Michael Giberson Jeremy’s Blog at LDSLiberty.org comments on a price gouging episode in The Long Winter, the sixth book in the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Due to a long winter of snow and storms, the people in the town of De Smet are at the point of starving. Suddenly …
Price Gouging in Literature: Little House on the Prairie’s “The Long Winter” Read More »
Michael Giberson Some techniques for checking the tendency toward extreme partisanship, which can be a ready source of intellectual errors (source): •Take opposing points of view at face value. It is more comfortable to treat opposing points of view reductively. That is, rather than deal with a different viewpoint, we prefer to explain it away. …
Michael Giberson At Bleeding Heart Libertarians, University of Arizona philosopher David Schmidtz discusses what a good concept of property does for society. He sums his view concisely at the end, reproduced below. Go read the rest of it for the background and support for these conclusions. To summarize, in more concrete terms, when a system …
Michael Giberson Venezuela “President” Hugo Chávez has put his government strongly behind efforts to combat price gouging, which in this context means selling a good for more than the government’s permitted price. The policy has had the usual effects: shortages of ordinary consumer goods and queues reminiscent of Soviet-style communism. The New York Times reports, …
Great Strides Have Been Made Combating Price Gougers in Venzuela Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Today in Forbes Art Carden has an essay arguing that we should end the War on Drugs and make marijuana legal, now. He’s right. Here’s why. As Art argues, the War on Drugs is a policy poster child for unintended consequences, because the inelastic demand for the regulated good means that stronger enforcement …
Michael Giberson Five minutes of Matt Zwolinski on price gouging (from Learn Liberty). [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9QEkw6_O6w] If you think price gouging should be against the law, watch this video. Are you persuaded by Zwolinski? Let me know in the comments. MORE: Zwolinski has written serious philosophical works on price gouging,which makes the clarity of his position in …
Zwolinski: “Is Price Gouging Immoral? Should It Be Illegal?” Read More »
Michael Giberson In principle, there is nothing in the science of climate change that imposes a partisan political commitment. It isn’t as if, for example, you have to believe in steeply progressive tax rates in order to understand climate science. Yet there seems to be a partisan divide on the science. Three recent posts at …
Lynne Kiesling Over the weekend Mike praised the Institute for Humane Studies teaching workshop he attended last summer. I’ll add to that an IHS recommendation for students: attend as many IHS summer seminars as you can while you’re a student! More than ten week-long seminars sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies apply classical liberal …
Lynne Kiesling Got two spare minutes and want to spend it enriching yourself? Then watch this great Learn Liberty video from Aeon Skoble. Aeon’s a philosopher who also reads a lot of economics, so he’s in a distinctive position to make this important point — both economists and philosophers use the word “value”, but we …
Michael Giberson Last summer I had a lot of fun at the too-short IHS Liberty and the Art of Teaching workshop. Well, I say “too short,” but the truth is that they packed so much information into 2 days that I couldn’t absorb it all. I did absorb a few bits, though, as related in …
Ihs’s Great Summer Workshop for College Teachers Read More »
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