them to consider reunion with the United Kingdom? In many ways, the Irish and the British have more in common with each other than either do with the continental Europeans ..
Such a change would mean Ireland leaving the discredited eurozone and re-joining the sterling area. This would provide at least two clear advantages. First, interest rates would be more likely to take account of the needs of the Irish economy. Second, if Ireland were re-united with the rest of the UK, the central government would be able (and probably, to some extent, willing) to redistribute resources to Ireland from other parts of the country. Neither of these is possible in the eurozone.
.. policymakers seem to show a lot less interest in the economic ideas of the “Austrian school” led by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, who once battled Keynes for intellectual supremacy. Yet the more you think about recent events, the odder that neglect seems.
A one-paragraph explanation of the Austrian theory of business cycles would run as follows. Interest rates are held at too low a level, creating a credit boom. Low financing costs persuade entrepreneurs to fund too many projects. Capital is misallocated into wasteful areas. When the bust comes the economy is stuck with the burden of excess capacity, which then takes years to clear up.
.. Even today, when the horrors of communism are known to everyone, social democrats the world over continue to denounce and undermine private property rights and seek to replace them with some form of collectivized property. Since the late nineteenth century, most intellectuals have been hostile to private property rights and have advocated, if not outright communism, at least some “third way” closer to it than to a regime of full-fledged private property.
.. Hayek argues that human beings .. retained .. a genetic predisposition to conduct their affairs in the communal fashion of families and small bands from time immemorial. However, Hayek argues further, the altruism and fully-shared information that had undergirded the conduct of the family and the band do not, indeed, cannot exist in the great society ..
.. Ludwig von Mises argues in The Anti-Capitalist Mentality that the intellectuals suffer from frustration, envy, and resentment and blame their relatively poor position in the economy and society on “the rich,” especially the capitalists who have gained the greatest wealth by serving consumers most successfully in the markets.
In an essay titled “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?,”Robert Nozick argues similarly that the intellectuals .. convinced that the smart people (that is, those who were good at school) should run the world and rise to the top of society, harbor intense resentment toward the people who navigate the market most successfully and hence toward the socioeconomic order that accommodates this success.
.. we all have an equal right by nature to be free and to own the fruits of our labor. It is this conception of rights that underlies Jefferson’s claims in the Declaration of Independence. So it’s actually true that social privilege is, for the most part, earned, but that is a by-product of classical liberalism, not its essence.
That same system of rights means that I am entitled to use my wealth as I see fit (other than to harm others), and it is surely not surprising that what many wish to do with their wealth is give it to their children. For many people, that’s the whole point behind financial success: to be able to provide a more comfortable life for your kids than you had. In fact, that’s the whole notion of the American Dream.
.. Of course it’s true that dead people do not have property rights, but if living people do, then there’s no reason to think that setting up wills and endowments and trust funds isn’t among their options.
.. So it’s not the fact that the wealth is inherited that makes it politically dangerous. It’s the fact that all politicians are susceptible to the allure of money, which is indeed dangerous. But we can’t fix that by restricting property rights.
Deciding which politician to support has long been frustrating for libertarians. Both the liberal and conservative perspectives conflict with cherished libertarian views, so few Democrats or Republicans present a package that libertarians can embrace with enthusiasm.
Libertarians do find common ground with conservatives on some issues, and with liberals on others. Roughly, libertarians are economic conservatives and foreign and social policy liberals. So, depending on the pressing issue of the day, libertarians can sometimes identify one candidate or another as "the lesser of the evils."
.. Human life has a much higher value when it’s taken by an enemy of the state, for some reason, than it does when it’s taken by the state or one of its friends ..
Oddly enough, though, nobody at TownHall.com wants to prosecute Bush, Cheney, Obama, who actually sent soldiers to be shot at, for the blood of thousands that’s dripping from their hands ..
.. Imagine, if you will, that the U.S. government has been supplying arms and military advisers to Satan .. imagine that for some reason Satan stops taking orders from Washington .. Why, the very next day the White House .. would be .. announcing in the most shocked tones what they’d just discovered was going on in Hell! ..
Look, if something’s a crime, it’s a crime no matter who does it. It’s a crime to kill people who are doing you no harm, and to take or damage their stuff. It’s a crime to send someone else to rob and kill innocent people. It’s a crime whether you’re Joe Blow, or whether you call yourself “Commander-in-Chief.”
They promise fiscal responsibility. Then they spend like drunken sailors. They promise to cure poverty. Then their programs make it worse. They promise to create jobs. But then they make life so complex and unpredictable that entrepreneurs are afraid to create jobs.
Almost none of their promises come true. But few people approach government with the skepticism it deserves.
Whether you believe in God—or psychics, or global warming—that's your business. I may think you're stupid, but if you waste your money on, say, a "strength" bracelet, you only harm yourself.
But being gullible about government hurts everyone. Government is force. When it sells us bunk, we have to pay even if we don't believe in or want it. If we don't pay up, men with guns will make sure we do.
It's good to be skeptical. It's really good to be skeptical about government.
.. King Abdullah Economic City, a 65-square-mile development at the edge of the Red Sea. With a projected population of two million, the city is a Middle Eastern version of the “special economic zones” that have flourished in places like China...
