In this article I offer an experiment than may satisfy those who are questioning the existence of God or would like to have intellectual artillery in such debates.#

The Experiment#

It is first noted that this experiment cannot actually be attempted with current technology and it is unlikely that it ever will be workable, but it may be interesting to think about the experiment and its potential results.#

Assume there is a simulator that can simulate the universe that is perceivable by humans. Secondly, assume this simulator can simulate humans themselves in some way, i.e. it is not defined whether they must develop inside the simulation or their DNA is uploaded.#

Now, we run this universe and monitor the humans' thoughts and speech as they develop from prehistoric man-apes.#

If they develop a polytheistic or monotheistic faith, then one could assert that since we did not install those thoughts in them they are a defense mechanism against the world. Basically, because the operators of the simulation are essentially "God" and if the operators do not inform the humans of their existence, then the humans created the notion on their own.#

However, what if they do not develop a faith for some amount of time? (And suppose the simulation can branch with each intervention and runs infinitely faster then the "real" universe, so we can run many experiments) At this point, if we must install into their brains the idea of God, or gods, then a conclusion may drawn: If God is not an idea that is natural to humans and must be implanted, then because "real" humans have a concept of God, this fact may be offered as proof that God does exist, for if not how was the idea put in the minds of "real" humans?#

Critiques#

Obviously this would not settle the question for many who would deny that its conclusions could be drawn or it could be feasibly attempted. But it also has a few theological problems:#

It offers no consolation to those who do not believe in divine intervention or those who would claim that God would exist whether anyone realized it or not. In fact, this second case would be proved in the instance that the humans did not develop the idea because the operators obviously exist.#

It has no way of protecting against the "real" God intervening in the operation of the simulation (or the structure of our universe, if you prefer) in order to skew the results one way or the other. i.e. If you believe in a God that intervenes, you can't trust the simulation. Actually, one could say that because such a simulation is impossible (by AI or physics arguments) God HAS structured the universe in such a way as to "rig" the results of the experiment.#

Conclusion#

This was an interesting thought I had on a run. I felt like sharing it. I don't think it really proves or could prove anything, but it is best explained when described in that manner.#

François-René Rideau writes in Economic Reasoning vs. Accounting Fallacies: The Case of "Public" Research of the "Myth of Public Service" and related topics.#

First off, Faré explains why he is writing on this particular topic with interesting comments on French culture:#

I am subscribed to a french-speaking mailing list about zetetics, the art of skeptical inquiry — as applied to debunking pseudo-science and superstition. And from time to time, I receive through this list messages that appal me by the economic fallacies they convey. What is most remarkable is the way that these messages are seemingly accepted with seriousness and solemnity by the other members of the list (at least among those who express their opinions), whereas my debunkings are greeted with repetitions of the fallacies, ad hominem attacks and rehashing of communist propaganda, in a general consensus. Thus, people who are proud of their critical mind, and endowed with a robust scientific training (though admittedly in France) end up defending, in irrational ways, absurd theses.

Self-interest explains part of this behavior: when economic fallacies serve to defend the funding of public research and more generally to defend the welfare state, out of which a scientist lives, believes he lives, or intends to live, it can be expected that the first reflex of said scientist be to defend his turf. Rationality comes second after self-interest — which tears down the myth of scientists and other "experts" as objective, pure minds, rather than as humans primarily move by their self-interest, like all other humans. But beyond this reflex, the ease with which these fallacies prevail, the almost complete lack of resistance to these fallacies, are the sign that something is rotten deep down in the way that opinions are made, by scientists in particular, and by the public at large.

This second paragraph contains the jewel of something I have been thinking about recently: How much does the instinct of self-preservation in general deplete progress? Just as the rent-seeker fashions himself a Statist, so will a teacher of Roman history promote the cult of the Emperors, and the Ford automobile dealer is an advocate for Ford cars. I think it can be generally stated that everyone who does something, A, for which there is not something, B, that is easily substituted will over-value the importance of A.

A way to think about this has to do with the investment in human capital, i.e. training. To become a doctor of Marxist economy, I must invest time and money. To maximize the benefit of this investment, it is in my interest to promote Marxism, whether I believe it or not and whether it is true or not. It may be best to "play the game" of Marxism and get a check, then to undergo new training.

