“The chilling photo of a hooded man cold-bloodedly executing a health-insurance CEO on a busy New York City street should make any decent person pause and reflect. Anyone who even glimpses the role of social cooperation in making life better and longer felt sickened, or should have. Nothing can justify what the perpetrator did. That so many people see him as a vengeful hero acting in defense of the downtrodden is appalling. One can only hope they will soon come to their senses. At the risk of taking our eye off the crime, it’s worth pointing out that all departures from the market economy — laissez-faire capitalism — are steps toward social disintegration. That infamous, unsurpassingly ugly photo is the perfect image of anti-cooperation, anti-capitalism, and anti-human welfare.” (12/27/24)
“I must begin this blog post with a confession. I have never been into game theory, and although I did take some undergraduate courses in it, I’ve always struggled to understand it all. But while I was somewhat uneasy about game theory (or at least parts of it), I couldn’t express the reasons for my reservations. It was more of a feeling. From these days, I still remember a conversation I had with a fellow undergrad (perhaps she had also recently graduated) about game theory. She was rather fond of it and gave nice arguments about why it was helpful and good. Back then, one of the criticisms I voiced was that game theory struggled to explain cooperation, or so I thought.” (12/28/24)
“‘Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.’ — Alexis de Tocqueville … There have actually been people in history who have found slavery to be more comfortable than freedom, and indeed, I would argue that many such individuals exist today. They would rather be taken care of by the government (or, socialism) than risk the ‘freedom of opportunity’ necessary to provide for themselves. Sadly, that just feeds the egos and lusts of power-hungry politicians who live to control other people and tell them what to do. And when you control somebody’s finances, you definitely control them. Congress can’t even go home for Christmas until they try to pass some kind of budget that gives them trillions of dollars to spend to enslave the masses.” (12/28/24)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“One of the difficulties in teaching economics is that the students believe they already understand it. They are frequently wrong, not in the sense of missing the fine points but of believing plausible sounding nonsense. That post illustrates one version. If you imagine wealth as money, stacks of hundred dollar bills, the logic is clear. Given a fixed number of hundred dollar bills, if one person gains, gets more, another person must lose. If someone, the Treasury or a counterfeiter, prints more hundred dollar bills, more money is now chasing the same amount of goods, pushing prices up: inflation. But wealth is not always, not even usually, money.” (12/28/24)
“The Wall Street Journal’s COVID bombshell exposes how federal agencies carried out the biggest scientific con of the century. From the very start of the COVID pandemic in America, federal bureaucrats and politicians rushed to suppress evidence that the pandemic originated from a Chinese government lab bankrolled by US government agencies. In 2021, key Biden administration officials effectively exonerated the Chinese government, even though Beijing had completely stonewalled any outside investigation into the origin of the COVID-19 virus. The FBI’s top expert concluded that the virus leaked from the lab — but he was side-railed by the Biden administration, blocked from presenting evidence at a key White House meeting in August 2021.” (12/27/24)
“Social media censorship is a global phenomenon, but the war on pro-Palestinian views on social media represents a different kind of censorship, with consequences that can only be described as dire. Long before the current devastating war on Gaza and the escalation of Israeli violence and repression in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices have been censored. Some date the censorship to an agreement in 2016 that, according to the Israeli government, sought to ‘force social networks to remove content that Israel considers to be incitement.’ This was translated, almost immediately, to the shutting down of thousands of accounts and the barring of many social media influencers, with the hope of slowing down the vastly growing pro-Palestinian tendencies in all Meta-linked platforms.” (12/27/24)
“Over a century ago, John Maynard Keynes, an economist and critic of unregulated, unmanaged markets, pointed to the miracle that one could order the wonders of the world over the phone while lying in bed and have them delivered: ‘The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he may see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep …’ … at the time, Keynes described a fantastic privilege reserved for the richest of the rich who could afford phones and phone calls and buy on credit from people they couldn’t see and couldn’t see them. Keynes’s dream has come true in the 21st century for the poor and middle class, and not because of the interventionism he and his intellectual descendants thought was necessary.” (12/26/24)
“[The war in Ukraine] is, and always has been, about whether poor, politically corrupt — but resource-rich, and geographically located in ways that maximize its strategic importance — Ukraine will go forward as the US/EU/NATO imperial satrapy it became in 2014, or revert to its former status as a Russian imperial satrapy. In other words, it’s about profits for Rome on the Potomac versus profits for Constantinople on the Moskva. An odd bifurcation: Whenever I point this fact out on X, I’m accused of being ‘pro-Russia.’ Whenever I point this fact out on a site where I frequently comment, I’m accused of being ‘pro-US/EU/NATO.’ But I’m going to stick to my guns — pardon the militaristic turn of phrase — on this one. There are no ‘good guys’ at the policy level here.” (12/26/24)
“Brownstone Institute has been tracking a little-known federal agency for years. It is part of the Department of Homeland Security created after 9-11. It is called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA. It was created in 2018 out of a 2017 executive order that seemed to make sense. It was a mandate to secure American digital infrastructure against foreign attack and infiltration. And yet during the Covid year, it assumed three huge jobs. It was the agency responsible for dividing the workforce between essential and nonessential. It led the way on censorship efforts. And it handled election security for 2020 and 2022, which, if you understand the implications of that, should make you spit out your coffee upon learning. More than any other agency, it became the operationally relevant government during this period.” (12/25/24)
“In the view of many Washington policymakers, Syria is like the Hotel California: You can check out, but never leave. President-elect Donald Trump should remedy his first-term mistake and withdraw American troops from Syria.” (12/26/24)
