From the monthly archives:

January 2008

Bizarro Callahan

January 31, 2008

David Callahan has a silly op-ed in the LA Times today on "A Gentler Capitalism," which mainly caused me to recall Julian Sanchez’s rather ungentle review of his book The Cheating Culture:
An amusing game to play while reading The Cheating Culture — and perhaps the only way to avoid being driven mad by its plodding [...]

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Recession!

January 31, 2008
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Taste

January 30, 2008

I hereby declare a holiday, after this post, from analogies of bad arguments to bad art and from further references to the intellectual and moral philistinism of neocons. But allow me to offer David Hume’s minor masterpiece “Of the Standard of Taste“. A selection:
A good palate is not tried by strong flavours; but by a [...]

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The Idealism of Jackets and Ties

January 29, 2008

David Brooks is one of America’s most successful thinkers in much the same way that Thomas Kinkade, painter of light, is one of America’s most successful artists. And Brooks’s column on Teddy K’s endorsement of Obama is artful in much the way “A Day at the Cinderella Castle” is artful.
The respect for institutions that was [...]

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Embedded Agents, Embedded Video

January 29, 2008

BhTV now has an embeddable Flash player, so let’s give it a try. Here’s Tim Harford and me talking about behavioral economics and rational choice….

Tim and Will place humans on the Homer Simpson to Mr. Spock continuum

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Yes, Mies van der Rohe is Antiseptic and Cold and Socialist

January 28, 2008

Yes, I know the political history of the Bauhaus and the International School, thank you very much. (That major in the history and philosophy of art is not worth nothing!) And I admit it does put a strain on my not-very-well-thought-out analogy, if that’s the modernism you had in mind. Of course, I had [...]

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Tim Harford at BHTV

January 28, 2008

Today on Free Will I chat with Tim Harford about his new book The Logic of Life.
Tim’s book isn’t just another foray into pop econ. It’s a fascinating and entertaining overview and synthesis of a good deal of the most important recent research in economics. I wasn’t expecting to discover work that would help [...]

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Must… Destroy… Milton Freedman

January 25, 2008

Benjamin Storey & Jenna Silber Storey: “The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life.” Translation:
Libertarianism is dangerous because it discourages juvenile romantic attachment to higher things — meaningful things – like Honor, Virtue, and the indescribable joy of sacrificing one’s life to the service of the American Volksreich. All libertarians care [...]

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Our Pritchett, Who Art in Cambridge

January 25, 2008

Heads up, globalist pigs! Kerry’s interview with Lant Pritchett, now online, is full of great stuff about how to increase liberty and well-being at the same time! Here’s a taste:
Pritchett: [...] Being against migration to the United States is wrong for two reasons. One, I don’t think it gets the scale of the poverty in [...]

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Media This Week

January 23, 2008

This morning on Marketplace, I argued that the politicians yammering on about fiscal stimulus ought to just shut up after the big Fed rate cut. Monday’s edition of Free Will on Bloggingheads TV was a chat with Jonah Goldberg about his much-hated bestseller Liberal Fascism.

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Cultural Freedom

January 17, 2008

Kevin Michael Grace, who must have time on his hands, reminds me of a rant I published in the comments section of an ill-conceived article he wrote three years ago criticizing Reason for covering culture as if it has something to do with freedom. You might need to suffer through it for context. Anyway, I [...]

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Green Line 4-Evah, or Cosmolifestyleorangebeltwaytarians Unite!

January 17, 2008

I would like to associate myself with these comments from Mr. Julian Sanchez.

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Make that Two Cheers for PC

January 16, 2008

I recommend to you Steve Horwitz’s lucid post on anti-racism and libertarianism. A choice excerpt:
What I am interested in is the claim that those who stand in opposition to racism are being accused of being susceptible to using the state to somehow enforce that set of beliefs. First, as Roderick Long argued a few years [...]

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Just Sitting Here With My Gay Poodle and Ludwig von Mises’ Politics

January 15, 2008

From reason comments, I found this pretty funny:
Cosmotarianism: Parking Vespas in the handicap spot at Trader Joe’s since 1996. Take that, police state!

That said, this picture is sexist; I deplore it. And I bet Ludwig von Mises had a Vespa!
[Liberal] thinking is cosmopolitan and ecumenical: it takes in all men and the whole world. Liberalism [...]

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Bloggingheads TV with Douglas Massey

January 15, 2008

Speaking of structural barriers to the exercise of liberty, here I am talking with Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey about his book Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System. If you think serious racial discrimination has dried up these days, try Chapter 3: “Reworking the Color Line.” It’s full of evidence of continuing labor market and housing [...]

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Ron Paul: Good for “the Blacks”?

January 15, 2008

I’m more than a bit baffled by this idea:
Despite the fact that Ron Paul, through his profitable, base-building newsletters, has actively spread and reinforced racist ideas, the really important thing here is that an end to the war on drugs would do more good for African American men than anything else. And since Ron Paul [...]

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Pinker on the Moral Sense

January 13, 2008

Nice overview. But I found the ending part on why the Haidt calibration view doesn’t imply relativism a bit shady—a bit Straussian even!
Pinker struck me as arguing that there are real external facts about human flourishing that help underpin the authority of the harm and reciprocity dimensions of the moral sense, whereas the new science [...]

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Ron Paul Debacle Must Reads

January 13, 2008

Brink Lindsey:
In the twentieth century, alas, American liberalism was heavily influenced by the socialist dream of supplanting markets with central planning and top-down control. That confusion begat confusion in response — namely, an antistatist movement heavily influenced by authoritarian resentment of liberal cultural values. Paul’s illiberal libertarianism is a particularly unattractive variant of this kind [...]

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The Shame of Ron Paul

January 10, 2008

It now seems quite clear to me that Ron Paul has for years used racism, among other vicious sentiments, to build financial and political support.
I’ve been pretty negative about Paul from the start, attracted only to his antiwar stance, since I find his old right brand of nationalist, populist anti-statism pretty repellent and at odds [...]

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Media This Week

January 9, 2008

On Monday, my new, weekly Bloggingheads TV show, Free Will, debuted with special guest Kerry Howley. On Tuesday, The New York Times excerpted a bit of our conversation on sex trafficking. Today, I argued for a common North American labor market in my commentary on Marketplace. I’ll be on every other Wednesday!

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Hillary, Huck, and Howley

January 5, 2008

So far, 2008 is the year of Kerry Howley. The New York Times arrived on our stoop this morning containing some op-ed page Howley goodness on why, whatever else you might think about Hillary, being the wife of an ex-President isn’t such a bad thing:
Like it or not, the road to female advancement often begins [...]

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