Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Rudy Rummel reports new death-by-government figures for China: Civil War-Sino-Japanese War 1923-1949 = 3,466,000 murdered Rule over China (PRC) 1949-1987 = 76,000,000 murdered Boy, the US sure did the Chinese a big favour by "liberating" them from the Japanese and handing them over to Mao, didn't it?

How about new appliances?

I was browsing through a book on Budhhist philosophy the other day and found: "Human action has an aim. That which is aimed at is an object, i.e., that which is desired." This Misesian style of analyzing action is common in the history of philosophy -- you can find it in Aristotle, in Kant, in Augustine, in Aquinas, and, apparently, in Buddhism. It is only those indoctrinated in the scientistic philosophy trendy at the moment who find Mises's approach quirky or idiosyncratic.

British friends, today I urge you to go out and buy stuff. It doesn't matter what, just anything will do. Why? Today is marked by the crazies as Buy Nothing Day in your part of the world (and Japan). Yesterday was Buy Nothing Day in the U.S. and Canada (my neck of the woods). But don't worry, you won't be alone. I will go and buy stuff here in solidarity with you. Maybe some garbage bags, maybe a cup of tea, maybe a hat or a scarf, or this t-shirt . Hey, every day is a good day to enjoy capitalism.

In this piece I believe Ilana Mercer misunderstands the Christian approach to forgiveness. It is true that God is just. However, Jesus bore the punishment for everyone else's sins--that's why Christians say "He died for our sins." (Someone used the analogy that God is a judge whose own child comes before him in court. Because He's just, he still levies the fine, but because He loves His child, He gives the child the money to pay the fine. Just so you're not confused, in this analogy the child is us, not Jesus.) There are plenty of Biblical passages where Christians are instructed to forgive, regardless of the contrition or not of the trangressor. Also, one can forgive without "forgetting," in the sense that you could still not let a murderer babysit your kids, even though you forgave him for his previous crimes. It's particularly interesting that Ilana (we know each other--I'm not using her first name because she's a woman) took t...

I don't know how Austrian this is. I bet it probably isn't very Lionel Robbins-ish. He, after all, said "every mind is inscrutable to every other, and no common denominator of feeling is possible." If he's right, then measuring happiness is ridiculous. Maybe you think so, too. My dissertation at the LSE was on the economics of happiness. Somewhere along the way I guess I was convinced that we could measure happiness or, at least, give a 'good enough' account of it. And, since some prominent economists--especially Richard Layard who let me use a manuscript version of his book "Happiness" as I was doing research--are using happiness data to plump for more statism, I thought throwing a wrench into those works would be a good idea. A synopsis: We're (Westerners) wealthier, healthier, and more educated, but we're no happier than we were 60 years ago. People call this a paradox. They don't really bother too much about the fact that somethi...

I attended the Southern Economics Association meeting over the past weekend. There, I had a very distressing conversation with two young "Austrians." Both of them were advocating wealth maximization as the proper normative criterion for policy evaluation. This is a regression to the views of Adam Smith, and an idea that I should have thought was utterly discredited by the work Menger, Mises, Hayek, Kirzner, and Rothbard. The two problems with wealth maximization as a norm are: 1) The notion of "society's wealth" is itself incoherent. We can say how wealthy an individual is because he potentially could sell his assets on the market, and we can make a good guess as to what amount of money their sale would bring. But who is "society" going to sell its assets to? 2) It recommends any policy that increases some measure of wealth, whatever the means it employs. I have no doubt that the US could increase the material wealth available to residents by forcing u...