Category Archives: Economics

Demonizing School Choice

won’t help education:

…it’s certainly fair to note that people opposed to desegregation decided that one way to solve the problem was to get rid of public schools, allowing racists to choose a lily-white educational environment for their children. Maintaining Jim Crow is a vile motive, and it can’t be denied that that was one historical reason some people had for supporting school choice.

Only the proper answer to this is, So what? You cannot stop terrible people from promoting sound ideas for bad reasons. Liberals who think that ad hominem is a sufficient rebuttal to a policy proposal should first stop to consider the role of Hitler’s Germany in spreading national health insurance programs to the countries they invaded. If you think “But Hitler” does not really constitute a useful argument about universal health coverage, then you should probably not resort to “But Jim Crow” in a disagreement over school funding.

If you think we can’t allow school choice because Jim Crow, then it would be just as logical to oppose minimum wage and gun control, because historically, their purpose has been to control blacks.

Lunar Cryonics

I accidentally started a Twitter conversation with Sandy Mazza as a result of this nice piece on markets being enabled by lower-cost launch, including space burial. I noted to her that it made no sense for the California Department of Public Health to be regulating it, and then mentioned that they shouldn’t have anything to do with cryonics, either. In the course of the discussion, I dug up an old piece I wrote for Cryonics Magazine back in 1990 (ctrl-F “Simberg” to find it). Given that things are finally looking promising for reducing cost of access to space in general, and likely the moon as well, I decided I’d resurrect it here. Note that I’ve been talking about the need for markets to drive down launch costs for three decades. Note also that it’s somewhat dated, in terms of its discussion of the NASP and American Rocket.

Continue reading Lunar Cryonics

Nazis

Yes, sorry, but they really were socialists, and there is nothing “right wing” about them.

Related: Dinesh D’Souza apparently has a new book out:

Dinesh D’Souza explodes the Left’s big lie. He expertly exonerates President Trump and his supporters, then uncovers the Democratic Left’s long, cozy relationship with Nazism: how the racist and genocidal acts of early Democrats inspired Adolf Hitler’s campaign of death; how fascist philosophers influenced the great 20th century lions of the American Left; and how today’s anti-free speech, anti-capitalist, anti-religious liberty, pro-violence Democratic Party is a frightening simulacrum of the Nazi Party.

Yup.