http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle The Sweet Release of Reason Wed, 24 Jun 2009 05:48:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en As I admitted below, I don't know much about Iran, but I suppose exiled Iranian journalist and filmaker Lila Ghobady does. She says: There has been no real election. Candidates are all hand-picked and cleared by a central religious committee. It is a farcical imitation of the free nomination/ election process ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/06/23/history-repeats-itself/ Some people were really ticked off by my Twitter avatar post, and I can see why. I guess it's bad enough to accuse people of empty moral posturing. It's another thing to accuse people of empty moral posturing that helps the people who worked like crazy to start an unjustified ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/06/23/further-meditations-on-the-objective-meaning-of-green-twitter-avatars/ I've been meaning to blog about William Easterly's exchange with Amnesty International about the notion that poverty is a rights violation. I've found my own view much harder to pin down than I thought I would, so it took me forever to actually write this post, which goes far afield, ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/06/22/is-poverty-a-violation-of-human-rights/ So folks on Twitter have been turning their avatars (little profile photos) green to show solidarity with the protesters in Iran. There are websites to help you do this. But why do this? How does it help? I want the Iranian people to live in freedom, just as I want ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/06/19/signaling-and-solidarity/ Since I found it all interesting, I thought I'd just reproduce all of Will Ambrosini's post about my last post here: I’m actually with Will Wilkinson when he talks up “liberaltarianism” and I support a reasonable social safety net. I’m one of those people that thinks rising GDP indicates increasing interdependence, ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/06/18/the-bailouts-are-like-paying-off-molested-children/ In an admirably frank piece in the American Prospect, Matt says the problem with Obama's budget is that the government doesn't have enough money to pay for it and so Democrats will need to raise taxes on the middle class if they want all this spending. This is such an ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/06/18/yglesias-on-taxes/ At Distributed Republic, Curunir cites this study by Erzo Luttmer and Monica Singhal finding that immigrants' preferences for redistribution tend to be predicted by the average views in their country of origin. They also find a similar but weaker effect on the children of immigrants. Curunir writes: Now, there are several ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/06/16/should-freedom-loving-americans-fear-the-mexican-voter/ Joshua Green writes: [P]undits are a plague on us all. It is time we acted. The crowning indignity, of course, is that they're usually wrong. Not just off-by-a-few-degrees wrong, but invading-Iraq-is-a-good-idea wrong. "Dow 36,000" wrong. And what are the consequences? There are none at all! You can blow the biggest questions of the day, ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/06/16/regulating-pundits/ OK. Let me get this straight. I can get $4500 toward a new car as long as my old car gets terrible gas mileage. Well, I've got a 1996 Civic, which gets 30-something MPG. But it's worth less than $4500. So I guess I should sell it for what it's ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/06/10/cash-for-clunkers/ You may know him as the Felix Unger of Bloggingheads TV. Or you may know him as the author of big-think bestsellers like The Moral Animal and Non-Zero. Today Robert Wright's years-in-the-making The Evolution of God hits the bookstores and the new issue of Cato Unbound offers you a taste ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/06/08/new-at-cato-unbound-robert-wright-on-the-clash-of-civilizations-as-a-malfunctions-of-moral-imagination/ In the comments below, Robin Hanson writes: I can't imagine what you are thinking in saying economists have no competence to say what is a cost or benefit. That seems to me to be one of the things we know best. And the market interest rate clearly gives the opportunity cost ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/06/07/why-economists-arent-experts-on-what-is-a-cost-or-benefit/ Ryan Avent, following up on Ezra's post on the policy prestige of economists in general and benefit/cost analysis in particular, writes: [I]f we can’t use cost-benefit, how do we make these decisions? How in hell do we figure out which trade-offs are sound ones and which are damaging to society on ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/06/04/economic-expertise-and-moral-mathematics/ Matthew Lesko, an odd D.C. fixture, on the bailouts: http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/06/03/free-government-money-2/ Read Fabio Rojas' illuminating post on the centrality of Nixonite networks and their priorities within the GOP for well over a half-century. Highlights: [T]he narrative about Goldwater as the guiding light of the post-war GOP is wrong. Nixon, and his allies, have driven the agenda since the late 1940s. Other Republicans ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/06/02/the-party-of-nixon/ An excellent column from Bruce Bartlett. Some highlights: But even these metro-libertarians tend to be more concerned about economics than social or foreign policy. The Cato Institute publishes an annual survey of economic freedom throughout the world, but produces no surveys of what countries have the most political or social freedom or ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/05/29/bruce-bartlett-on-liberaltarianism/