August 2009 - Posts

30 August 2009
The God's Proxy Principle
States throughout history have covered their criminal acts with a veneer of false legitimacy by claiming to be divine agents. The earliest recorded incident of this is in perhaps the "war of nerves" conducted by Enmerkar, ruler of the Sumerian city-state of Erech (Uruk), against Aratta, an... Read More...
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29 August 2009
On Private Education
Education is a good. Like any good, demand for it stimulates supply. Sumer In ancient Sumer, where writing was first invented, being a scribe was a high-paying and prestigious job. This was largely because demand for scribes was high, since their services (especially record-keeping) were of such benefit... Read More...
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29 August 2009
The Magistrate/Mandarin Principle
This is the first of a series of posts called "Principles of Man". I will continually return to each post in this series adding more evidence for its importance from history. The state is a maleficent symbiosis of enslaving brigands (magistrates) and corrupt intellectuals (mandarins). Throughout... Read More...
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26 August 2009
A Mini-Manifesto of Liberty
In the following I outline, as succinctly as possible, my principles of libertarianism. Natural Morality I feel assault, plunder, and enslavement are wrong. Implicit in this feeling is a belief in property rights. I don't derive this feeling from some philosophical doctrine. It's just part of... Read More...
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26 August 2009
How Ends Contend
I claim that the ultimate goals of humans are products of feeling and not reason. However, Roderick Long, as a eudaimonist, claims that what the teleological philosopher usually thinks of as ultimate goals are really penultimate goals (although he doesn't use that term) which serve as means to the... Read More...
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15 August 2009
Action, Goals, and Goods
(This post is an attempt to formulate praxeological fundamentals according to how they make sense to me.) An action is an embarkation of a behavior for the achievement of a goal 1 which executes a deliberate choice 2 among potential behaviors. A goal is a possible future situation that is perceived as... Read More...
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14 August 2009
Ben Bernanke Was Wrong: YouTube Mashup
Somebody did a cool "mashup" ( defined in Wikipedia as "a digital media file containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video and animation drawn from pre-existing sources, to create a new derivative work") of my Mises.org article on Ben Bernanke's embarrassing prognostications... Read More...
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08 August 2009
The 19th Century Bernanke
There is something disarming about a technocrat. While it is easy to dismiss elected officials as blustering panderers, there is something comforting in the image of the specialist civil servant toiling away with industry and equanimity. Poring over statistics like a Hellenic priest scientifically examining... Read More...
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