Recently in Economics Category

During the time between I allowed my blog to go down, and the time I restored it, Google's crawlers did the understandably necessary thing, and culled the dead links from others' sites to mine. Not a big deal to me, but if there's any one reason to leave this site up, it's to service those engaged in public discussion of the unconstitutional outrage of the American Community Survey (ACS). About four years ago, I posted a short note commenting on Texas congressman Ron Paul's criticism of the survey entitled "None of Your Business!': the American Community Survey" which has become the very most heavily posted item here.

Folks, apologies once again for having let the site go down.

Libertarians should not be denying scientific fact. We should instead spend our time combatting the religious impulse of people to think the modern world is evil and that we must repent for our sins by living cruddy lives and waiting for (in their minds) our inevitable and justified doom at the hands of a wronged Gaia.

Perry E. Metzger

L. Neil Smith finally does a real blog, "L. Neil Smith at Random", with comments enabled. I've long thought that Neil's writing would fit the format, and now I'm sure of it.

The Dissident Frogman has incorporated my Japanese translations of his popular "Support Denmark" banners into his multilingual contributions archive page.

My thanks to knowledgeable friends Mariko and Garth for their thorough critiques of my pre-final draft. Thanks also for feedback on the issue of translating the original phrase "the legacy of the West", which was problematic, by these people on the honyaku mailing list: Richard Thieme, Peter Durfee, Benjamin Barrett, J.C. Helary, and James Sparks.

Charles Hudson has written an interesting opinion piece on the potential of Yelp (which I mentioned recently.) Thanks to Matthew P. for the pointer. Excerpt:

Yelp is collecting a ton of data from those who take the time to rate and review restaurants, hotels, etc. In the same way that Junglee/Amazon revolutionized how people find books and other goods by using collaborative filtering, I can see Yelp (at scale) achieving a similar aim. Right now, the "missing lens" is the ability to filter reviews and ratings based on similar interests. I would love the ability to use Yelp to filter reviews and ratings based on how similar other reviewers' scores are to ones that I have entered. This is something that nobody seems to be doing today. Ultimately, this collaborative filtering might prove even more useful than reviews provided by my friends.

Some friends of a friend started a geographically-oriented business review site, Yelp.com, with an apparent emphasis on restaurant reviews (but an ontology supporting very many more categories.)

I've joined on her recommendation, and have been surprised to discover just how useful it's been already: I've found some nearby places I'd never considered before, and am now using to drive some of my purchases at local specialty shops.

Now, whether Yelp is another Next Big Thing remains to be seen. It's a closed system, with no apparent provision for RSS syndication of the content we the users add to the review base, and relatedly, no leveraging of microformat standards such as hReview, a serious issue (thanks to Mike Linksvayer for pointing me to this recently.)

Yelp seems to have purchased a GIS-oriented business database, and coded some Google Maps integration into their interface. Rather nice, but entirely US-oriented, with no indication they're ready to scale into the English-speaking markets of Tokyo (big expat and traveller population) and other locales.

Speaking of which, I just tried inviting a good friend, an American living in Panama who could be a productive member of the Yelp community, and he sent me back this, reprinted with his permission:

'Hi Russell,

These morons ask for a zip code and won't accept my sign-up without one. I see this sort of shit all the time. When are US geeks going to get a clue the the US is not the world and that not everyone who has internet also has a "zip" code? So Thanks, but no thanks. I won't sign up with jingoistic idiots. Please feel free to pass along my exact words, if it pleases you.

Regards,
Sandy'

Wow. Well, he does have a point. I see this as one of those "We weren't planning to be so successful" scaling issues. Can't count the number of times I've seen this. I think the Yelpers really should have generalized their GIS integration to allow world-wide registration, from the very beginning. I have lots of friends in Europe, Asia, and South America who won't be able to join due to this and related issues. Maybe agitating in the Yelp forums about this might help; I've noticed they do tend to pay attention to issues of interface (e.g. marking businesses as closed or moved) so they may listen. Of course, they may be planning some kind of world-market rollout, but it would help if they advertised that somewhere prominent.

In the meantime, I'm going to use the hell out of it until and unless it ceases to be interesting. It's a much more convenient place for me to bulk-load all those pictures of food and storefronts I take in my travels, more so than the Movable Type blogging interface I'm using here, and since most of my reviews are locale-specific, it's probably a better place for my rants and raves about local businesses (and ones I visit in other cities.)

Property "rights" are basically an epiphenomenon arising from respect for voluntary agreements. As such, if a society doesn't respect voluntary agreements, private property doesn't last long. You can't even decide who owns something unless voluntary agreements are respected.

Perry Metzger, by permission, from a private mailing list

Just saw a telecast version of this print article on Foxnews, "Cruisin' For Cash"; a small town (Littleton, Massachusetts) police chief, John Kelly, is using carside adverts - no tax money - to fund his police cruisers:

The chief says he felt he had little choice but to take an unusual, much-criticized step to upgrade his patrol cars. He’s selling advertising space on the quarter panels and rear bumper of patrol cars to pay for the new wheels.

12 grand a year for three years earns a local business the right to put a banner ad on the back and sides of a town police car. This allows Kelly to buy all new lights, sirens, radios, scanners, shotgun and assault rifle racks, and an on-board law enforcement laptop computer. Plus, it covers the entire cost of the vehicle lease. A local grocer, Donnelans, bought space to pay for the first new cruiser.

Brilliant, and if someone proposes yet another obnoxious bond measure (or tax) in my town in California, I'll point them to this example as a superior alternative.

I took a break from studying this evening and visited a number of local stores to buy Danish food and booze products. Here's what I came back with, minus duplicates (I had to buy more than one of the tins of ginger cookies):

From left to right, purchases from various stores in Cupertino, California:

From Trader Joe's:

• Rosenborg Danish Blue cheese
  
• Silver Goat Organic Feta cheese
  
• "The Queen's Cookies" Ginger Spice Cookies (made in Denmark for Trader Joe's)
  

From Whole Foods:

• Denmark's Finest Havarti cheese
  
• Denmark's Finest Havarti cheese with dill
  
• Rosenborg Danish Blue cheese
  
• Blue Danish Castello Triple Cream cheese
  
• Fontina Danish Cheese
  

From Safeway:

• Denmark's Finest Fontina cheese
  
• Denmark's Finest Blue cheese
  
• Primo Taglio Havarti with Dill cheese
  

Especially notable and tasty are the ginger spice cookies made under contract in Denmark for Trader Joe's:

The thing that's missing from the first picture above: Danish beer. None of the three supermarkets above had any Danish beer - assumedly Tuborg and Carlsberg - and the one place I think might have such beer (Cost Plus World Market) closed tonight before I could check out their stock. I'll try there tomorrow night. In the meantime, I'm enjoying my Havarti with Newcastle Brown ale tonight.

I encourage all of my readers to participate in this Danish buycott.

The Dissident Frogman has updated his "Support Denmark" banner blog posting with banner versions in additional languages such as German and Simplified Chinese.

The Dissident Frogman is actively maintaining and updating a blog entry with "Support Denmark" graphics in multiple languages. Translations in additional languages are forthcoming (Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Farsi, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Korean, to the best of my knowledge.)

Oh, yeah: go out and stock up on Havarti cheese... it's not only a show of support contra the recent Islamist boycotts and violence against the Danes (and random others in their neighborhood) but it's also damned fine cheese.

Four weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a Halloween party in Manhattan. I wasn't prepared with a costume, unless you count my normal get-up below as, um, "Visiting Silicon Valley Guy." On the left is Perry Metzger who is, ahem, a eusocialist insect:

A week ago, I caught a short segment of Fox News' business anchor Neil Cavuto interviewing Eric Anderson, president and CEO of Space Adventures, who was promoting his company's Deep Space DSE-Alpha program, a privately-funded Soyuz-based circumlunar expedition. I noticed, not for the first time, a surprising skepticism about private space travel from the normally highly pro-free enterprise Cavuto, who seems to be nurturing a serious blind spot on the matter, a dangerous case of NASA-romanticization.

Me, I'm sanguine about the DSE-Alpha, and hope to see Anderson's enterprise succeed. In the meantime, someone needs to buy Neil Cavuto a copy of Victor Koman's "Kings of the High Frontier." Abolish NASA, get the government out of the space business, and let people like Anderson do their thing without subsidy or interference.

The idea of a constitution, we’re told, is to limit government power. It’s supposed to bind the government to certain operational procedures that restrict its ability to violate rights. So a constitution cannot grant human rights; it can only spell out what are seen as the proper functions of government, and try to limit its ability to invade rights.