This idea could go further and probably has been looked at before. I will offer one more thought, however. Understanding this notion will help in understanding why the advocates of mind-control target youth, and why it is nearly impossible to change the mind of a newly minted Ph.D.:

• The young have not yet invested in their particular capital, so they are open to new ideas.
• The studied have much to lose if they forsake their training.
• The old and out-of-work have less to lose, because they are out-of-work anyways, so they have the benefit of leisure or the necessity of finding a new skill.
• It is therefore curious why tenured professors would not be more apt to changing their mind, they are like the old, living on a pension. Perhaps they are seeking to maximize the return of prestige in the field they have devoted themselves to becoming noticed in, and thus are committed to it egotistically, rather than economically.

Next, Faré reveals the theme of his critique: The distinction is not between "public" and "private" research and work, but between "political" and "free" work.#

Indeed, notice that what "public" means in this context is nothing else but "managed by the state monopoly of violence", as opposed to "left for free citizens to take the responsibility of organizing it". The right term to describe the phenomenon should thus be "political" management of research, as opposed to "freedom" in research. And this freedom includes of course the freedom to choose which research to fund and which researchers to fund, as well as the freedom to decline participation in research endeavours in which one isn't interested. For the public benefits as much or more from research when the funding of research is "private", that is, done on a voluntary basis through donations and contractual exchanges between members of the public than when the funding of research is "public", that is, done on a compulsory basis, with citizens being deprived from taxes that profit to a privileged cast.

The consequences of political management of research are thus as follows: numerous research endeavours are half completed but never finalized, were never made useful for the public; other research endeavours receive titanic credit lines totally disproportionate with their utility; yet other research endeavours remain unfunded; funds are distributed through nepotism, that is, people receive credits according to their relation with committee members rather than to their achievements; researchers are isolated from each other, from manufacturers, as well as from the public; researchers are generally demotivated; the public completely loses any sense of responsibility in research, not having any influence on the allotment of funds (qualitative aspects of the distribution of funds is never the stake of an electoral ballot). Such are the inconveniences of political monopoly, and we may summarize them as: injustice, plunder, responsibility deficit, inefficiency.

He explains that this central fallacy and its supporting fallacies can be resolved when one moves beyond accounting calculation to economic calculation, particularly to acknowledging the existence of opportunity costs of government-managed research. And this conclusion clearly follows:#

In conclusion, we will recall that public research is always done at the expense of other, private, spendings. And this other spendings, by definition, would have had more benefits in the very opinion of those people who had to be forced to contribute against their will to the political intervention. Political intervention, far from being useful to research, is deeply harmful to it. In the domain of research as everywhere else, the best civil services are private services, are more exactly, free services traded on a voluntary basis, as opposed to compulsory services imposed by the coercive ways of political intervention.

Another argument that Faré resolves is whether the government-managed monopoly of research would be more or less conducive to sharing of research information with the public:#

Another argument of the monopolist was the sharing of results: according to him, public research would allow to share results between everyone, whereas private research would lead to a partitioning of knowledge. As usual, this argument is based on a lot of confusions, that we'll have to unmangle before we can debunk it.

To begin with, let's assume a complete public monopoly on research, as the statists longs for. In such a case of monopoly, would knowledge really be shared? Such an affirmation stems directly from statist mysticism: The "public" nature of research is worshipped, which in actuality means that it be in the hands of politicians, on the ground that these politicians are meant to act in the name of the people, of God, or any other official reason, dogmatically accepted as legitimate. 19. Now, with a monopoly on research, by definition of a monopoly, the monopolists are the only ones who are entitled to use the monopolized knowledge for further research. Those who would try to use these informations outside of the monopoly would have no public funding, but instead endless judicial and administrative trouble if they were to try and find private funding for such research; they are forbidden to do their research but on their own, funding themselves with a day job, being relegated to the fringe of amateur work on projects that require very little capital investment. In fact, "the people" is more effectively excluded from research with a public monopoly than with a private monopoly.

I think this question, and its answer, aptly summarize the attack on public research and public funding in general: Would people freely consent to this, or not?#

To determine whether a person is verily an exploiter or an exploitee, we should ask one question: Would this person be payed as much or more by freely consenting people to whom this person would render the same kind of services? If the answer is "no", then this person is a political exploiter. If the answer is "yes", then this person is being exploited. Thus, without the government monoply on agriculture, most of the "civil servant" working in North-Korean sovkhozes would still be farmers and would make a better living; and in North Korea, were everybody is a "civil servant", the huge majority is made of slaves owned by the Communist Party. Without government monopoly on research, the researchers in public laboratories would also for the most part still be researchers, and they would be able to fulfill their calling while getting a better paycheck.

