Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, libertarianism, Liberty, Reason
“First and foremost, Austrian economics is not an empirical science as is mainstream economics, but a branch of logic.” As always, Professor Walter E. Block, friend and mentor, explains Austrian economics beautifully.
Here is the full, behind-the-scenes interview Walter did with a local, NBC affiliate, from which too few pearls were culled for the final segment.
A doff of the hat to EPJ for the story.
MORE.
Crime, Justice, Morality, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Race, Racism, Reason
CORRESPONDENT DON LEMON is a (piss-poor) prime-time reporter for CNN. Deprivation was the theme of Lemon’s sympathetic segment on 14-year-old (alleged) slasher Phillip Chism. Chism killed his 24-year-old math teacher with a box cutter.
According to Lemon’s editorializing , the possible source of Chism’s deprivation, boohoo, was not depravity but an absent father. Bill O’Reilly—and all other “conservative” pundits—is also prone to backwards logic, namely that if someone does something evil, then you work backwards in search of exculpating factors. Anything but pure unmitigated evil.
Controlled studies show that well-functioning individuals tend to report as many pathological experiences as do people who don’t function well. The same faulty reasoning must lead us to conclude that their trauma caused their successes.
Investigation Discovery featured a gaggle of Australian lasses who murdered a girl who had made their leader jealous. These feral females beat their victim and then set her alight as she begged for mercy. The stiffest sentence received by one of them was 17 years.
It’s a consolation that here in the U.S., Chism will be tried and sentenced as an adult.
DON LEMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The students are back at Danvers High School.
COLLIN BUTLER, JUNIOR, DANVERS HIGH SCHOOL: I’m trying to return to some essential of normalcy.
LEMON: The school’s flag at half-staff and pink ribbons on the trees — reminders that thing are still far from normal.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Why would someone do this to someone so nice?
LEMON: Still, more questions than answers as to what made 14-year-old Phillip Chism allegedly kill his math teacher Colleen Ritzer with a box cutter on Tuesday and then dump her body in the woods behind the school’s athletic field. He then went to this theater to see Wood Allen’s “Blue Jazzman”.
Chism’s uncle in Tennessee among those who still can’t understand why.
TERRENCE CHISM BLAINE, UNCLE OF PHILLIP CHISM: This is the furthest thing from reality for me to believe that Phillip could, you know, get entangled in something like this.
LEMON (on camera): His uncle told CNN that Chism’s parents are separated. Chism’s father, a former military man, is now living in Florida. The question is, could trouble at home be one of the reasons behind his alleged attack?
CARRIE KIMBALL-MONAHAN, SPOKESPERSON, ESSEX COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY: An investigation is a broad and painstaking effort. So they’re all, any and all information that’s pertinent and relevant to proving our case is taken into consideration.
LEMON: Would something like that be relevant?
KIMBALL-MONAHAN: It could be.
LEMON (voice-over): The freshman student Cambria Cloutier sat near Chism in Ritzer’s math class. She said he was a good student but that something was different about Chism’s behavior on Tuesday.
CAMBRIA CLOUTHIER, FRESHMAN, DANVERS HIGH SCHOOL: He was a little more quiet than usual. He had his ear buds on. He was drawing. He was not doing math. He wasn’t paying attention.
LEMON: Clouthier says Ritzer teacher asked Chism to stay after class to help him with what he missed, telling CNN’s Pam Brown that she walked by the classroom after school and saw the two of them together.
PAMELA BROWN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: What did you see in the classroom at 3:15?
CLOUTHIER: I saw Ms. Ritizer standing at her desk computer smiling at me. And then I saw Phillip slouching in his chair, staring at me when I walked by.
LEMON: Just 15 minutes later, according to sources close to the investigation, Colleen Ritzer was brutally killed in the school’s second floor bathroom.
CLOUTHIER: If I had walked by there 15 minutes later, what could have happened? If I witnessed that, what could I have done?
(END VIDEOTAPE)
LEMON: And sources close to the investigation say there is no indication that there is anything in this young man’s path that would lead him to this type of behavior. And they also say that reports of him having a crush on the teacher are unfounded. In the meantime, Erin, 24-year-old Colleen Ritzer will be laid to rest on Monday.
BURNETT: Thank you, Don.
Crime, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Race, Racism, Reason
“He wasn’t violent at all. He was really the opposite of agressive [sic].” Predictably, that’s how a classmate has described a black, 14-year-old, who murdered his white math teacher, near Boston, Massachusetts.
