The human tragedy that produced the Lord of the Flies atmosphere in New Orleans was due to the fact that government had turned much of the Crescent City into an urban reservation via its welfare system, and when those who depended heavily upon that system for their sustenance found themselves on their own, they had no idea what to do or how to do it.
If you give money to those who stay unemployed, you are not teaching them to work. Rather, you are teaching them how to survive without working.
History reveals that prohibitions are indeed classic examples of the co-opting of public-spirited intentions by rent seekers within the political process, thereby explaining the existence of what at first appears to be irrational policies.
What needs to be understood clearly is the mischievous nature of the governmentally sheltered fractional-reserve banking system. In terms of the relative frequency of "boom-bust" cycles, we find ourselves precisely where we were without the "monetary policy".
Your high-publicity stunts before Congress, at the National Academy of the Sciences, the IPCC, and in the press will put you directly in the crosshairs of just such a maniac, I fear, especially if you don't quit while you're ahead.For the sake of science, Dick, for the sake of collegiality, for your own sake, give it a rest. You know as well as I do that the issue isn't global warming. The issue is what side of the bread our butter is on.
We must realize that the two most powerful motivations in human history have always been ideology and economic interest, and that a joining of these two motivations can be downright irresistible. Progressives prided themselves on being organic statist middle-of-the-roaders between old fashioned dog-eat-dog laissez-faire individualism on the one hand, and proletarian socialism on the other.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe has famously argued that any attempt to argue against the libertarian ethic of self-ownership and non-aggression is self-refuting, since the very act of engaging in an argumentative exchange presupposes the legitimacy of each participant’s exercising exclusive control over the scarce resources involved in arguing: his own mind and body.
Taylor, and you other critics of the spontaneous outcomes of the market economy, please do us all a favor: Go read Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson.
Further, the idea that the quantity of money is important to trade is incorrect. The market does not desire a certain quantity of money.
The inability of modern philosophers to furnish any kind of argument for the maintenance of a government is a notorious weakness.
