No legal document can save a society from appointing its own slave masters if enough people are determined to do so. Laws alone are not enough.
– Perry de Havilland, discussing constitutions.
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July 4th, 2014 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Why then are tens of thousands of Latin Americans willingly flooding into a supposedly racist country where cutthroat capitalism ignores the poor and the oppressed such as themselves? In most past polls of Mexican citizens, two general themes often show up: the majority of Mexican nationals believe that the American Southwest still should belong to Mexico, and a sizable minority would like to leave Mexico for the U.S. You figure out the mentality. – Victor Davis Hanson (H/T, Instapundit.) Travelling to a country, then despising it, does not strike me as a way to win friends and influence people. I don’t know how widespread this issue is in the US – I’d be interested in comments from US-based readers about the situation on the southern border of the US. July 1st, 2014 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
To people clucking that the First Black President deserves more respect, may I suggest that you should have done a better job of picking the First Black President? June 29th, 2014 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
“So why is it, then, that when it seems obvious that to understand finance you need to understand human behaviour, Finance World continues to insist that finance is `all about numbers’ and can be fully understood using mathematics? Partly, perhaps, because so many of them are mathematicians to start with and they find it difficult to see things other than within a numerical framework. Partly, perhaps also, because many have Type-A personalities and they find it difficult to deal with uncertainty. Yet surely also because so many are reluctant to admit that they may have been wasting their time all these years basing their work on the Markowitz worldview, just as so many unrepentant socialists found it difficult to admit they had been used as Stalin’s `useful idiots’ when the Soviet Union’ collapsed.” – Guy Fraser-Sampson, The Pillars of Finance: The Misalignment Theory and Investment Practice, page 187. The book is about how, under the influence of mathematics specialists such as Markowitz, a lot of investment decisions got dangerously out of whack with reality, as we saw in 2008. Despite some pushback, a lot of the investment industry on which our pensions and savings depend are in thrall to risk and market ideas that are seriously mistaken. Throw in the joys of central bank fiat money and the rest, you have a problem. I should add that Fraser-Sampson, who is a professional investment figure as well as academic, is a big fan of the Austrian school (von Mises, etc). Even better, Douglas Adams, the 30 Year’s War and The Goon Show make an appearance. What more can one ask for in a book about finance? June 26th, 2014 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
In politics, many debates are polarised for a reason. There are usually profound differences in the ideological priors underlying viewpoints and the interpretation of evidence. We should therefore be suspicious of the arrogance of those who feel they don’t have to formulate arguments from first principles, and instead unilaterally announce themselves and their ideas as above debate. How often do we hear, for example, “it’s time to take the ideology out of this debate”, or, worse, “I’m only interested in what works”? Often these are rhetorical devices which simply mean “shut up, and accept I’m right”. But in other instances, users of these banal phrases seem genuinely unaware that what they are saying has any sort of ideological assumptions underpinning it. June 24th, 2014 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The purpose of the NHS is political, not medical. In the UK, in our Coronation of the State as our Bountiful Lord, it is the Crown, the dole is the Orb and State Education is the sceptic sceptre. Those who question the State threaten to leave you without medical treatment, leading to a horrible death, or starve or be illiterate. Yet a Slaughterhouse like the Mid-Staffs can kill on a scale that an early 1940s German bureaucrat might admire, and nothing happens until hospital the pile of corpses becomes too obvious for excuses not to be shuffled out. – Samizdata commenter Mr. Ed June 19th, 2014 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
The only serious black mark against the NHS was its poor record on keeping people alive – Denis Campbell and Nicholas Watt. This was written in all seriousness in a Guardian article praising the NHS. Seriously. Not joking. You could not make this up. June 18th, 2014 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Is it too much to hope that one day these uneducated and bigoted Yorkshire folk will understand that claiming benefits, fly-tipping, littering the streets, threatening people and playing loud music all night – these were the things of which they complained – are simply expressions of cultural diversity, to be warmly embraced? Why don’t they understand that we all have to get along? June 16th, 2014 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to make too much of this. But here it is anyway. In a report about successful pop entertainer Frank Turner meeting successful pop entertainer Josh Homme, Turner is quoted saying, about Homme, this:
Thanks to Turner and Gigwise, and google sending me an email about it, I get to enjoy it too. The shit in question is referred to in this earlier posting here by me, and I wrote some more about Turner here. June 16th, 2014 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
A story in The Telegraph has brought to mind the following quotation, which seems doubly apt: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” – Karl Marx, writing in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” June 14th, 2014 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
We’re in a political campaign, and the candidate is Uber and the opponent is an asshole named Taxi. – Uber CEO Travis Kalanick Gratitude to City A.M.’s Lynsey Barber for spotting this quote and supplying the link to it. June 9th, 2014 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
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