Reverie

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. -Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900) 

Re. the size distribution of income and wealth. This knowledge serves no good purpose; it is wholly unnecessary for defensible government policy or action. It serves only as fuel for economic misunderstanding and demagoguery. It feeds envy and provokes public mischief. If such knowledge were completely unknown, no decent project would be harmed, and a multitude of destructive policies and actions would be rendered more difficult to initiate or carry out.--Higgs

Today, the top 1 percent of taxpayers, who earn just under 20 percent of total individual income, also pay just under 40 percent of all individual income taxes. So ironically, redistribution programs depend on continued successes at the top.


Who is....the Denisovan?

The foreign-born vote overwhelmingly, by about 80 percent, for Democrats. They always have and they always will -- especially now that our immigration policies aggressively discriminate in favor of the poorest, least-educated, most unskilled people on Earth. They arrive in need of a LOT of government services.
According to the Pew Research Center, 75 percent of Hispanic immigrants and 55 percent of Asian immigrants support bigger government, compared to just over 40 percent of the general public. Even third-generation Hispanics support bigger government by 58 percent.--from an article by Coulter

Corporate taxes might be a subtle economic test for the economic intelligence of the community. It is a disguised tax, a tax on all consumers but appears to be a tax on the abstract corporation. The higher the tax the culture allows, the less the culture must understand it.




Law enforcement officials and medical professionals say counterfeit opioid pills “have been flooding the illicit drug market and have been sickening — and killing — those who are seeking out powerful prescription drugs amid a worsening national opioid crisis.” According to the Post, there is “widespread fear that users who believe the prescription drugs are safe — because they are quality-controlled products of a regulated industry — could now unwittingly end up ingesting potent cocktails of unknown substances.”




One interesting question in the development of the New World was the success of the Dutch and the failure of Spain. Spain had the resources of the Americas with tons of gold and silver, the Netherlands was under Spanish control--and usually under water. Yet the Dutch revolted, threw off Spanish control and became the major New World explorer while the Spanish slowly declined. How did that happen? The Dutch invented efficient credit and used capital. The Spanish sank their incredible wealth into war. The essence seems to be the difference between capital and wealth, expansion and stasis, exploration and defense.




"The most important fact to understand about the economics of communism is that communist revolutions triumphed only in heavily agricultural societies. Government ownership of the means of production could not, therefore, be achieved by expropriating a few industrialists. Lenin recognized that the government would have to seize the land of tens of millions of peasants, who surely would resist. He tried during the Russian Civil War (1918-1920), but retreated in the face of chaos and five million famine deaths. Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, finished the job a decade later, sending millions of the more affluent peasants ("kulaks") to Siberian slave labor camps to forestall organized resistance and starving the rest into submission."

This is in the definition of Communism from The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. It raises an interesting question as to whether or not the government ownership of production is a foolishness limited to the agricultural world, a tool limited by its time, like the buggy whip. 

"The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'" This was one of Freud's famous quotes--and problems. His explorations into the human psyche had a significantly masculine bent so perhaps this question was more rhetorical than sincere. But apparently it is a more pervading problem than we knew. What do these abusing men think their female victims want? What was Charlie Rose thinking? And what did he think these girls were thinking?

The powerful--whether hereditary nobles or consecrated priests or self-appointed or acclaimed cultural leaders--will always take the opportunity to have their way. Regardless of how you shuffle the human deck, the top card will always act the same.

According to a survey of 20,185 people in 20 countries conducted this past July:

. . . global perception of the United States saw a substantial decline over the past year, causing the U.S. to drop from first to sixth place in Anholt-GfK’s annual Nation Brands Index (NBI).
Germany moved from second to first place; France rose to second place from fifth; and the U.K., which lost some ground after the Brexit vote, improved its score and maintained its third-place ranking.
Japan saw a large (2.12-point) jump in its score and made the top 10 ranking for the first time since 2011, tying with Canada for fourth place. Italy rose to sixth place, from seventh.
Switzerland, Austria and Sweden maintained their eighth, ninth and tenth places, respectively.

 

There has been a lot of criticism about the decline of American influence and it seems o be Trump's fault. But does "leading from behind" fit into this?

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/09/behavioral-insights.html

Behavioral Insights steeleydock.blogspot.com The U.S. government is getting interested in influencing the behavior of citizens in a more direct way than information management. En...

An opinion I heard: We are a family and social contract species. Individualism is a conspiracy of the State to undermine those basics and offer itself as a surrogate.


This is the anniversary of Kennedy's assassination. This event--and the War--defined--and to some extent "ruined"--this generation.
Stephen King's sci-fi book 11/22/63 is a surprisingly good book about it.


The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the use of race in Harvard University’s admissions practices and has accused the university of failing to cooperate, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. (wsj) Now this could be interesting. It is an open secret that Harvard limits Asian acceptances. I doubt anyone thinks this has origins in bigotry but rather demographics. There are a lot of good students who are Asians and there are a lot of Asians. What will the meddling and ill-informed government do? 


The von Mises quote above raises the NPR question: What will save the country from the bad taste of capitalism? This is a serious misunderstanding of capitalism--or a purposeful dodging of the question. Capitalism has no creed; it is the result of liberty, the free community that allows the individual to pursue his interests, in this instance, commercially. The idea that the pursuit of one's individual free interests will benefit the community, that is a creed. Freedom does not create bad taste; bad taste is in the people. If you want to improve the taste of the people, raise the level of the culture. Who were the most cultured people of the early last century? The Germans.


The FBI is investigating Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Bob Brady for conspiracy, and false statements and his campaign in relation to payments his campaign allegedly made to 2012 primary opponent Jimmie Moore in order to persuade him to drop out of the race.


An interesting little graphic about current theory about homo cross- breeding. (Only species can breed for fertile offspring.) This map assumes some commonality among the entire genus homo. How they would know is only a guess. This is a notion that a lot of people fear as it raises the possibility of sub-species intellectual diversity.

Russian authorities on Tuesday confirmed reports of a spike in radioactivity in the air over the Ural Mountains, however it denied the Rosatom's Mayak plant for spent nuclear fuel in the Urals  was the source.

TIME (11/21, Park) reports that investigators “analyzed national cancer data and calculated how much of cancer cases and deaths can be attributed to factors that people can change.” The researchers found that “among more than 1.5 million cancers in 2014, 42% were traced to these factors, as well as 45% of deaths in that year.”

AAAAAAnnnnnnddddddd.......a graph: