“Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Category Archives: Thought for the Day
Thought for the Day: 22 March 2013
Via Charles Pierce:
[The United States] has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
John Quincy Adams, 1821
Thought for the Day: 19 March 2013
Metaphors for the role of government spending under current economic conditions and for the long haul:
- Put out the fire.
- Once the fire is out then worry about the resulting water damage to the structure.
- Also remember that permanently flooding the structure isn’t a good long-term solution.
- Lower the unemployment rate. Get people back to work. Contemporary macroeconomics tells us that this will require changes to government fiscal policy, i.e., enacting some Keynesian stimulus.
- Worry about the deficit after we’re back to full employment (or at least close to it) and the economy is healthy again.
- Letting the debt be an ever increasing fraction of the GDP would not be good. However, that’s a long term issue. We have a near term problem which needs to be dealt with first – see Item 1.
Thought for the Day: 18 March 2013
“A paranoid is a man with all the facts at his disposal.”
– William S. Burroughs
Thought for the Day: 8 March 2013
In general, when I embark on an understanding-and-critique task, I find myself in one of four situations. Sometimes the people I am reading are not as smart as I am and have not done their homework: they are my lawful prey. Sometimes the people are smarter than I am but have not done their homework: I critique them by doing yet more homework. Sometimes the people have done their homework but are not as smart as I am: I critique them by working hard to be smart. And sometimes the people are smarter than I am and [have] done their homework. Then I have a very hard task indeed…
On the value of reading literature
David Toscana is from Mexico and writes about what he sees there. It doesn’t take much imagination to apply his observations to our society:
Earlier this week, I spotted, among the job listings in the newspaper Reforma, an ad from a restaurant in Mexico City looking to hire dishwashers. The requirement: a secondary school diploma.
Years ago, school was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline, study. Teachers were respected figures… schools aimed to offer a more dignified life.
Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago.
Thought for the Day: 1 March 2013
Brad DeLong had a recent post, American Conservatism’s Crisis of Ideas. Two comments on it caught my attention:
…a consistent libertarian would denounce the phrase “will of the people”, “free” or otherwise, as an invocation of a Rousseauian collectivist concept. The libertarian would counterpose to this the wills of “free individuals” as the only reality to be reckoned with, and declare that any social insurance scheme by its collectivist nature cannot possibly reflect the will of anybody real, and is therefore only the project of those individuals whose own will is to exploit the needs of others to foster a dependency upon these selfsame individuals in pursuit of their own self-aggrandizement, an egoism the libertarian understands perfectly well.
and
Thought for the Day: 26 February 2013
“The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.”
– Aldo Leopold
Thought for the Day: 24 February 2013
Via Paul Krugman:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
(I once used the first half of that sentence in responding to a reviewer’s criticism of one of my papers. Fortunately, the journal editor had a sense of humor.)
Thought for the Day: 17 February 2013
“Dans les champs de l’observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés.”
[In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.]
– Louis Pasteur