It’s over; we’ve won. You can sell off your collection of Milton Friedman hardbacks, tape over your Stossel videos, and stop wasting your time reading rants like this one. You see, the world is now in the iron grip of a quasi-religious cult, a fanatical cabal with global influence, which has brought about a laissez-faire […]

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Eve has a good response-to-my-response-to-her-response, to which Sara has, for the moment, deferred. Lest this become AbortionBlog, I’ll try to keep my remarks succinct. Before diving into the point-by-point, though, let me just clarify what I meant when I said that the link between human biology and value depended on that biology typically giving rise […]

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I’ve spent the last couple of days at work researching the San Fernando Valley’s push to secede from the city of Los Angeles, which will be put to a vote in November. Believe it or not, this actually allowed me to blogcrawl a bit: one of the most useful resources I found was the witty, […]

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Lemme take a break from all that brow-furrowing to relate something I heard on the local NPR affiliate this morning. The announcer informed all those potential corporate donors out there in radioland that underwriting spots on NPR “get results.” Results? (I asked, in my best Polyanna falsetto) What on earth could those results possibly be? […]

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Both Sara and the redoubtable Eve Tushnet flatter me with responses to the previous post. I hope neither will object to a combined response-to-the-responses. I’ll note by way of preface Sara’s reference to Stanley Fish, who observes that pro-choice folks now seem to focus on metaphysical questions, and a distinction between “biological” and “moral” life, […]

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Fellow Koch alum Sara Russo has posted a transcript of a speech she delivered at a conservative conference, entitled “The Science of Being Pro-Life.” She begins with the observation that many people are, rightly enough, not impressed with strictly religious arguments against abortion. Few people, after all, think that we should criminalize the failure to […]

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Sep Dog throws out two questions on his blog today: why is speech that causes disutility morally distinct from actions that do the same, and what’s so bad about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act? First, speech: I don’t know that I’d make “disutitlity” the primary focus in either case, but that’s a longer discussion than […]

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Ram over at PostPolitics dug into Dick Gephardt’s funding and found that his special brand of anti-corporate populism is, unsurprisingly enough, funded by huge corporations. Now, maybe that’s just self-defense, because as an incumbent Gephardt is practically guaranteed reelection. But Ram suggests that the motivation may be more sinister still: as long as regulation and […]

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If you’ve ever held a microphone too close to its own speaker, you’ve experienced in a direct and irritating way the power of feedback loops. Often, feedback loops are useful: game theorists will tell you they can hasten convergence on an equilibrium outcome in collective action problems, and the evolutionary feedback loop generated by the […]

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NPR just announced that it’s Fatboy Slim’s 39th birthday. They apparently thought that more important than making note of one Milton Friedman’s 90th. Surprise surprise. Anyway, be sure to celebrate Friedman day right: use an illegal drug, purchase sex services, fire a handgun, visit a private school, or establish a currency with a stable M2. […]

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