Winter’s Haven

Happy American Independence Day! Today is a good day to pause and appreciate that we who live in America enjoy the benefits of a government which, despite its many and serious flaws, is pretty damned good by comparison to most other past and current states.
Independence Day is also a perfect opportunity to declare, proudly, that [...]

Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams’s statements advocating the introduction of Sharia law for muslim residents of the UK has drawn plenty of well-deserved criticism. Johann Hari, writing for The Independent, offers some particularly enlightening commentary. He argues that by advocating Sharia law, Williams has pushed the doctrine of multiculturalism to its logical conclusion and unwittingly demonstrated [...]

A sociology grad student at Northern Illinois University opened fire on a crowed lecture hall there, killing 5 people and wounding 16 before killing himself. Details can be found at the New York Times and most everywhere else. I just want to toss out a bit of meta-commentary.
As in past mass shootings, this incident [...]

Jerry Taylor of Cato explains why it’s so difficult for governments to fix the prices of goods:

Congress can no more guarantee that fuel prices will go down from now until the end of time than it can guarantee a robust sex life for fat, balding, middle-aged men.

Supply and demand, baby. Suppy and demand.

All too often, people talk about market competition as if it were opposed to cooperation — as if capitalists were only a step away from resorting to napalm and land mines. The Economist’s Free Exchange blog douses that burning pile of stupid with some cool, clear analytic philosophy:
The competition at the heart of capitalism is [...]

The French government prohibits booksellers by law from selling their wares at less than 95% of list price. Allow me to state the obvious: it’s a stupid law that protects established booksellers from upstart rivals who might otherwise attempt to gain market share by offering lower prices; it raises the prices of books, and generally [...]

Commenting on the scandalous Ron Paul newsletters brought to light by The New Republic today, David Bernstein provides some very informative background on the political and cultural forces which produced this situation. I quote:

[T]here are really two disparate groups to whom the limited-government message appeals: philosophical libertarians (which consists of a tiny percentage of [...]

My last post argued that voters ought to ignore issues which are chiefly ideological (such as evolution/creationism) and instead evaluate candidates on their policies. I feel that I should pass along this article by Megan McArdle which contends that Paul’s proposed policies would do remarkably little good (from a libertarian perspective, that is).
She’s probably [...]

The Bad Astronomer condemns Ron Paul for reasons which are… politically misguided. Namely, Paul is a creationist.
I think I speak for a lot of atheists libertarians when I say that, yes, Ron Paul’s views on evolution/creationism are awful, but in spite of that I’d still be fairly overjoyed to see him in the Oval Office. [...]

After sarcastically venting my frustration that my own impeccably sensible ideas are so are out of the political mainstream, I was reminded of a recent post from Megan McArdle. She doesn’t understand why so many liberals oppose funding education through vouchers, rather than having the government provide it directly, as it currently does. And, frankly, [...]