Don't listen to the crowd, they say "jump."
UPDATE (17 Apr 2014): If you maintain a spaghetti mess of a legacy codebase, my new book based on this talk will give you step-by-step instructions on how to modernize it. You can buy the book today with free updates and a money-back guarantee.
You folks who think people should find ways to defend themselves that don't involve guns -- what about little old ladies?
An 87 year old lady persuaded two armed robbers to leave her house when they broke in at 3 AM. And by âpersuadedâ I mean that she showed them the handgun she was going to shoot them with if they didnât exit the premises immediately.
Via Another robbery foiled by a little old lady - An NC Gun Blog.
Market process are unloved for many reasons.
One of them, obviously, is that market processes are not visible. Going through our everyday tasks, we fail to notice how millions of voluntary transactions resulted in precisely these goods and services being available to us when and where we want them at a price that makes them affordable. That is of course a point that Adam Smith and others made long ago, but could be made more forcefully if we understood the limits and susceptibilities of human imagination. In a powerful essay, 19th century free-trader Frédéric Bastiat noted that the economic process comprises âwhat is seenâ and âwhat is unseenâ. For instance, when a government taxes its citizens and offers a subsidy to some producers, what is seen is the money taken and the money received. What is unseen is the amount of production that would occur in the absence of such transfers.
Another plausible factor is that markets are intrinsically probabilistic and therefore marked with uncertainty. Even though it is likely that whoever makes something that others want will earn income, it is not clear who these others will be, how much they will need what you make or when you will run into them. Like other living organisms, we are loss-averse and try to minimise uncertainty. (Note, however, that market uncertainty creates a niche for market-uncertainty insurance, which itself is all the more efficient as it is driven by demand).
Finally, humans may be motivated to place their trust in processes that are (or at least seem to be) driven by agents rather than impersonal factors. This may be why there is a strong correlation between being scared of markets and being in favour of state interventions in the economy. One of the most widespread political assumptions in modern industrial societies is that âthe government should do something about xâ, where x can be any social or economic problem. Why do people trust the state? The state (in people's intuitions, not in actual fact) has all the trappings of an agent.  It is supposed to have knowledge, memories, intentions, strategies, etc. Now it may be that people are vastly more comfortable trusting an agent to provide help or impose sanctions, than they would trust an impersonal, distributed and largely invisible process. That would be mostly a question of intuitive psychology (highly salient in our reasonings about social processes) versus population thinking (highly unintuitive, difficult to acquire and engage in without sustained effort).
Read the whole thing. All emphasis mine. It occurs to me that you can replace "markets" with "evolution" and strike many of the same chords, but with a different audience. Via Why donât people like markets?.
A letter from a libertarian to his conservative friends.
My friends on the right, I find that you have failed in two ways.
The first is that you have mistaken mere wealth for market process. You praise the industrialist and the banker. Very well. Often they deserve it. But have you looked closely at the industrialists and the bankers just lately?
Among Ayn Randâs villains, I donât believe that a single one was poor. Every one of them was a member of the elite, and almost all of them were rich. They were people much like we know today, who maybe once upon a time set themselves apart through their own efforts. But at some point they committed a cardinal sin -- they reached for the state to keep themselves on top. They made bad bets, then pleaded that they were too big to fail.
...
Often the biggest enemies of the market properly understood are precisely those who have made large fortunes--and who now want the government to shield them from all further risk. They are also trying their best this election cycle to portray themselves as your friends, and as friends of the market. Youâve spent way too much time listening to them and doing their bidding.
A politician who loves the market as a moral institution would be the very last one to do any favors for individual market actors. And I do mean any favors. I mean subsidies, tax breaks, eminent domain, no-bid contracts, and all forms of regulation that keep honest competition out. I mean our intellectual property system, which if conservatives had any tactical sense theyâd already be attacking--cheap entertainment for the consumer, less cash for liberal Hollywood elites. Whatâs not to like?
* * *
And now for your second failing: The market has moral value because it is an arena of self-fashioning. But there are other arenas. They have value too, and they should be free for exactly the same reasons.
...
Consider immigrants. In particular, if our free market is so great, why do you work so hard to exclude immigrants from it? Is the immigrant laborer less a moral self-fashioner than the Wall Street banker? I wouldnât say so. Heâs clearly at least as motivated. If the immigrant wants to make a life in America -- why not let him?
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Consider our surveillance state. Mass secret data collection has grown almost unchecked over the course of the last two administrations. What chance is there for dignity, for autonomy, for self-fashioning when the government may well be spying on almost everything we do?
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Consider the Drug War. In the final analysis, itâs a war on the market process, at least for some goods. But it also appears purposefully designed to wreck individual lives and to make a mockery of the kind of self-fashioning that we so value in our defense of the market. Nothing kills self-authorship like being thrown into prison. Not business regulations, not high taxes, not even the demon weed itself.
All emphasis is mine. Via An Open Letter to My Friends on the Right | The Agitator.
Several other experiments showed that Americans link even moderate drinking with stupidity, which the professors call the âimbibing idiot biasâ.
This may be short-sighted. Another recent paper from the journal Consciousness and Cognition by psychologists at the University of Illinois confirms what many have long suspected: a couple of drinks makes workers more creative. Tipsy employees, they say, find it hard to focus on a task, but this makes them more likely to come up with innovative ideas. This may help to explain the success of Silicon Valley, one of the last workplaces in America where hard and soft drinks still jostle for space in the company fridge.
via Drinking at work: The boredom of boozeless business | The Economist.
We tend to think of the conservative influence in purely political terms: electing Ronald Reagan in 1980, picking away at Social Security, reducing taxes for the wealthy. But one of the movementâs most lasting successes has been in developing a common intellectual heritage. Any self-respecting young conservative knows the names youâre supposed to spout: Hayek, Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Albert Jay Nock. There are some older thinkers too--Edmund Burke, for instance--but for the most part the favored thinkers come out of the movementâs mid-20th century origins in opposition to Soviet communism and the New Deal.
Liberals, by contrast, have been moving in the other direction over the last half-century, abandoning the idea that ideas can be powerful political tools. This may seem like a strange statement at a moment when American universities are widely understood to be bastions of liberalism, and when liberals themselves are often derided as eggheaded elites. But there is a difference between policy smarts honed in college classrooms and the kind of intellectual conversation that keeps a movement together. What conservatives have developed is what the left used to describe as a âmovement cultureâ: a shared set of ideas and texts that bind activists together in common cause. Liberals, take note.
I think you're using the wrong verb tense.
In a Christian Science Monitor/Investor's Business Daily/TIPP poll completed last week, 40 percent of respondents generally agreed with the statement: "The US is evolving into a socialist state." That outnumbered the 36 percent who disagreed. About one-quarter of respondents expressed a neutral view or said they were unsure.
The same poll asked other questions that took America's temperature on the size of government. A majority said it should not be the government's role to redistribute wealth, and a majority said they prefer "a smaller government providing less services."
via Is America becoming a 'socialist state'? 40 percent say yes. - CSMonitor.com.
During the first half of the 20th century, Pit Bulls were the closest thing the United States had to a national dog. They were featured on U.S. recruiting posters in World Wars I and II, prominently featured as corporate mascots and cast as the ideal family dog in television and movies.
Now the breed is demonized and battles everything from a media-driven reputation for being predators, to abuse from their owners, to legislation that seeks to outlaw their existence. How did this happen to a dog that was once Americaâs sweetheart?
via What Happened to America's Dog? - Fairfax City, VA Patch.
If you consider yourself a writer of any kind in the English language, you need to read "Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell. It is a short essay that I return to time after time to correct my own poor habits. The briefest of excerpts:
I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one.
I believe in America and in Americans. I take second place to no one in love for my country. The Sikh speakers, especially the President of the temple, exceeded me in patriotism by a long shot. America is not blood, and itâs not soil. America is ideas, and the people who believe them. These were Americans. They might have been born here or far away. But once they started talking about America, the âbestâ and âsafest country in the worldâ, you could tell that they were Americans. These are not scare quotes, these are direct quotes from the speakers. Thomas Jefferson might have had a problem understanding the accents, but not the sentiments.
And now for the funny part. There must be some sort of gun enthusiast radar. I donât know if they found me or I found them, but we found each other. The guys I was sitting next to were both Sikh and gun owners. We talked about guns, and weâll be getting together sometime soon to go shooting. One of my new friends said that he was surprised that no one in the Temple shot at the intruder. He was mystified as to why there was no one with a gun available to shoot back. He assured me that it was almost certain that there were concealed carriers in the congregation. I did not go to the temple to advocate for concealed carry. I was, however, treated to a discussion of how banning guns would not change anything. I was told that criminals would get guns no matter what the laws, and that taking guns from the honest people would only make things worse. In short, it was a discussion pretty much like any that you would read on any pro-gun blog.
via I had lunch with my fellow Americans today | An NC Gun BlogAn NC Gun Blog.