The Competitive Enterprise Institute honored science writer Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist and other works, with an award. Ridley honored us with a great talk:
2012 Julian L. Simon Memorial Award Dinner from CEI Video on Vimeo.
Category: video
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Video: Gas Prices
Earlier this week I touched on gasoline prices. One factor I didn’t mention (but which is getting a lot of coverage, now) is the weakening dollar. This humorous video points the finger at “The Bernanke”:
I am not certain about the argument here, though. So I look around for alternatives views. It turns out that David Henderson made the almost same argument as I did: saber rattling is a major factor in the world price of oil, and earlier on EconLog he argued against the inflationary explanation of today’s rising gas prices. (But Henderson assumes that inflation is an equilibrium price phenomenon. As I understand it, the Misesian view of inflation is that the price-upward pressure of inflationary monetary policy proceeds with a lag, and initial price rises tend to be sectoral, so we might expect some markets to be affected by new money first. Like housing was in the last bubble, like stocks are in most bubbles, like . . . gas?)
I am sure of one thing: There is going to be a lot more talk on this subject. I hope some of it is as amusing as the above cartoon.
One of the things I do is promote the initiative and referendum process. Have you noticed? Well, that means traveling around the country and speaking before groups of people interested in making the world a freer, better place. Recently I spoke at “Liberty On the Rocks” in Denver:
Ari Armstrong asked some great questions — questions I think that would come to most thoughtful people’s minds, when contemplating direct action via the ballot.
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Video: Nuclear Detonation Timeline
This is mesmerizing, and perhaps more than a bit unsettling:
There’s a lot of interesting talk here at “The Devil’s Advocate”:
You can’t free up society all on your lonesome:
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Video: The Broken Window Fallacy
The biggest issue of our time, swept under the rug:
In my Townhall column today – The fickle finger of fairness? – I took President Obama at his word: “No bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts.” But as seen in this week’s video, below, others (like ABC’s Jake Tapper) think Obama is practicing class warfare to distract from all his landmark legislative achievements – which are so incredibly unpopular one might question the use of the word “achievement.”
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George Orwell 1984
On this day sixty-two years ago, George Orwell passed away, soon after the publication of his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, an ugly glimpse at a dystopian future where the world is run by totalitarian regimes.
At the end of the novel, the torturer O’Brien tells Smith that, “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.” O’Brien goes on to argue that “the individual is only a cell, Winston, and the weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism.”
“You’ll fail,” Winston responds. “Something will defeat you. . . . some spirit . . . the spirit of man.”
In Orwell’s book, the spirit of man is defeated, destroyed. Thankfully, in our lives, we can write our own ending.
“The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”—George Orwell, Letter to Malcolm Muggeridge (4 December 1948), quoted in Malcolm Muggeridge: A Life (1980) by Ian Hunter