Classic Crockett
"[A]rtificial [gas] price caps will work no better now than they did in the 1970s. They won't get petroleum refined faster. They won't reduce motorists' demand for gasoline. All they will create is shortages--the one thing price controls always bring in their wake." -- Jeff Jacobyand:
"Big announcement today from FEMA. They say they believe a big hurricane has hit New Orleans. They can't confirm it." -- Jay Leno
# The Onion - Halliburton Gets Contract To Pry Gold Fillings From New Orleans Corpses' Teeth - satire, but it wouldn't surprise me to read this as truth. [cafe]
# September 19, next Monday, is Talk Like a Pirate Day - If you need help in typing up your blog posts on that day, you could get a Pirate Keyboard. Avast! Rrrr! [pournelle]
# Edward S. Ellis at LewRockwell.com - Davy Crockett vs. Welfare - a clasic excerpt from Mr. Ellis' The Life of Colonel David Crockett. How Mr. Crockett became aware of the fact that the U.S. Congress has no power to give charity. And guess what, nothing has changed since his day. They still have no authority to give charity, to anybody, for any reason, though they give billions of dollars of it every year. [lew]
# Lee Harris at Tech Central Station - The Iron Law of Oligarchy, Revisited - a reminder of the facts presented by Robert Michels, a German sociologist, in his book, On the Sociology of Political Parties in Modern Democracies. [alisvoice]
"The fundamental sociological law of political parties (the term 'political' being here used in its most comprehensive sense) may be formulated in the following terms: 'It is organization which gives birth to the domination of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy.'"
# Butler Shaffer at LewRockwell.com - The Market and the State - the invisible hand works better than the iron hand of the state, but don't confuse a true free market with the government-supported corporation. [lew]
One of the most dangerous assumptions to infect the human mind has been the idea that people can act out of any motivation other than the pursuit of their self-interests. To war against self-interest is to war against the nature of life itself. There is no action you or I can take that is not driven by self-interest.
Neither the state nor the marketplace has a monopoly on wisdom, efficacy, or motivation. People can be well- or ill-motivated in either sector. The primary distinction between a political system, and a non-political, free-market system, is whether some people will be allowed to use violence against others to achieve their desired ends. By definition, the marketplace eschews coercive means; by its nature, the state is organized force.
But having said that is not to confine the scope of one's self-interested pursuits. If individuals or groups want to accomplish some objective, they are free to organize themselves and their resources to do so. The spontaneous efforts of millions of people to part with their own money or other property to help flood victims exemplified self-interested motivations. One who wishes to understand why this is so need look no further than the Austrian school of economics. Mises expressed the point so clearly: people act out of a desire to be better off after acting than they were before.
