Wednesday, March 27, 2013

"The Invisible Bitch-Slap"

It's like "the invisible hand," but instead it's when you piss off the forces of economics and reality decides to punish you for your stupidity.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

The anti-austerity people induce the lulz in me, especially when I keep hearing that a lot of the cuts they complain about were barely cuts at all.

Stop QE, and start looking at both the private and public debt a bit more. Scrap Social Security altogether and let people decide how they would like to invest for their retirement and keep a minimum social safety net for pragmatic reasons. If politicians want to focus so much on education and spend money on that, then turn it into the RIGHT investment with STEM program funding and optimizing NASA in some way. Get science, economics and math back into the conscious of the general public and I think you'll solve a lot of other problems, even the divide between the Democrat Party and the GOP on social issues. Also make the public school curriculum more rigorous and focused on Greek, Roman, and Western culture.

Matthew Walker said...

My parents have had roomates ever since a week after she graduated college and he moved out of the BOQ. It's called "marriage". It's not normal in human history for people to live by themselves in their thirties. Extended families used to live in one house.

Anonymous said...

Read your spot with Roosh and as a libertarian I disagree here;

3. In my review of your book, there were many critical comments about libertarianism (I remember one saying that libertarians should move to Somalia). Why do you think there is such a knee-jerk reaction to this ideology?

You got me. The libertarian ideology is what America was founded on. Both SOCIAL and ECONOMIC freedom. You leave me alone, let me practice whatever religion, marry who I want, smoke whatever I want, and let me keep the vast majority of the fruits of my labor – as long as I’m not hurting anybody, it’s all good. How you can argue against a system like that, I don’t know because it is the most adult and successful political model ever devised. I believe it is either people who are too lazy to read up on basic libertarianism or libertarians themselves who speak poorly and give the rest of us a bad reputation.
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"The libertarian ideology is what America was founded on."

It was founded on colonialism, genocide, war, and slave labor.

"Both SOCIAL and ECONOMIC freedom."

Freedom for who exactly?


"You leave me alone, let me practice whatever religion"

Missionaries worked hand in hand with the American established from the get-go to "civilize the native savages" a huge part of which was to convert them to Christianity, even separating children from parents in order to do so.

"let me keep the vast majority of the fruits of my labor"

Even the "founding fathers" didn't want to labor or pay people to labor for them and that's why they kept slaves.

I think its time we libertarians stop parroting the nonsensical myths of the trad-cons, neo-cons, republicans and democrats.

This nation was never like how you or they imagined it and that is PRECISELY WHY libertarianism is so misunderstood, unappreciated and rejected here: it is totally alien.

The only time it resembled libertarianism was when it was all "savage natives" BEFORE even one European or Englishman stepped foot here.

Now, I do think there is hope for the future but lets not delude ourselves about the past.

Anonymous said...

"Stop QE, and start looking at both the private and public debt a bit more. Scrap Social Security ..."

In addition all US military bases in the hundreds of global outposts should be shut down, and all our troops brought home.

All non-violent drug offenders should be released from prison and our Prison Industrial Complex cut in half. That means close 50% of the prisons in this country.

The US has the largest prison system in the world - larger than all of Europe combined!

You mean we have THAT many criminals? Nonsense.

End the war on drugs.

End all US wars completely.

Family courts should be dismantled because most of the time they are used for nothing more than extracting money from fathers who are already broke. All fathers in jail currently for not paying child support should be released.

Child support by legal obligation should be abolished though voluntary child support should be rewarded.



Cut the police in half - at least.

Traffic cops should be nixed in toto. They are the biggest glaring government largesse parasites preying upon American citizens for driving a mere 10 miles over the speed limit.

If we did all this we could even keep social security.

Anonymous said...

"Get science, economics and math back into the conscious of the general public ... Also make the public school curriculum more rigorous and focused on Greek, Roman, and Western culture."

Agree about science and math. Greek, Roman and Western civilizations can be studied in conjuction with other World Civilizations.

We are living at a time when Asia is, if not returning to its former prominance, surpassing it.

Plus, the Romans borrowed from the Greeks who borrowed from the Egyptians who borrowed from the South Asians who lived as a "sister civilization" to the East Asians.

The study of the Silk and Spice Routes are not only a must but very interesting.



Eric S. Mueller said...

When I look at the policies and rhetoric of "the elite", I have to wonder if this is deliberate, or are they really that stupid?

It's probably a form of what I call intellectual inbreeding. They're so focused around a core ideology, and won't allow new information or data in. What happens to their intellect is what happens to genetics in a family where cousins keep marrying each other.

That's what I think of whenever I read whatever Krugman said last. A couple weeks ago, he said we could safely hit 200% debt to GDP and still be able to stimulate economic growth.

One thing I've heard in several different areas of study is that the conservatives have to read the liberals, but the liberals will not read the conservatives. I doubt Krugman has ever read Rothbard.

Anonymous said...

Here's an article that may interest you:

http://www.bigpondmoney.com.au/inactive-bank-accounts-raided

The Australian government is raiding 'inactive' bank accounts faster than ever.

Not sure if Canada/USA have this, but in Australia if your bank account has no activity (fees and interest don't count) then the government used to seize them after 7 years.

Our incompetent female Prime Minister, who has run the country into the ground with handouts, needed a way to make the budget look better before the next election, so she made it so the government can raid these accounts after only 3 years!

They estimate it'll reap about $750 million.

This from a woman who believes that the careers of foreign women are worth more than the health of the men in her own country:

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/pm-gets-lift-on-way-to-raise-status-of-women-20120829-2512n.html

I think the picture in the article says it all about modern Australia: women being held up on pedestals on the way to handing out money made mostly by men to aid women in their careers!