To encourage more foreign companies and their employees to come here, the government will allow foreign ownership for the first time. And officials say the city will have a streamlined bureaucracy, so that unlike in other Saudi cities, where delays can make even the simplest transactions stretch out for days, action on visas or customs documents will take just an hour.
Let's face it, politics is largely the art of deception, and political rhetoric is largely the art of misstating issues. A classic example is the current debate over whether .. to give "tax cuts to the rich."
Not only are the so-called "tax cuts" not really tax cuts, most of the people called "rich" are not really rich. Rich means having a lot of wealth. But income taxes don't touch wealth. No wonder some billionaires are saying it's OK to raise income taxes. They would still be billionaires if taxes took 100 percent of their current income.
What those who are arguing against "tax cuts for the rich" are promoting is raising the tax rates on families making $250,000 a year and up. A husband and wife making $125,000 a year each are not rich. If they have a kid going to one of the many colleges charging $30,000 a year (in after-tax money) for tuition alone, they are not likely to feel anywhere close to being rich.
Is the government doing any of us a big favor by not taking even more of what we have worked for? Is it not an insult to our intelligence to say that the government is "giving" us something by not taxing it away?
Paul Krugman writes: “But a large part of the tax cuts, especially those for the wealthy, would not be spent, so the tax-cut extension increases the budget deficit a lot while doing little to reduce unemployment”.
Prof. Krugman is unfair to your readers in his failing to at least acknowledge the main argument that many economists offer against raising tax rates.
This argument is that higher tax rates on incomes and capital-gains – by reducing the return to work effort, savings, investment, and risk-taking – constrict economic activity and, thereby over time, diminish economic opportunities and reduce real wages.
The chief argument for lower tax rates is not that these lower rates prompt more immediate consumer spending but, instead, that they prompt more investment, risk-taking, enterprise, and production.
O Keynesianismo confunde consumo (independentemente da utilidade, destruição de riqueza) com a produção de riqueza (algo que requer coordenação de poupança e investimento). Uma doutrina baseada no imediato só pode conduzir, a prazo, ao emprobrecimento económico, social e moral de uma sociedade.
A propósito do desaparecimento de Carlos Pinto Coelho e do renovado ressentimento de algumas elites que se viram deprivadas de um programa de televisão patrocinado pelo povão ignorado,
As suas funções úteis são do domínio da animação cultural, que as autarquias podem realizar com sucesso; do turismo, que os organismos próprios do sector fazem melhor; do comércio externo, idem aspas; das relações externas, no domínio da língua e da “imagem” nacional; e da educação, onde não faltam funções de maior utilidade, para muitos grupos de teatro e de intervenção cultural.
Sim, de facto, eu não penso que se deva subsidiar a criação, até porque muitas vezes, não é criação nenhuma mas um papaguear das modas do dia, defendidas por uma muito vocal elite, que naturalmente defende os seus interesses. A dispersão de actividades .. permitiria uma utilização muito mais sadia e transparente dos escassos dinheiros existentes e afastar o estado de critérios de gosto. Assim o dinheiro seria certamente mais bem gasto do que aquele que alguém gastou a colocar uma piscina-banheira azul a tapar o Tejo numa das mais bonitas Praças do país.
All too often, history provides us with examples of state-enforced book burnings and other forms of extreme censorship. Many of us today take our so-called freedom of speech for granted, and few realize just how pervasive government censorship remains ..
.. Assange cracked the government's veil of benignity and brought into question the state's tactics. His website undermines its moral authority.
WikiLeaks was only shut down for one day. The service found a new host .. Bureaucracy has been stumped by a new obstacle .. — the Internet. Now it is the state that finds itself one step behind. Book burning has been rendered obsolete.
.. It is worthwhile to consider the following passage from Ludwig von Mises's Human Action,
In the long run there is no such thing as an unpopular government. Civil war and revolution are the means by which the discontented majorities overthrow rulers and methods of government which do not suit them.
Bloody revolution is no longer with the times, because government's armies are becoming more and more immaterial. As this WikiLeaks episode unfolds, and as government sows the seeds of its own humiliation, we will see government combated, not by force of arms, but by the supremacy of the market.
.. a complex, advanced economy requires private property, exchange, markets, and prices to calculate value and determine the efficacy of one’s production activities. Profits and losses, too, are key to providing feedback to firms .. knowledge is too often dispersed, contextual, and/or inarticulate to be communicated and centralized. This is the core of the Austrian argument against socialist planning.
As it turns out, the same issues arise within firms .. CEOs and other leaders might be utterly unaware of important information available on the shop floor unless they have processes by which that information can be communicated ..
The idea of an “undercover boss” would be a fun and interesting way to approach these problems .. A really interesting version of the show, at least to an economist .. Rather than making bosses look incompetent for not knowing how things work, make them and the employees look smart by showing what can be gained by observing frontline operations.
In a world where more and more work takes the form of services and creative jobs in which strict routines make little sense, frontline workers will continue to have more independence and responsibility. Being observed by the boss is one possibly effective way for employees to transmit what they know up the chain of command so the knowledge can be effectively used by others.
PS - Não sei que o programa já passou em Portugal, mas recomendo. Dizem que pode ser descarregável em torrents.