Roderick T. Long explains an ancient Greek model of government in The Athenian Constitution: Government by Jury and Referendum.#

Those engaged in the project of designing a constitution for a new libertarian nation can learn from the example of previous free or semi-free nations. In previous issues of Formulations we have accordingly surveyed sample constitutions ranging from the mediæval Icelandic system of competing assemblies to the U. S. Articles of Confederation. One example that is not often considered when libertarians discuss constitutional design is ancient Athens.

In a way this is not surprising. Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC is famous for being the purest, most extreme form of democracy in human history. Most libertarians get understandably nervous at the thought of unlimited majority rule. Moreover, the leading thinkers of the classical liberal tradition, from Montesquieu and Madison to Isabel Paterson, learned their Greek history from upper-class writers like Thucydides and Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle, Polybius and Plutarch, and absorbed from them their bias against the democratic institutions of Athens.

He reveals that the Athenian idea of democracy is very different than that of the United States:#

But to the Athenians, democracy (demo-kratia, "rule by the people") meant something quite specific, and importantly different from the political system of any nation today. Athenians would have guffawed at the notion of calling the United States, for example, a democracy; by their standards it would have been a moderate oligarchy. What, then, was Athens' democratic constitution, and how can we learn from it?

Legislative#

The Legislative Branch was made up of two Houses, the upper and smaller of the two was composed by a random drawing of the lower. Furthermore, the president of this Council was changed every twenty-four hours in the fashion of a rotation.

Proposals to replace sortition with election were always condemned as moves in the direction of oligarchy.

Why? Well, as the Athenians saw it, under an electoral system no one can obtain political office unless he is already famous: this gives prominent politicians an unfair advantage over the average person. Elections, they thought, favor those wealthy enough to bribe the voters, powerful enough to intimidate the voters, flashy enough to impress the voters, or clever enough to deceive the voters.

Judicial#

The Judicial Branch was a sequence of private or public Arbitration, followed by large (401, 501, or 1001 member), random, volunteer Jury Courts that had no presiding judge, and had the power of judicial review of the legislature.

Potential jurors swore the following oath: "I will cast my vote in accordance with the laws and decrees passed by the Assembly and Council. On any point where the law is silent I will give judgment in accordance with my sense of what is most just, without favor or enmity. I will vote only on the matters raised in the charge, and I will listen impartially to accusers and defenders alike." However, jurors could not be penalized for their vote — unless it could be shown that they had accepted bribes; but the practice of selecting juries randomly on the morning of the trial made bribery difficult, and the sheer size of juries limited the effectiveness of bribery in any case.

Many ancient observers considered that the Jury Courts, rather than the Council or Assembly, were the true governing powers in Athens. For one thing, the Jury Courts had the power of judicial review. The opportunity to exercise this power came when a politicians was prosecuted for having proposed an unconstitutional law or decree in the Assembly. A politician could be prosecuted whether his proposal had passed or not; but if it had indeed been enacted into law, and the proposer was found guilty, the law was automatically repealed. The juries made frequent use of this power: "The Supreme Court of the United States has had the power to test and overthrow Congressional Acts since 1803. In the period 1803—1986 that power was used 135 times: our sources show that at Athens that figure was nearly reached in two decades, let alone two centuries." (Hansen (1991), p. 209.) Thus, a few hundred ordinary citizens could strike down, as unconstitutional, legislation enacted by an Assembly of 6000 people. The notion that Athenian democracy meant the unrestrained tyranny of the majority is clearly a myth. (The Athenian system also allowed for a second kind of judicial review, to be discussed below.)

Prof. Long comments that Jury Courts did not recognize official precedent. He includes comments about whether this was good or bad. My suggestion is that because the juries could decide based on whatever metric they desired, a juror could remind his fellow jurors of a previous case or vote based on that knowledge himself. Thus common law can be alive, as long as it lives in the people.

Further structure was the Areopagos, which was like an advanced jury court that was highly respected and membership was permanent once chosen by lot. Lastly, laws themselves could be put on trial by the legislative branch to be struck down by the Jury Courts. (Because recall that the legislative branch could not single handled remove laws.)

Executive#

Magistrates, who performed the day-to-day operations of the government, were also chosen at random and reviewed by the Assembly. Some, however, were elected by vote--namely the Generals of armed forces, who needed certain skills.

