Brainsurfing...

[elfs]

Clinton's pastor defends Obama's pastor

To evaluate his dynamic ministry on the basis of two or three sound bites does a grave injustice to Dr. Wright, the members of his congregation, and the African-American church which has been the spiritual refuge of a people that has suffered from discrimination, disadvantage, and violence. Dr. Wright, a member of an integrated denomination, has been an agent of racial reconciliation while proclaiming perceptions and truths uncomfortable for some white people to hear. Those of us who are white Americans would do well to listen carefully to Dr. Wright rather than to use a few of his quotes to polarize.

Oh, but what does Pastor Dean Snyder know anyway?

It's a profit and loss system, Dummy!

I heard this on NPR last night. Professor of Economics Russell Roberts states the obvious:

In a world where people who make bad decisions are spared the full consequences, only one thing is certain. We've encouraged more people to make more bad decisions in the future. The real price to be paid isn't the dollar costs of any bail out, but the encouragement of recklessness and irresponsibility. That will make all of us poorer down the road.

The one thing he didn't point out is that invention is one of the seeds of growth, and invention requires both regulatory freedom and the chance to fail.

Is Cheney betting on Economic Collapse?

Tinfoil-hat article suggesting that Cheney's investment strategy, which is apparently public knowledge, is heavily skewed toward non-dollar holdings, short-term bonds, and other financial instruments that would do much better than average if the economy's pooch gets buggered

11 Year Old Girl Dies Because Parents Choose Prayer Over Medicine

The girl has three siblings, ranging in age from 13 to 16, the police chief said.

"They are still in the home," he said. "There is no reason to remove them. There is no abuse or signs of abuse that we can see."

Uh, hello? Their sister just died because their parents believe insane things about the way reality does and does not work. She died of a completely manageable form of diabetes, and her mother continues to insist that her daughter might still be resurrected! If this isn't the most horrible form of child abuse-- a reckless course of action that results in a slow, lingering, painful death-- what the fuck is?

Dean Kamen invents ultra-efficient water purification system for third world villages.

Ultra-efficient vapor-compression distiller married above a Stirling engine which generates electricty; the waste heat from the engine drives the compressor for water distillation. If it works as advertised, it's a serious step in the right direction for dealing with the world's water shortages.

Prada Prostitutes

An interesting article for writing about sex. Deals mostly with the lack of introspection among sex memoirists, but I'm wondering: what does the writer of the article really want from these people?

Protection Portfolios for the Home

Does it mean I'm old when stuff like this gets my attention?

The Real Cost of Financial Clutter on the Road to a Remarkable Life

I think I'm getting older...

50 Tips And Resources to Better Sleep

Yep, definitely getting older.

Comments

Re: Hmm

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

I appreciate all of that, and it isn't a flame at all, so no worries on that account.

There are certainly people who have problems for no fault of their own, people who can get themselves out of trouble with a certain amount of help rather than becoming dependent on the help. It's always worthwhile to offer help to these people. In a very real sense, there is no social cost to this kind of assistance; not helping is more expensive than helping.

There's also a social value to a certain level of protection against long-term disabilities and other problems that won't ever allow a full recovery. But there have to be pretty well-defined limits to this kind of coverage to create appropriate incentives for people to take care of their own health to the extent they can.

Generally, I'm fully behind any social program that can truly show that its social benefit is greater than its social cost.

But we are way, way beyond all that. Federal, state, and local spending for social programs is in the range of a few trillion dollars a year, several times higher than it ought to be.

This level of spending is a huge drag on the economy. It eliminates the very job opportunities that people need to get themselves out of poverty. It dramatically increases the prices of basic goods and services. It diminishes the variety and resources of private charities, which used to used to play a much larger role in assisting the poor. And much of the spending doesn't even go to needy people-- if we accounted for government programs the way we account for private charities, you'd be horrified by how much money goes to bureaucrats, consultants, contractors, and their flunkies.

And it's all done to expand the power and influence of the politicians who promote these programs. It doesn't matter to them that many of these programs are at best inefficient, more likely ineffective, and often counterproductive-- they insist that diverting more money will solve the problem. It never does, though. And let someone suggest that spending ought to be cut, and suddenly that person is called a heartless monster.

The monsters here are the socialists who use the power of government to steal money from some people and then use it to hurt other people.

The bottom line here is that most of today's social programs have failed to achieve their goals. We solved the big problems of infant mortality, adult life expectancy, literacy, etc. long ago, and we should have stopped there. Instead, we have gone on to enact more and more ambitious programs that never had a chance of succeeding and never will because they're actually worse than doing nothing.

The only thing that really improves society in the long run is prosperity, which requires liberty. Instead of diverting such a large fraction of our productivity into useless social programs and massive bureaucracies to manage them, we ought to let people keep a larger share of what they have legitimately earned. Individuals spend and invest their money much more wisely than the government ever could, and that's the surest path to a better life for all of us.

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