The US constitution came perhaps as close to this ideal as possible, until its meaning was perverted into a complete reversal, from restricting power to enabling it, from binding government to giving government a mandate for a thousand things to do to us.

But here is the problem. Constitutions by necessity leave the government as the primary enforcement agency. It’s like a memo: "Government to Self: don’t become tyrannical." It only works so long as the enforcement agent operates in good faith. If we remember that the worst rise to the top in government, as Hayek noted, we can have no realistic expectation that this good faith will last. Government gains not by adhering to its own restrictions, but by re-rendering them as positive mandates.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
"A Constitution for Iraq"

...the digital (PDF) version I'm reading now, but Charlie Stross tells his readers not to do so. I will, however, be buying several copies from Amazon as gifts to friends. Damn it's good!

I recently did some driving through Nevada and California, working remotely from a number of hotels. I loaded up my iPod (which I connect to a Pioneer black box installed behind the dash, itself interfaced with the sound system's head unit) with music, podcasts, and audio books (almost all of it purchased on iTunes,) including an unabridged copy of:

"Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side to Everything," by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

I thoroughly enjoyed the 6 hours of sometimes humorous, often surprising and counterintuitive anecdote. I highly recommend it: I do enjoy economic storytelling, from Braudel to Postrel to Friedman Jr. and now these guys.

Anyone else encountered this book or its audio equivalent?

I will add the qualification here that the work does gloss over the correlation between concealed carry laws and violent crime, primarily since the authors took John R. Lott as the authority on the matter... which is a double shame, since there's much there to explore, and since Lott seems to have screwed the pooch with respect to the issue of academic integrity.

Curt Howland has pointed me to a relevant blog entry hosted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Like many, I keep a pocketchange bank on my desk, where I throw my end-of-the-day coin shrapnel. Until recently, I'd taken the 8.9% hit on Coinstar exchanges at a local supermarket, since I value my time highly enough not to spend it counting out 6 pounds of coin. A few days ago, I noticed that one of the options on the Coinstar machine allowed for a conversion of my coins to stored value on an anonymous Starbuck's card... with 0% commission. Since I regularly drink Starbuck's coffee - when a Peet's is not convenient - I found this a rather good deal.

Year by year, a third of the [American] labor pool emerges with a college degree. Most of these degrees are in the humanities and social sciences.

Meanwhile, China produces over 450,000 college graduates a year in science and engineering – as many scientists and engineers as the United States has, total. Then, next year, China will do it again.

Gary North

...reading for pleasure is pretty much the single most important determinant (and correlant) of later success in any fields involving thinking, planning, writing, and intellectual effort. Those who don't read as children are mostly lost forever...they'll simply never catch up with those of us who read books every night.

Timothy C. May

I just got back from a meeting of an organization of which I'm a member, and was talking with a Polish acquaintance at the potluck which followed. We were discussing the until-recent history of Russian occupation of his country, and he told me that some Poles he knew had during that time advocated "Layered Communism":

"Layer of Communists, layer of sand, layer of Communists, layer of sand..."

How much time have you spent in the Western US?

Have you ever tried to buy a semi-automatic rifle in Canada?

Have you ever tried to order an "unapproved" video from Loompanics in Canada?

Have you ever tried to tell a Mountie to "Get a Warrant"?

None of these things work very well in Canada.

When Canada is as free as, say Montana, where a man stopped by a state traffic cop for driving 80 mph, with a beer in one hand, and pistol on his hip, can ask the cop "What the hell do you want?", and have the cop eventually just give up and walk off, then you can discuss with us how "free" Canada is.

As for the "we're doomed" crowd here ... The US is the healthiest patient in the World's tyranny cancer ward. If we don't win here, things are going to get very ugly.

Kristopher Barrett

Just saw this a few minutes ago on a SuperBowl TV commercial: Richard Branson & Volvo team up in a contest to give away a suborbital flight on Virgin Galactic.

Capitalism is the only moral social system because it allows each man to work for his own profit and because under a capitalistic system men only have to work with each other through voluntary action for mutual benefit. Capitalism maximizes wealth, prosperity and happiness.

Valara Forsythe

Walking past a newsstand near my office yesterday, I saw the banner headline "Tube Bosses Buy Parts on eBay". The accompanying story told us, in faintly mocking tones, how engineers working on the London Underground system have resorted to using the online auction firm because the parts they need are so old that they cannot get the pieces they need from regular stock.

