AynCrap

Sometimes a person has something sensible to say and is met by insane raving. The only sensible response is to push forward rationally. In that vein I submit two YouTube videos of people I respect (one more than the other) defending common sense in the face of insanity, Dan Hannan and Peter Hitchens . ~~~ Dan Hannan This is Dan Hannan taking the European Union to task and making a case for Brexit. ~~~ Peter Hitchins Peter Hitchens defends the presumption of innocence until proven guilty.

Quick update: There is a nicer, fancier article on this very subject on another blog. If for some reason you read my article below, treat yourself and partake of properal's piece too . ~~~ There is a paper by Samuel Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi called 'Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene' and it is wonderful. It leaves a few stones unturned and its thesis needs to be empirically verified or falsified but it really begins to clarify the intimate relationship between the form of agriculture that we refer to as farming on the one hand and private ownership on the other. Their thesis is that technology was not the driver that led to long-term (inter-generational) farming, but also that farming did not follow some moment where the folks in a society all said "hey, let's all have private property now!" Rather, what they posit is that farming and private property actually coalesced, ad-hoc and over a multi-generational time-fram...

A summary of grievances addressed to my 19th Century anarchist chums re their concepts of exploitation and wage slavery. a/ non-sequiturs Inferring something moral (exploitation) from an accounting fact (<100% of revenue in wages) is a non sequitur and runs afoul of the is/ought problem . The non sequitur arises because in this case the accounting fact doesn't actually imply the moral one. Further steps would be needed to connect these two different facts, whether an LTV or the will of some deity. For another link describing the is/ought problem, first formulated by David Hume, maybe anarchist econ needs a guillotining . b/ metaphysics Avoiding the non-sequitur problem requires a metaphysical theory of value that is invalidated by observable reality and serious contemporary logical inquiry - namely falsification (Karl Popper) & the maths and quantum mechanics behind incompleteness (Kurt Godel) and uncertainty (Werner Heisenberg) respectively. Completeness/obj...

Tom W. Bell, whom I have linked to on this blog before , helps out at the Seasteading Institute. Joe Quirk interviews him on the subject of seasteads & special economic zones , saying things that won't surprise people like me in the slightest. Such zones are less ambitious than seasteads, but they offer a chance, especially when privately administered, for people to increase their prosperity far moreso and far more quickly than outside such SEZs. Give it a listen.