Tyler Cowen linked to this NYT reader poll about how to stimulate the economy. I had to stop reading after the first five. Go ahead and try it. In just two minutes you can ruin your whole day.
Invest billions of dollars to develop an interstate passenger rail system similar to the interstate highway system. This would do much to create jobs, stimulate growth in the economy and reduce our dependence on oil.
— D Harwood, Richmond, VA
LOL
Put a hefty $4 additional tax on gasoline. Split the revenues evenly between education (every citizen gets 2 years of college free, and can work off the other 2 years with public service), real investments in solar and wind energy production and light rail. What do you get? Energy conservation, a better workforce, jobs and re-investment in safe, healthy cities. It's what we should have done on 9/12/2001.
Break windows. As many of them as we can. Breaking windows should be a central feature of any sensible economic plan.
I liked this terminology, from comment #5: "assign much more money to community colleges". Assign them more money. That just takes all the coercion and injustice out of it, doesn't it?
I guess no one will read this comment since the post is 4+ days old, but I felt like posting it anyway.
Taxation is not theft: "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves." -- Romans 13 The key idea implicit here, and the one that turned me on the subject of whether or not taxation is theft, is that "every soul" owes obedience to the "governing authorities." Now, if that is a debt I truly owe , then, when those authorities levy the taxes they need to do the job of governing, I owe them those taxes, and attempts to collect them certainly do not constitute acts of theft. And obviously it doesn't matter at all, from this point of view, whether or not I "signed" any sort of "social contract." (In fact, the history of political thought since the Reformation can be read as an attempt to find a secular rep...
Never one to allow a mistake to go uncompounded by a glaring error, Bob Murphy digs in deeper . He claims that "Taking money from people against their will is not akin to getting on the treadmill; it is akin to killing people against their will." Bob has introduced a largely irrelevant criterion here with his "against their will." Let us start with killing. (No, no, not killing Bob : we still love him despite his obstinacy.) The justice of a killing does not depend at all on whether the "victim" wants to be killed. If I shoot someone who is attempting to set off a nuclear weapon in Times Square, the fact that I killed him "against his will" does not make my killing immoral. And if a friend who is in despair asks me to shoot him in the head, the fact that he wants me to kill him would not make my action moral. Similarly, in taking money from people, the crucial question is whether you are taking it justly or unjustly, not whether they wan...
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
EDITORS' SELECTIONS
ReplyDeleteInvest billions of dollars to develop an interstate passenger rail system similar to the interstate highway system. This would do much to create jobs, stimulate growth in the economy and reduce our dependence on oil.
— D Harwood, Richmond, VA
LOL
Put a hefty $4 additional tax on gasoline. Split the revenues evenly between education (every citizen gets 2 years of college free, and can work off the other 2 years with public service), real investments in solar and wind energy production and light rail. What do you get? Energy conservation, a better workforce, jobs and re-investment in safe, healthy cities. It's what we should have done on 9/12/2001.
— Nick Hayes, Milwaukee, WI
*cringe*
Put a muzzle on Ben Bernanke.
— dave, Tucson
Hey, now that's a good one!
Break windows. As many of them as we can. Breaking windows should be a central feature of any sensible economic plan.
ReplyDeleteI liked this terminology, from comment #5: "assign much more money to community colleges". Assign them more money. That just takes all the coercion and injustice out of it, doesn't it?
I guess no one will read this comment since the post is 4+ days old, but I felt like posting it anyway.