2010

Dollar Got the Blues: The Official Song of Dollar-Haters

by Geoffrey Allan Plauché September 8, 2010 @ 12:01 am (Austrian) Economics

The song was written in 1971 by Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, a long-time resident of Slidell, Louisiana. Live 04/16/83 in Hamburg, Germany: Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown (guitar/vocals), Homer Brown (tenorsax), Bill Samuell (tenorsax), Joe Sunseri (baritonesax), Craig Wroten (piano), Miles Wright (bass), Robert Shipley (drums). HT Dick Clark for bringing this to my attention. ~*~ Cross-posted at [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Boston Legal’s Alan Shore on Americans

by Geoffrey Allan Plauché September 7, 2010 @ 12:01 am Anti-Statism

In a recent post at The Libertarian Standard, Akiva claimed that people (in general) get the government they deserve. The US is an imperial-warfare state and a growing surveillance-police state, not to mention a nanny-welfare state. Boston Legal’s left-liberal attorney Alan Shore echoes Akiva’s sentiments in a closing argument in defense of, oddly enough, a [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Should Parents Need a License to Procreate? A Moron Says Yes.

by Geoffrey Allan Plauché September 6, 2010 @ 12:00 pm Corporatism

Hugh LaFollette, “Licensing Parents Revisited,” Journal of Applied Philosophy. The premise of his article is that the legitimacy of professional licensing is well-established and the practice should be expanded to parents. While one could argue that it doesn’t follow from professional licensing being applied to various professions that it should be expanded to parents, this [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Progressive Egalitarians Should Be Anti-IP

by Geoffrey Allan Plauché September 5, 2010 @ 11:35 pm (Austrian) Economics

The Obama Administration insists that “‘Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft,’ and it should be dealt with accordingly.” Nonsense, of course. Only scarce goods can be property and therefore only scarce goods can be stolen. Ideas or information patterns are nonscarce goods. If I take your bicycle, you don’t have it anymore. If I copy your [...]

1 comment Read the full article →

Imperial Doublespeak About Iraq

by Geoffrey Allan Plauché September 1, 2010 @ 1:18 pm Featured Posts

In a series of Orwellian twists, the United States is pulling out (prematurely some say) “all” “combat” troops from Iraq but doubling down (for starters) on mercenaries. The Obama Administration gets away with “fulfilling” Obama’s promise to end US combat operations in Iraq by removing the last (officially-labeled) combat brigade from the country, yet 50,000 troops [...]

2 comments Read the full article →

Voting, Moral Hazard, and Like Buttons

by Geoffrey Allan Plauché September 1, 2010 @ 1:02 pm Featured Posts

I was reading Sarah Lacy’s “If You’ve Got Social Media Fatigue, UR DOIN IT WRONG” on TechCrunch and was reminded of a passage from Henry David Thoreau’s seminal essay “Civil Disobedience” that I discuss in chapter 6 of my dissertation. First the passage from Lacy’s article: Sometimes metrics can be a bad thing and beware of [...]

1 comment Read the full article →

Greedy Businessman Does More For Environment Than Environmentalists

by Geoffrey Allan Plauché August 17, 2010 @ 5:37 pm (Austrian) Economics

Over at Forbes.com, Reihan Salam had something rather unexpected but very welcome to say about the CEO of a major corporation: That the success of the Kindle is good news for Amazon should go without saying. But it represents a remarkable environmental advance as well. The publishing industry in the U.S. felled roughly 125 million [...]

1 comment Read the full article →

Pundits: Play Whack-A-Mole with WikiLeaks. Oh wait…

by Geoffrey Allan Plauché August 14, 2010 @ 12:40 am Science and Technology

In How to Mirror a Censored WordPress Blog, I discussed how the Mises Institute open-sourcing all of Mises.org and putting its entire literature and media library online as a set of torrents will help ensure the continued existence of this treasure trove of liberty in the event of a natural disaster or a future crackdown [...]

2 comments Read the full article →

CrunchGear vs. the Tea Party on Net Neutrality

by Geoffrey Allan Plauché August 13, 2010 @ 4:54 pm Business

Yesterday, in All Your Tubes Are Belong to Googlizon, I blogged about the Google-Verizon proposal for regulating the internet and why libertarians should oppose both it and any net neutrality laws and regulations. Today, I came across a post on CrunchGear, a tech and gadgets site, by Nicholas Deleon, that criticizes the Tea Party for [...]

1 comment Read the full article →

All Your Tubes Are Belong to Googlizon

by Geoffrey Allan Plauché August 12, 2010 @ 8:49 am (Austrian) Economics

What you say!!! There has been a lot wailing and gnashing of teeth recently over a joint announcement by Google and Verizon of a legislative-framework proposal they’ve been working on. Now, I’ve seen this variously referred to as a backroom deal or pact, a secret treaty, or a set of regulations Google and Verizon are [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

← Previous Entries