The Lovely Summer

It was amazing to me how quickly she overturned the power structure within her family,” Leslie Chang writes in Factory Girls, her 2008 book on internal migration within China. Chang is marveling at Min, a 17-year-old who left her family farm to find work in a succession of factories in the rapidly urbanizing city of Dongguan. Had Min never left home, she would have been expected to marry a man from a nearby village, to bear his children, and to accept her place in a tradition that privileges husbands over wives. But months after Min found work in Dongguan, she was already advising her father on financial planning, directing her younger siblings to stay in school, and changing jobs without bothering to ask her parents’ permission.”

“Are Property Rights Enough?” Reason, November 2009

How could the noble communists let this happen in their country? They should have taken people off their family farms and put them into communal farms, so they could capitalize on - I mean, make the most of - their already communal culture, bringing to fruition the bounty of true brotherhood. Oh, wait, they did, and they starved by the tens of millions. (The people, that is - not the noble, selfless communists.) Does anyone remember that?

Those were the good old days. But now they’ve turned to the Dark Side. And it all happened because some greedy people wanted to get rich. May they all reap what they sow.

Boy builds windmill, brings electricity to his village.

Obama is willing to spend political capital to shut down payday lenders. Never mind that the people will pay for his good intentions.

In a December 2008 working paper, [Dartmouth economist Jonathan] Zinman concluded that former payday customers in Oregon ended up using less desirable alternatives such as overdrafts and utility shutdowns, and that “restricting access caused deterioration in the overall financial condition of the Oregon households.” In summary, “restricting access to expensive credit harms consumers.”

A February 2008 study for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found similar results: “Compared with households in states where payday lending is permitted, households in Georgia [after a May 2004 ban on payday lending] have bounced more checks, complained more to the Federal Trade Commission about lenders and debt collectors, and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection at a higher rate,” wrote Federal Reserve research economists Donald P. Morgan and Michael R. Strain. In North Carolina, where payday loans were banned in December 2005, “households have fared about the same. This negative correlation—reduced payday credit supply, increased credit problems contradicts the debt trap critique of payday lending, but is consistent with the hypothesis that payday credit is preferable to substitutes such as the bounced-check ‘protection’ sold by credit unions and banks or loans from pawnshops.”

http://reason.com/archives/2009/09…

May we all seek disconfirming evidence for our theories, especially when we have the power to enact them.

Capitalism = voluntary trade

Humanity is benevolent to the extent humans have satisfied their own needs.

(Both empirical, as all good claims and concepts are.)

I recommend the Objectivism 101 website.

Atlas Shrugged selling better than ever since its year of publication.

Atlas Shrugged No. 1 seller in Amazon "classics" category.

Hopefully you've all heard about and delighted in the arrest of a corrupt politician, the governor of Illinois. I delight in the mild irony that this man's bad luck brings joy to good people.

The FBI complaint, chock full of the most blatant corruption you may ever see.


Thanks to john_j_enright for the link to the actual complaint. It's a fun read over breakfast, if you skim fast enough.

Also, What the Fed Left Out, a parody.

"Did you partake of the miracle of human flight you non-contributing zero!"



Hat tip to Stephen Hicks, who links to really neat stuff daily.

What a great theme for a blog:

The Left has traditionally assumed that human nature is so malleable, so perfectible, that it can be shaped in almost any direction. Conservatives object, arguing that social order arises not from rational planning but from the spontaneous order of instincts and habits. Darwinian biology sustains conservative social thought by showing how the human capacity for spontaneous order arises from social instincts and a moral sense shaped by natural selection in human evolutionary history.

Well, it's a false dichotomy, between an infinitely malleable human nature and an arational, instinctual nature, but at least we're moving in the direction of a scientific foundation for considering basic human values. It's been decades since leftists could pretend to any moral authority on scientific grounds, but instincts and tradition aren't what got us out of our caves.