Notable is that Athens had no law enforcement mechanisms:

Law enforcement was not one of the services offered by the Athenian state. Athens had no actual police force; the nearest equivalent was a few hundred guards — slaves owned by the state — but their main task was keeping order at public meetings. The notion of an elite enforcement corps, with broader authority than the average citizen, would have been anathema to the Athenians. "No classical state ever established a sufficient governmental machinery by which to secure the appearance of a defendant in court or the execution of a judgment in private suits. Reliance on self-help was therefore compulsory ...." (Finley (1994), p. 107.) Victims had to rely on friends and relatives to enforce judicial decisions; if these lacked sufficient force, it might be necessary to appeal to a powerful patron, though the role of patronage in law enforcement never reached the level of formalization that we find in, for example, mediæval Iceland. (Still, in light of this recourse to private law enforcement, it's debatable whether Athens really counts as a state.)

Other Institutions#

Ostracism:

One of the safeguards they adopted was formal ostracism. This allowed the Athenian people as a whole to vote for the expulsion from the city of any citizen they chose, for a period of ten years. Unlike exile, ostracism was not a penalty for a crime; also unlike exile, it was applied only to the prominent and powerful — those that the people feared might be positioning themselves for a coup. The procedure was that someone would propose to hold an ostracism, the Assembly would vote on it, and if the proposal won then an ostracism would be scheduled. On the day of the ostracism, every adult male citizen could turn in a ticket (literally a potsherd, ostrakon, whence the name) inscribed with the name of the person they thought Athens could best do without, and the person whose name got the most votes had to leave the city for ten years.

Critics of Athenian Democracy#

Ancient:

One charge brought by some of the more extreme critics of Athenian democracy, like Plato in the Republic, or the anonymous author called the "Old Oligarch," was that under democracy there was too much freedom. People made their own choices and lived as they pleased, without being directed and supervised by the state; and they showed insufficient deference to their social superiors. Of course, the fact that Athenian democracy attracted this sort of comment is precisely why libertarians should take it seriously as a model!

There is an interesting discussion of how ancient critics dealt with the issue of balancing the interests of the wealthy and the poor. Prof. Long resolves that the Greek system of patronage was the most effective part of the constitution of the society. His comments are necessary in full.

Modern:

Athens has its modern critics also. One common criticism of the Athenian system of direct democracy is that such a high level of participation requires a great deal of leisure, and that the citizens enjoyed this leisure only because they could rely on the unpaid labor of women and slaves. Thus, it is claimed, the Athenian political system inherently requires involuntary servitude as its economic base. By contrast, in a representative system, the level of participation demanded is lower, and so citizens do not have to spend all their time discussing politics; they can work for a living, and so do not have to depend on exploiting the labor of a large class without political rights.

I think this objection is mistaken. It is certainly true that in Athens, as in other Greek states, women and slaves were excluded from the benefits of democratic rights. But this was not essential to the system. The amount of leisure that the Athenian system required has been grossly exaggerated. Most Athenians worked for a living. The heaviest labor was performed not only by slaves but also by Menials, who were generally too poor to own slaves; to the Menials, the notion of Athenians as a bunch of leisured gentlemen relying on the labor of slaves would have seemed a bad joke. The Yokemen did ordinarily have slaves, but they themselves worked too, as farmers or tradesmen, often right alongside their slaves. The only class of which the "leisure" stereotype is at all true is the Horsemen, and they were a minority of the Athenian population. There was no significant conflict between political participation and earning a living. Serving as a Councillor or Magistrate was a temporary position; the Assembly met infrequently, and most people attended only occasionally anyway; and the judiciary was manned primarily by retirees. So the Athenian system would not have been noticeably hampered if slavery and sexual inequality had been banished.

What Can We Learn From Athens?#

Today we call the United States a democracy. But the Athenians would have called it an oligarchy — or at best a Mixed Constitution. They would have seen our reliance on an electoral system as reinforcing the power of a wealthy, privileged elite whose manipulation of the media and restrictions on ballot access ensure continued success at the polls. The notion that America is run by majority rule is one the Athenians would have found ludicrous; they would have seen that America is run by a tiny minority consisting of public officials and the wealthy interests that support them.

Libertarians are fond of echoing the conservatives' dictum that America's founders wanted a republic, not a democracy. What we mean when we say this is that they wanted a system in which neither the majority nor the minority could run roughshod over the other, rather than a system that simply empowers the majority. To that extent, they were right. But for the founding fathers, or many of them, this translated into a preference for a constitution based more on the Roman model than on the Athenian; and this last preference may well have been the fatal error that opened the door to an American Leviathan.

