Twitter’s a great medium for sharing links and short comments. And since that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing with Missing Link Friday it raises an obvious question — why not take Missing Link to Twitter?
So I thought I’d give it a go: @donattroppo. Let me know what you think.
Classical liberals and social justice: "many defenders of private economic liberty suffer from a malady that I shall call social justicitis. Social justicitis, as I use that term, refers to a strongly negative, even allergic, reaction to the idea of social or distributive justice." John Tomasi, Free Market Fairness (early draft chapter available online).
Free market fairness – an online symposium: "Bleeding Heart Libertarians will be running a symposium on John Tomasi’s new book, Free Market Fairness, from June 11-15, 2012. Scheduled participants include Elizabeth Anderson, Richard Arneson, Samuel Freeman, Deirdre McCloskey, and Will Wilkinson." Matt Zwolinski, Bleeding Heart Libertarians.
Tim Andrews doesn’t want to abolish government: He just wants to shrink it a little. At Menzies House Andrews announces the creation of the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance, an organisation dedicated to mobilising Australians against high taxes, wasteful spending and crippling red tape.
"Welcome to the anti-carbon-tax alliance", writes Catallaxy commenter Gavin R Putland. "Right-wing astroturfing good. Left-wing astroturfing bad."
How racist do you have to be to get fired from the National Review Online? After years of offensive commentary NRO’s John Derbyshire finally stepped over the line with a piece on black white relations in Taki’s Magazine. Cutting Derbyshire loose, NRO’s Rich Lowry wrote that the piece was "so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation".
What effect with this public shaming have? Not much according to David Sessions at The American Scene: "those who think Derbyshire-type thoughts, the episode only confirms the alternative-universe narrative that truth-telling white people are always victims of political correctness."
Competitive victimhood: "Nowadays whenever a political group is accused of unjustly harming another group, it will invariably play some kind of victim card" Eric Horowitz, Peer-reviewed by my Neurons.
Political difference inhibits empathy: A new study shows how political difference inhibits empathy. As Will Wilkinson puts it: "It turns out politics not only makes us stupid. It also makes us callous."
Journalists side with their employers: "I’m convinced that so much of the reactionary response to attempts to make journalism more democratically responsive – like Finkelstein – stem from a paranoid, Luddite and protectionist urge among employees of mainstream media companies to keep non-tithed operatives off their front lawn." Mr Denmore, The Failed Estate.
The human penis is a puzzler, no bones about it: Unlike humans, the males in most mammal species have a bone in their penis. At the Conversation Lauren Reid asks why.
If you discovered that you had cancer would you (a) find a doctor who is an expert in treating your disease and follow their advice, or (b) attempt to devise your own treatment by reading about cancer on the internet?
According to some sources, Apple founder Steve Jobs may have shortened his life by relying too heavily on (b). Martina Cartwright at Psychology Today writes, "When Mr. Jobs was first diagnosed in 2003, he chose to pursue alternative therapies, including acupuncture, herbal, diet and fruit juice therapy and spiritual consultations. Many of these therapies he found on the Internet."
In the Weekend Australian Cassandra Wilkinson cites Jobs as an example of the "countless tragic cases of people delaying or denying medical treatment in favour of quackery. Jobs is only a high-profile example of a growing problem." Andrew Bolt concurs: "’alternative medicines’ are not just a danger to our health but an insult to our reason."
Also in the Australian, Brendan O’Neill complains that climate change sceptics can’t get a fair hearing because activists attack their motives rather than engaging with their arguments. This "stinks of intellectual cowardice", says O’Neil. "Instead of taking sceptics up on what they say in public, campaigners dig for dirt behind the scenes."
O’Neill wants a free public debate where "all of us can hear ideas, assess their worth and accept or reject them." What he doesn’t want is activists wasting everybody’s time by uncovering which climate change sceptics are being bankrolled by oil companies.
Why don’t women patent? "In Why Don’t Women Patent?, a recent NBER paper, Jennifer Hunt et al. present a stark fact: Only 5.5% of the holders of commercialized patents are women." Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution.
Innovation and inequality: What effect do now products and technologies have on inequality? Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias.
An annoying parable: Is the classroom a good model for the economy? Glen Fuller thinks not.
Friedman’s classical liberalism: According to Milton Friedman "Government has done a lot of good. And the implication certainly seems to be that government has done good in ways that the market on its own could not have done. For Friedman, that’s good enough. For Rand, Rothbard and Nozick, of course, it wouldn’t be." Matt Zwolinski, Bleeding Heart Libertarians.
Conservatives aren’t getting crazier: "Conservatism is not getting crazier, and it’s not going away, either. It’s just getting more powerful." Rick Perlstein, Rolling Stone.
You think Twitter’s annoying now? "Going forwards, all of us are going to find Twitter increasingly annoying. The company has been in hyper-growth mode up until now, getting to its current astonishing scale. But it’s now getting serious about making money, which means selling us, the users, to people willing to pay lots of money to work their way into our timelines one way or another." Felix Salmon.