Now it may at first appear a terrible thing that our metro systems are so old that the folk running them have to resort to an online auction set up by those vulgar American geeks from their Silicon Valley offices to get the stuff they need. But (drums roll!) I have a certain admiration for the Tube staff who had the entrepreneurial savvy to make use of the amazingly successful eBay platform. If the power of the internet can make my journey to work a bit smoother, I ain't complaining.

Johnathan Pearce

This just in from my distant friend James Bennett: his announcement today of the website supporting his new book "The Anglosphere Challenge." This seems like a very enticing book, and I plan to read it during winter school break.

Thanks to David Purves for the pointer to an entertaining article published yesterday, "The Monetary Economics of Thurston Howell II (sic)," which I've discovered is also today the subject of intense discussion on Slashdot.

A few days ago, I finished reading Henry Petroski's "The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are," a breezy exposition on the origins of things most people take for granted, usually considered not worth wondering about. In a similar vein, and coincidentally well-timed, Curt Howland forwarded me yesterday a pointer to an essay lauding one artifact in particular, "In Praise of the Oh-So-Dependable Cardboard Box," by Russell Roberts.

I'm reminded of an essay I read in the summer of 1990, a copy of which was given me by its author, Phil Salin, at a house party in Palo Alto, before leaving for my 1st work assignment in Europe. The essay, "The Ecology of Decisions, or 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Kitchens,'" opened my eyes to what Petroski often refers to as the "artifactual intelligence" encoded in the seemingly mundane, the things we don't consider.

Phil's work, by the way, is maintained on the web by friends who deeply care about him: he succumbed to stomach cancer sometime around 1993, and is presently in cryostasis at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. I didn't have the chance to personally thank Phil for his strong influence on my thinking, but I hope to have that chance someday.

Voicing an opinion is costless - anyone can argue that socialism is great, or that the government won’t really inflate a fiat currency. Having a false opinion may be costless if it doesn’t affect your life much, and it can produce a benefit of feeling good. So people may choose an opinion based on how it appeals to their hopes, rather on on what they believe is true.

An example of a more incentive compatible system is gambling. While people often gamble irrationally, gambling still tends to draw out more beliefs and less hope than mere discussion. By placing a wager, you tie your opinion to a personal gain or loss, so you care whether you are correct. Hence “Wanna bet?” really means “Do you actually think that, or are you just saying it?", and its a great way to call the windbag’s bluff. People offer absurd opinions much more often than they make idiotic wagers.

Patri Friedman

You might want to take note of the interconnection between purpose and action in the minimal State. The minimal State does not, for instance, build art museums, because it does not exist to promote art but to enforce agreements and provide mutual defense. In order to build an art museum, the State would need to acquire the resources with which to build it. If people are willing to donate those resources freely, there is no need for the State to build the museum — it could be built privately. If people are not willing to donate the resources freely, then the act of forcibly taking the needed resources turns the purpose of the minimal State on its head — instead of enforcing the decision by the participants to respect each other's lives and property so that their own lives and property will be respected, the State then becomes an agent for some to abscond with the property of others. I may think it is a good idea to build a home for orphans, but if I take your resources against your will to do it, whether I'm an official of the State or a private citizen, I have violated the truce. To obey the truce, I must convince you to voluntarily provide resources for my goals, whether by trading with you or appealing to your charitable instincts.

In short, if the justification of the minimal State is that it exists, at the behest of a collection of sovereign individuals, to enforce a mutually beneficial truce among those who choose to participate in it, and to organize mutual defense against those who choose not to participate by violating the truce, then that justification does not reasonably permit the expropriation of resources for the purpose of projects that are merely laudable.

Note that this view of the minimal State cannot provide a justification for initiating warfare in distant lands which are not a threat its citizens' safety, regardless of how laudable it might be to re-arrange the social structures of those foreign places to suit enlightened tastes. However, by the same token, neither position prevents individuals from engaging in such activities on their own, at their own risk and with their own resources.

Perry Metzger, in "What is the Role of the State?" today

I'll tell you what I'd prefer our government's foreign policy to be, assuming we need to have a State at all. My proposal is pretty simple: Swiss-style armed neutrality. That means no invasions, no military threats, no foreign aid, no "covert operations", no military bases outside the country, no attempts to influence the internal affairs of foreign countries whatsoever.

No one blows up bombs in the streets of Geneva. No one from Switzerland gets kidnaped in third world countries to protest the evils of Swiss foreign policy. Wherever they go, at worst, people think of the Swiss as boring — it is rare that anyone feels the need to buttonhole someone from Zurich or Lugano and tell them off for what their government does.

