Avoid Weather Blasphemy!

By -
This morning, with a temperature of 41 degrees at 5:30, I heard a guy at the gas station in PA saying, "Summer better come soon: I can't take this shit much longer!"

My friend Clayon Gordon, the reggae sage, corrected this attitude perfectly: Whenever he heard such belly-aching, he would say, "Well, since I can't create any weather, I don't feel I'm in a position to criticize any of it."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights

By -
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...
Read more

If Fractional Reserve Banking Is Fraudulent, Then So Is...

By -
In this paper , Hoppe, Hülsmann, and Block (HHB) make their ethical case against fractional reserve banking (FRB) based on the fact that "two individual owners cannot be the exclusive owner of one and the same thing at the same time." They then posit that since fractional reserve bank notes creates multiple titles or claims to the "same" gold, they are inherently fraudulent. In analyzing this claim, the first thing we will have to do is to turn it into a remotely sensible claim. No one who deposits money at a bank thinks they are entitled to the same money back. What they want, when they go to get their money out, is the same amount of money back. What a gold-backed  fractional reserve note comprises is a claim to a certain amount of gold, not certain particular pieces of gold. I hope that change to their argument is uncontroversial! So their complaint comes down to this: if a bank issues pieces of paper that allow the bearer to claim a certain amount of gold...
Read more