Philip Chism, the alleged killer, was clearly aggressive enough to kill.
The other options the idiocracy will opt for—they set the parameters of the debate on crime—are 1) racism. The white teacher’s or the white kids’, but never the black student’s. When blacks take the life of a white, it is never taken as a sign of racial hatred.
2) An “illness.” From “EVIL, NOT ILL”:
the tele-experts, understandably self-serving, … work to place bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, making it amenable to their “therapeutic” interventions. … conjuring so-called mental diseases either to control contrarians or to exculpate criminals. To listen to the nation’s psychiatric gurus is to come to believe that crimes are caused, not committed. Perpetrators don’t do the crime, but are driven to their dirty deeds by a confluence of uncontrollable factors, victims of societal forces or organic brain disease.
The paradox at the heart of this root-causes fraud is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds have no need of mitigating circumstances.
This mode of thinking amounts to backward logic. It’s logically fallacious.
Poor Colleen Ritzer was only 24. This beloved teacher had “graduated magna cum laude from Assumption College in Massachusetts with a math degree.”
UPDATE (Oct. 24): “A law-enforcement source said authorities believe Chism attacked Ritzer with a box cutter. The source said the boy was seen on school security video pushing a large recycling bin, which authorities believe he used to take her body outside.”
“You know what the insurance companies are like,” I was told by a statist neighbor, who adores Obama but concedes her healthcare premiums have gone up. How does the irrational individual solve the cognitive incongruity of rising prices and her undying love of the state?
She blames markets.
But even the stupid statist press can deny no longer that “insurance is at dramatically higher rates,” and some of the reasons are these:
First, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) sets minimum standards for benefits, including mental-health and substance-abuse treatment, maternity care, prescription drugs, and rehabilitative care, which were not included in many of the old plans. Also, insurance companies are now required to take all comers, regardless of their health status, and so rates are rising to cover their costs as well.
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Here The Heritage Foundation is forced into explaining the economically obvious:
…Contrary to a key intention of the legislation, the combination of mandates and taxes will not help to reduce the deficit. In fact, the PPACA will likely increase the deficit by an average $75 billion per year, and as a result, the nation’s publicly held debt will be $753 billion higher at the end of 2020. Such astronomical debt crowds out other productive investments and will lead to an estimated 670,000 lost job opportunities per year. …
he policy combination of spending and taxes alters the macroeconomic performance of the economy and feeds back onto the budget. A dynamic simulation shows that the higher initial costs are not an investment that pays off with a higher return in later years. Indeed, these front-loaded costs slow economic growth with higher inflation and higher interest rates, which overwhelm the benefits the proposal hoped to gain in later years.
The bill’s taxes, penalties, and fees on investors and businesses will decrease the amount of investment in the economy. This reduced investment will in turn lead to a decline in productivity, causing the economy to produce $706 billion less worth of goods and services. A smaller economic pie means that workers earn lower wages and salaries. Higher taxes on investment also put upward pressure on interest rates as investors seek to achieve their after-tax desired rate of return. …
…Lower wages reduce the amount of taxable income that could otherwise have been achieved. This will both increase the deficit and grow the total debt—which in turn puts upward pressure on interest rates and crowds out some savings that could have gone to new productive business investments.
Higher interest rates mean that more American tax dollars will go toward paying the interest on the federal debt rather than paying down the principal. Simulations using dynamic analysis estimate that the government would spend an average $23 billion more per year on interest rate payments over the 2010–2020 year window than it would without the PPACA.
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And from “Obama’s Politburo Of Proctologists”:
The pit of perverse incentives Papa Obama is engineering includes leveling the insurance industry, which by definition must discern and discriminate between applicants based on their health status (largely under individual control). Under his benevolent rule, private insurers will be subjected to a host of new regulations, “including a requirement to insure all applicants and a prohibition on pricing premiums on the basis of risk,” in the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner’s rendering.
This means one thing: moral hazard. Writes libertarian economist Walter Block: “The greater the protection from the random expenses of sickness the greater the potential over-consumption of the item in question.”
We currently labor under “a seeming patchwork of indemnity insurance arrangements, managed care, private payment, and charity.” Yet the fewer the intermediaries interfering with the primary, patient-doctor relationship, the better the patient’s prognosis. The president’s prescription for too little freedom, however, is even less of the same!