In the comments to this post on time preference, I pointed to a confusion in Ayn Rand’s use of the example of “an immortal, indestructible robot” to show that only “life” makes the concept of “value” possible. Her basic idea was that an immortal, indestructible robot “would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or to lose; It could not regard anything as for or against it, as serving or threatening its welfare, as fulfilling or frustrating its interests.

I’ve been Hoppe-ing my brains out lately. Take this cool, pithy statement about the nature of economic analysis:

I’m tired of two kinds of gloomy Guses: First, the Chicken Littles who claim the economic sky is falling on our heads. Secondly, the doomsayers who will not recognize the material abundance that’s produced by the cornucopia of America. A silly sub-cell of this ideological club repeats incessantly that the gap between rich and poor - the affluent and the empty-stomached flatulent is widening day by day. I considered this accusation last night as I watched an ad for a can opener. It’s a dandy. Attaches to the can magnetically, I suppose.

Kathleen Blanco is trying to get the understandably hesitant insurance companies to issue more policies in hurricane-prone areas. She says that “there is no silver bullet” to solving the “problem” of lack of insurance.

He says that we are running a sweat shop around here!

The WashTimes has a piece on Bob Smither who is making life difficult for the Repubs and Dems in Texas. But what interests me is his quote machine at the bottom of the page. The code is here.