Footnotes#

This footnote on Roman names is appalling:

3 Roman men had names like our own — a first name peculiar to oneself, and a last name representing one's family. (Sometimes a nickname, either of the individual or of the family, was added as a third name.) But women had only a last name — their father's family name — but no personal name. So, for example, if a man was named Marcus Sempronius, his son might be named Gaius Sempronius or Lucius Sempronius or Titus Sempronius, but his daughter would simply be named Sempronia (the feminine version of Sempronius). If he had several daughters, they would all be named Sempronia. Parents told their daughters apart by numbering them; for example, the fourth daughter of Marcus Sempronius would be named Sempronia Four. The position of Athenian women was nothing to brag about, but at least Greek women were regarded as having enough of an independent identity to be worthy of having names. (Nor were their husbands authorized to execute them.)

Newmark links to Daniel Gross explaining Earl Thompson and Jonathan Treussard's explanation of the Dutch Tulip "Bubble."#

The news of these discussions began to filter out into the market in November 1636. Now, when it becomes clear that a contract is to be transformed into an option—the ability to buy something rather than the responsibility to do so—you would expect prices to rise. Why? If the investors in existing future contracts were only going to have to pay a small percentage of the contract price in the end—as was becoming apparent—then tulip planters would have to jack up contract prices significantly in order to recover sums that reflected the spot market prices. And people would be willing to pay the higher prices.

Why? In the worst-case scenario, investors would lose 3 percent of the price of the contract. In the best case, prices would rise above the strike price, and they could make an instant profit while assuming the minimal 3 percent risk.

So, the market exploded. In November 1636, when the burgomasters' plans to screw the tulip planters took effect, traders began to process the impending changes into their thinking. By late November 1636, "buyers had already begun treating the contract prices as option strike prices set at around 10 times the actual prices." As a result, "contract prices soared to reflect the expectation that the contract price was now a call-option exercise, or strike price rather than a price committed to be paid for future bulbs." By February, the price had risen 20 times. "That's what caused the tulipmania," says Thompson.

Edward Feser writes in The Trouble with Libertarianism about differences amongst libertarians.#

This difference in the understanding of freedom has its parallel in a difference in what we might call the tone in which various libertarians assert the right of self-ownership. In the mouth of some libertarians, what self-ownership is fundamentally about is something like this: "Other human beings have an intrinsic dignity and moral value, and this entails a duty on my part not to use them as means to my own ends; I therefore have no right to the fruits of another man's labor." In the mouths of other libertarians, what it means is, at bottom, rather this: "I can do whatever what I want to do, as long as I let everyone else do what they want to do too; there are no grounds for preventing any of us from doing, in general, what we want to do." The first view expresses an attitude of deference, the second an attitude of self-assertion; the first reflects a commitment to strong moral realism and a rich conception of human nature, the second a thin conception of human nature and a tendency toward moral minimalism or even moral skepticism. And the first, I would submit, is more characteristic of libertarians of a Lockean, Hayekian, or Aristotelian bent, while the latter is more typical of libertarians influenced by contractarianism, utilitarianism, or "economism."

It is sometimes said that contemporary conservatism is an uneasy alliance between libertarians and traditionalists, and that this alliance is destined eventually to collapse due to the inherent conflict between the two philosophies. But it can with equal or even greater plausibility be argued that it is in fact contemporary libertarianism which comprises an uneasy alliance, an association between incompatible factions committed to very different conceptions of freedom. The trouble with libertarianism is that many of its adherents have for too long labored under the illusion that things are otherwise, that their creed is a single unified political philosophy that does not, and need not, take a stand on the most contentious moral issues dividing contemporary society. This has led to confusion both at the level of theory and at the level of policy. Libertarians need to get clear about exactly what they believe and why. And when they do, they might find that their particular version of libertarianism commits them - or ought to commit them - to regard as rivals those they might once have considered allies.

Dave Kopel's 59 Deceits of Fahrenheit 9/11#

Local Roger reviews John Taylor Gatto's book The Underground History of American Education.#

Local Roger goes a bit wacky with his anti-capitalism, which is very strange because the problem of universal debilitating schooling is a creation not of liberty-minded capitalists but the variants of socialist utopians.

The review is interesting and reminded me of this book I'd like to read.

Nathaniel Branden writes in The Objectivist Ethics in an Information Age Economy about the growing importance of intelligence.#

In an agricultural economy, wealth is identified with land. In a manufacturing economy, wealth is identified with the ability to make things: capital assets and equipment, machines and the various materials used in industrial production. In either of these societies, wealth is understood in terms of matter, not mind; physical assets, not knowledge and information.