The Swiss are not pacifists, though. They have a very strong militia for defense, and in times past when Europe was less peaceful, it would have been extremely costly for an attacker to invade them. Even if (in the case of particularly strong enemies) an invasion might have ultimately succeeded, it would have yielded very little of value at an astonishing expense.

Perry Metzger

Capitalistic competition is also why "child labor" has all but disappeared, despite unionist claims to the contrary. Young people originally left the farms to work in harsh factory conditions because it was a matter of survival for them and their families. But as workers became better paid—thanks to capital investment and subsequent productivity improvements—more and more people could afford to keep their children at home and in school. Union-backed legislation prohibiting child labor came after the decline in child labor had already begun. Moreover, child labor laws have always been protectionist and aimed at depriving young people of the opportunity to work. Since child labor sometimes competes with unionized labor, unions have long sought to use the power of the state to deprive young people of the right to work. In the Third World today, the alternative to "child labor" is all too often begging, prostitution, crime, or starvation. Unions absurdly proclaim to be taking the moral high road by advocating protectionist policies that inevitably lead to these consequences.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo

I'm seeing the "Ads by Google" sidebar on an increasing number of blogs and social networking sites. Should I add one myself? I could certainly use the money... speaking of which, do any of my readers actually make money with it?

The same piece of software can be both an application and infrastructure. Apache is an excellent example of this. Apache is really Linux’s “killer app.” It runs on Windows and BSD, but the main point is that it doesn’t require Windows, and many machines are built for the sole purpose of running Apache. Apache is an application when I am setting up a web server, but it’s infrastructure for you when you’re looking at my blog.

Sean Lynch

Speaking of coffins, Costco is now test marketing them - coffins - in Chicago. Hey, for those into the "stuff the corpse in the box and stick 'em in a hole in the ground" school of funerary practice, it's certainly a better option than the ridiculous prices charged by the funeral home businesses... most of whom are screaming outrage at Costco's competitive offering.

I often keep the Fox News Channel playing in the background while I work, and the last couple of days I've heard the occasional newstwit breathlessly report on incidents of "price gouging" during and after the recent hurricane there. I'd been wanting to comment on the idiocy of the whole "price gouging" thing, but have been knee-deep in work. Doug Allen, I think, has said what I wanted to say (thanks Patri) in 'The "G" Word."

Most of America's health care is private, so many assume it operates as a free market. In truth, it is dominated by the government, resulting in high costs and stifling bureaucracy.

The federal government effectively socializes 86% of all health spending, a greater share than in 17 other industrialized countries, including Canada (though other features make these systems less free).

By discouraging individual responsibility, the government guarantees irresponsibility. We pay less attention to our health and demand more care — with little regard to the costs we impose on others or the rising prices that result. (Should it surprise us that health insurance is unaffordable for millions?) Those footing the bill — employers, insurers and the government — try to impose responsibility in ways both offensive and harmful (read: managed care).

Michael F. Cannon

Looks like that Google IPO I mentioned yesterday is actually happening today or early next week... I can't really understand their conflicting press releases listed here.

Google will be opening auction bidding for its 25.7 million IPO shares in less than 4 hours. This will be an interesting event.

If we have learned anything over the past 18 months it is this: that the first rule of politics - power must never be trusted - still applies. The government will neither regulate itself nor be regulated by the institutions which surround it. Parliament chose to believe a string of obvious lies. The media repeated them, the civil service let them pass, the judiciary endorsed them. The answer to the age-old political question - who guards the guards? - remains unchanged. Only the people will hold the government to account.

They have two means of doing so. The first is to throw it out of office at the next election. This works only when we are permitted to choose an alternative set of policies. But in almost every nation, a new contract has now been struck between the main political parties: they have chosen to agree on almost all significant areas of policy. This leaves the people disenfranchised: they can vote out the monkeys but not the organ-grinder.

George Monbiot

Among the most gruesome consequences of fiat money, and of paper money in particular, is its ability to extend the length of wars. The destructions of war have the healthy effect of cooling down initial war frenzies. The more protracted and destructive a war becomes, therefore, the less is the population inclined to support it financially through taxes and the purchase of public bonds. Fiat inflation allows the government to ignore the fiscal resistance of its citizens and to maintain the war effort on its present level, or even to increase that level. The government just prints the notes it needs to buy cannons and boots.