Gov 2.0 – Get it or go: "As Malcolm [Turnbull] points out Gov 2.0 is also about a change in the mindset of public servants. This raises an interesting question. What about those public servants who don’t change their mindset because they don’t want to ‘get it’? If they are holding back Gov 2.0 then should they be retired?" Steve Davies, Ozloop.
Even Andrew Bolt is shocked. On Tuesday mining magnate Clive Palmer fronted the media and announced that the US Central Intelligence Agency is using the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a campaign to undermine Australia’s coal industry.
Palmer appeared in front of the cameras brandishing a funding proposal for the Australian anti-coal movement — a document titled Stopping the Australian Coal Export Boom. On page two, the report acknowledges "the generous support of the Rockefeller Family Fund".
The Rockefeller Family Fund (controlled by members of the Rockefeller family) is a separate entity from the larger Rockefeller Foundation. Palmer seems confused about this.
When it comes to CIA involvement Palmer’s logic is a little hard to follow. Part of his argument is that : "You only have to go back and read the Church Report in the 1970s and to read the reports to the US Congress which sets up the Rockefeller Foundation as a conduit of CIA funding."
As Bolt notes, this is one part of Palmer’s diatribe that has at least some foundation in evidence. The US Senate’s Church Committee began an investigation of US intelligence in 1975. Among its findings was the CIA use of charitable foundations as a conduit for funds. As Volume I of the final report explains:
The CIA’s intrusion into the foundation field in the 1960s can only be described as massive. Excluding grants from the "Big Three" — Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie — of the 700 grants over $10,000 given by 164 other foundations during the period 1963-1966, at least 108 involved partial or complete CIA funding. More importantly, CIA funding was involved in nearly half the grants the non-"Big Three" foundations made during this period in the field of international activities. In the same period more than one-third of the grants awarded by non-"Big Three" in the physical, life and social sciences also involved CIA funds.
While there’s no evidence that Australian green groups are being funded by the CIA there is one Australian organisation known to have received CIA funding — Quadrant magazine.
When the Koch vs Cato controversy erupted blogger Skip Oliva was all over it. Now he’s just over it:
When you cut through all the bullshit—90% of which is coming from the Cato side—what you’re left with is two old men who simply refuse to compromise. Charles Koch signed an agreement that he believes Ed Crane refuses to honor. Ed Crane feels he has earned the right to dictate Cato’s future after 35 years at the helm. Complicating matters was a series of poorly drafted legal documents, from the two shareholder agreements to Niskanen’s will. There’s no great ideological battle going on here. And I’m not going to spend another moment pretending otherwise.
Steven Hayward, who’s dealt with both the Kochs and with Ed Crane, writes: "A clash between the Kochs and Crane over personalities and business principles is not hard to imagine."
According to most commentators, it was French politician René Lenoir who coined the term ‘social exclusion’ (l’exclusion sociale). But the idea that there is a disparate group of disadvantaged citizens who are excluded from economic, social and political participation is nothing new. It is one of the major themes of Michael Harrington‘s 1962 book The Other America.
It’s been 50 years since Harrington’s book was first published in the United States. This expose of poverty in America turned Harrington into a celebrity and saw him invited to Washington to help plan Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty.
Harrington argued that the poor had become invisible in America. In the 1930s poverty was too widespread to ignore and workers could be politically organised. But as 1960s began, the poor faded from view. They were a disparate group that included the old, the mentally ill, agricultural workers, blacks, homeless alcoholics and penniless bohemians. Aside from low incomes, all they really had in common was that they were excluded from the mainstream of society and immune to the benefits of economic progress.
A commodities boom can temporarily boost government revenue, says Malcolm Turnbull. Mostly that’s a good thing. But when governments respond by making non-temporary changes to the budget, we have a problem:
If, rolling in a big cyclical surplus, a government were to cut income taxes, that may not immediately send the budget into deficit. But when the cycle turns, tax receipts drop, unemployment benefits rise, the tax cut will still be there and reversing it will cause much more political pain than delivering the cut derived political joy. The same is true with increases to benefits or indeed to new benefits – if these are funded from cyclical surpluses then they may be contributing to a long-term structural deficit.
Turnbull suggests that a sovereign wealth fund could help discipline government decision making and encourage governments to use temporary surpluses for long term economic gain rather than short term political advantage through things like "unsustainable tax cuts" or "infrastructure projects in marginal seats".
Turnbull’s reference to "unsustainable tax cuts" prompted this response from Catallaxy’s Sinclair Davidson: "There is no such thing as unsustainable tax cuts, only unsustainable spending." But according to Turnbull: "That is quite wrong."
See over the fold for links to the full debate including posts by Davidson, Turnbull, Terry McCrann and Andrew Bolt. Continue reading