In a manufacturing society, intelligence is the guiding force behind economic progress, to be sure, but when people think of wealth, they think of material such as nickel and copper, and physical property such as steel mills and textile looms.

Wealth is created by transforming the materials of nature to serve human purposes. If all wealth is the product of mind and labor, of thought directing action, then one way to understand the transition from an agricultural to a manufacturing economy is that the balance between mental and physical effort is profoundly altered. Labor began to move along a declining arc of importance while mind began to climb.

The climax of this process of development is the emergence of an information economy in which material resources count for less and less, and knowledge and new ideas count for almost everything.

François-René Rideau offers a dialogue on false dichotomies, mental illness, and magic wands.#

What if none of those forceless methods can change anything?

Well, since forceful methods won't help either, then there's nothing to care about. Move on to another problem.

But isn't that a worrisome problem still?

If nothing can be done, it's not a problem.

But still the results are awful!

If nothing can be done, then it can be neither evil, nor can it be good -- it is a reality that you better accept, for it is going to be there whether you accept it or not. Accept it. Breathe deeply. Now it's over. -- So move your focus and intelligence to some topic where it can actually serve instead of wasting this most precious resource of yours where it's useless.

So you're going to do nothing about it?

Listen, is doing anything going to change the outcome? Well, if it does, or even if it might, then the outcome is not a fact, and it's an altogether different problem, where we are to reject the hypothesis that nothing can be done, that you were making a few seconds ago.

OK. So do you think there is anything at all that can be done, and if so what?

As you might have noticed, since the beginning of this discussion, I've been explaining why your initial question was a false dichotomy, and why it was a mental illness to base decisions upon false dichotomies. That choice you considered was not a relevant choice ever to be made by anyone, and is being used as a cover up to pick evil alternatives in actual decisions that are actually being made; it is a lure used by frauds and their accomplice victims to disguise real issues under a veil of deception. What I have been doing is verily the rational therapy that I've been talking about: making people realize about this mental illness, so they can begin to do something about it and reform their emotions.

Nathanael Schärli, Stéphane Ducasse, Oscar Nierstrasz and Andrew Black write in Traits: Composable Units of Behavior (PDF) on a new method of composition in object-oriented programming.#

This paper introduces traits, a simple compositional model for building and structuring object-oriented programs. Traits are composed using a set of operators—symmetric combination, exclusion, and aliasing—that are carefully designed so that they allow a fair amount of composition flexibility without being subject to the problems and limitations that we have identified for mixins and multiple inheritance.

Thanks to the favorable composition properties, traits are an ideal extension for single inheritance languages. Traits are completely downwards compatible and do not require modifying or extending the method syntax of the underlying language. Furthermore, the flattening property guarantees optimal understandability of the resulting code, because it is always possible to both view and edit the code as if it were written using single-inheritance.

Luke Gorrie links to Connection Machine Lisp (PDF) by Guy Steele Jr. about a variant of Lisp for parallel programming.#

During the reading of this paper by eyes were toyed with beyond compare. I have a new appreciation of modern typography.

Don Boudreaux write about the dark linings on silver clouds.#

This interview is evidence that bright people can find the downside of any piece of good fortune — but that the same bright people do not necessarily possess the wisdom to weigh the downside properly against the upside. It's as if a very ill child was completely cured by a talented physician, and the parents of the child, admittedly grateful, focused their discussion on the fact that now their little one will grow into adulthood and have to pay bills, suffer heartbreak in love, find a job, and encounter the many trials and tribulations that every adult endures. These are downsides, to be sure, but they hardly count against the blessing of seeing your child saved from death.

The Machinist#

Robert Lawson critiques some of Tyler Cowen's points on Marxism.#

5. A growing division of labor can make some people unhappier at their jobs.

My take: More talk of happiness? Sure Marx talked about "alienation" from your labour (note the spelling!) but he meant it in the literal sense that a worker doing minute, specialized tasks is far removed from understanding or appreciating was he is doing. That is, the final product being produced is quite alien to the worker in an economy with specialization. I don't believe Marx used the term "alienation" to mean unhappy though many people read it this way.

Even so, Smith appreciated this point at least as well as Marx.

Andrew Moroz points out that the Soviet currency is the "dinar."#

Michael Williams asks about linking style. I prefer linking to the actor, the institution, or the effort in that order. For example, if someone writes something on their blog I link their name. If it is an article in some paper, I will link their name to their site/blog and the name of the paper or the name of the article to the actual article. I only link the organization if I think it would unfamiliar to the average reader.#

Robert Lawson quotes "God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat."#