J.G. Hülsmann

A second fallacy is the idea of war as an engine of prosperity. Students are taught that World War II ended the Depression; many Americans seem to believe that tax revenues spent on defense contractors (creating jobs) are no loss to the productive economy; and our political leaders continue to believe that expanded government spending is an effective way of bringing an end to a recession and reviving the economy.

The truth is that war, and the preparation for it, is economically wasteful and destructive. Apart from the spoils gained by winning (if it is won) war and defense spending squander labor, resources, and wealth, leaving the country poorer in the end than if these things had been devoted to peaceful endeavors.

H.A. Scott Trask

Orkut.com and Chris Claypoole both inform me that Libertarian Party presidential candidate Michael Badnarik hits the half-century mark today. Congrulations on your continued survival!

The government doesn't produce any wealth. Factories, software companies, farmers, and others are the ones producing wealth. All the government can do is make it harder for people to produce wealth or take wealth from one person and hand it to another. It can't actually make the pie larger on its own, but it can manage to drastically reduce the size of the pie by interfering. Only the people actually doing productive work can increase the size of the pie.

We see extreme cases of this in the third world. The reason people in Africa live in shacks and have to wear our cast-off clothing is not because we're mean and keep them from having all the wealth we've stolen from them. They have little wealth to steal in the first place. They are poor because their governments are run in a way that makes the creation and retention of wealth impossible. Unlike the booming Asian economies, where foreign factories are welcomed, few foreign companies "exploit" the poor of Africa, because the African governments have made running factories and businesses nearly impossible. Even indigenous entrepreneurs are regulated, shaken down and taxed into oblivion. If you want to make the poor wealthier, you have to stay out of the way of people who want to produce wealth. The more you get in the way, the poorer people will be.

Perry Metzger

I've noticed an interesting phenomenon in my math classes over the last couple of years, which has become more pronounced as the subject matter becomes (to some people) more difficult: the Desperate Calculator Jockey. This is the guy who never studies, is too lazy to do his homework, but somehow manages to struggle his way from one class to the next. He can usually be seen furiously punching formulae into a top-of-the-line TI-89 or its near-equivalent, expecting some magical insight into the problem from the resulting graph. While this approach may actually work in some instances, such as with a simple "differentiate this function" problem, the approach is an utter - and deserved - failure when the student is confronted with the dreaded applications problem (the so-called "word problem.")

Oh, my... this is where thinking skills are really tested, and where numerical prosthesis is nearly worthless. I love these problems: exercises in aircraft fuel vs range optimization, predictions of least-time photon transit through a non-vacuum medium (Snell's Law, an application of the Brachistochrone curve), calculations of marginal cost & maximization of profit, how to make the largest rectangular horse corral with a fixed length of expensive fencing... the good stuff. The Calculator Jockeys rarely know where to start decomposing a problem to its tractable constituents, instead, as usual, attempting to invoke an answer from the aether by keypunch.

I can pretty much tell from looking around a room who's faking it and who's getting it: those who are actually learning the calculus are learning with their pencils, which are constantly moving on paper. The fakers, on the other hand, are constantly pushing buttons. The joke's on the latter group: with the exception of actual symbolic manipulation packages such as Wolfram's Mathematica, hand calculators - to date - depend entirely on methods such as linear approximation. This means that the calculator jockey can actually get the wrong answer for a derivative of a function at a point on a curve, since the curve may not actually be differentiable at that point, but the linear approximation around that point of a secant line connecting points on either side of the original point may exist. Suckers.

Robert LeFevre taught us that capitalism is simply the postponment of consumption today, so that resources may accumulate, allowing us to much greater things in the future.

I think he quoted von Mises, who pointed out that taking the time and making the effort to prepare a stick so that you can knock down fruit that's higher up on the tree, instead of simply plucking and eating the fruit you can reach by hand, is the fundamental act of capitalism.

That being the case, in any conflict that ever existed between capitalism and anything else, capitalism won several hundred years ago. The real struggle is whether we will practice private capitalism, or some other form that will seize your stick for the community, or "merely" license it, and either claim your future fruit production for "all mankind" or limit how much you can take at any given moment, idiotically "saving" it for future generations (by which time it shall have rotted or be eaten by birds).

Me, I'm a private capitalist, as much as I can be in this nation of fourflushers and cheeseheads.

L. Neil Smith