Hysteria and hysterics

In conjunction with the DVD release of the BBC’s series, “Planet Earth: The Complete Series,” AOL is currently offering a short quiz and a video contest.

Hysteria first: The 10-question quiz “Planet Earth by the Numbers“ has a certain spin, to say the least. Note question 10, my favorite:

Question: According to some estimates, by 2050, CO2 levels may be as high as when ...

On Evil Acts

Lew Rockwell asks: How does an evil impulse come to reside in a particular person and unleash itself in ghastly ways? Another consideration: how can we as a society best deal with the problem of evil? Let us not conflate the two issues. We do not have to side with either the progressives (people are basically good) or conservatives (people are basically bad). We only need to say that whatever is the intrinsic nature of man, the market will find the best possible means to deal with it, and whatever the outcome of that market process, it cannot be made better by involving the state.

Painting that spot behind the toilet

Sometimes it takes the odd event to allow two unrelated thoughts to become synthesis. Last night, as I sat watching the TV show “24” for the first and last time, spontaneous synthesis occurred.

As the “24” president and Jack - the main character - engaged in a desperate phone call, the president casually noted the destructive perimeter of the exact amount of the explosive C-4 that Jack claimed to be holding. It was then I realized that those who rise to the office of president are truly omniscient.

An Update to Henry Hazlitt’s “Uruguay: Welfare State Gone Wild”

Back in 1969, Henry Hazlitt’s Man Versus the Welfare State appeared. It was a valuable collection of essays, one of which was “Uruguay: Welfare State Gone Wild.”

This essay consisted largely of a series of verbal “snapshots” of Uruguay, as Hazlitt called them, in the form of quotations drawn from a variety of sources over the years 1956 to 1968. What Hazlitt described by means of the quotations was an economic system plunged into ruin by unrestrained welfare-state spending.

The FairTax Rally

I attended a “Tax Day rally” today (Tuesday the 17th) here in Pensacola, Florida, sponsored by the local FairTax people. What was I, one who has written against the FairTax here, here, here, here, and here, doing at a FairTax rally? I received an e-mail from the “Community Coordinator for Americans for Fair Taxation” here in Pensacola.

The Mortgage Market Mess

This is not your father’s housing market, nor your grandfather’s, for that matter. For them, writes Chris Westley, steadily rising — but basically stable — home values seemed (more or less) a given. Recent news suggests that that situation may be a thing of the past. If 40 percent of the Alt-A market fails this year (as many estimate), financial markets will be looking at $1 trillion in defaults. That’s a lot of defaults, especially when you consider that the 1980s S&L crisis cost, by comparison, $150 billion (about $240 billion in today’s dollars) and is partly blamed for the 1990-91 recession.
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