AynCrap

Oh Lord, grant me nose plugs mightier than Adamintine, for the Anarchist FAQers have been at their mischief again. Like Iain McKay's reply to Bryan Caplan's long essay The Anarcho-Statists of Spain there is a big problem with the dispute. Basically the attackers make a big deal out of things that either don't affect Friedman's case, or that only affect it slightly. ~~~ COMMUNAL ~~~ For some reason the existence of local governments called hreppar (hreppr singular) is the main historical item used to dispute Friedman's claim that Saga Iceland played host to polycentric law and private property. Yes I uttered that sentence and yes I'm accurately summing up these guys' argument. In other words they don't bother dealing with the actual meat of Friedman's argument, which is that there was no centralised executive to bring cases to trial. All cases were brought privately. The laws of the land allowed for a set number of godord or arbitr...

Tesla has for some time offered its customers free lifetime recharges at Tesla charging stations. Anyone wanna guess the result?  Turns out charging no money for the use of a scarce resource leads to shortages/excessive demand. Le gasp! In this case it means long queues of Model S and X Teslas lining up for juice, like a luxury breadline.

As all three of you know Iain McKay , librarian of the workers' revolution and keeper of the one truth , is my favourite person ever. Several of his pieces are published on libcom.org so I couldn't help but browse. This will be a series with this top bit repeated through each post. Sorry for that. I'm unresponsive to my public :p ~~~ In a piece called The Grand Bluff: Private profits, social risks our truth-teller gives a quick history of limited liability and why it's a bad thing; namely that it decreases owners' exposure to the risks the businesses they own take on. Correct! Limited liability is one state-granted monopoly privilege (along with organisational legal personhood, patents, and copyrights) that pretty much all anti-statists oppose. By describing the situation from the perspective of risk McKay even gets the reason why it's economically problematic right. Inevitably, however, there are some things I must complain about; there wouldn'...

A Youtuber called axe863 made a video in which he used scientific, mathematical and statistical common-sense to deliver the KO that the Venus Project and Zeitgeist Movement so richly deserved. If his approach seems weird and unconventional it's because he's not attacking from a tradition neoclassical or Keynesian perspective. Axe863's poison is complexity economics, something a good deal more dangerous to ideas like TVP and TZM. [ 2 ] Now to a couple of comment threads from below the video that I thought could od with being replicated just in case they get deleted at source! ~~~ AstralLuminary 1 year ago Why can't we generalize the consumption patterns of middle-income people in the western world, set our constraints equal to the amount of localized resources, and the rate of resource recovery, derive a population growth model that would be sustainable to said consumption patterns, and derive the necessary quantifiable amount of work required to expen...

Lengthyounarther reviewed Bourgeois Dignity by Dierdre McCloskey. Now I want to read that damned book even more! In the course of his review I heard only two real criticisms of McCloskey's scholarship, one about environmentalism in Sweden and one about the degree to which her thesis about ideals that legitimate commerce actually holds. Overall he is very positive about the book; In the closing few minutes Lengthy gets on to current thinking on anthropology re food supply, population growth and the quantity and diversity of nutrition. I was delighted to hear this because I'm intensely curious about the history of farming and private property .

Bryan Caplan's book The Myth of the Rational Voter is regarded as one of the best original economics books of this Century so far. I have read two pieces that act as reviews of the book, one by the Italian economist Francesco Caselli, and one by Prospect columnist Steven White. [ 1 ][ 2 ] Now we all know the former will be vastly more useful than the latter, because the former is by a fellow economist who wishes to understand Caplan's position, even if he ends up disagreeing with many elements of it by the end of his piece. The latter work is basically froth, offering not even an attempt to get at why Caplan is advancing the idea that voters, when they vote, prioritise their instrumental rationality over epistemic rationality. Oh well, never mind. At least I can laugh at White's piece, right? ~~~ [1] Review ... by Francesco Caselli  for the London School of Economics http://personal.lse.ac.uk/casellif/papers/caplan.pdf [2] The Myth of Bryan Caplan's Seriou...

Remember when I wrote that rather Ill-thought-out and shambolic analysis of An Anarchist FAQ 's section on anarcho-capitalism? I'm glad you don't, because somebody else did it better .