Category Archives: Economics
Crowdfunding Is Not A Scam
It’s market research. She makes a good point, that it’s a quick, inexpensive way to identify products with no market, relative to actually putting them in the market. On the other hand, sometimes products that don’t do well in the market as their primary function find some other killer app that no one anticipated. If it dies in crowdfunding, no one would get the chance to discover that sort of thing.
The Democrats’ Scandals
They’re all rooted in the evil of unlimited government:
Adam Smith’s formula for prosperity — “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice” — is the very modest ambition that conservatives aim for. Limited government is the tool by which government can be made to do good without necessarily being good, or being composed of good men.
The progressive state, on the other hand, is a state infused with moral purpose. If politics is to be a jihad, then the state must be invested with extraordinary power to achieve its moral mission. There is no way to invest the state with extraordinary power without also investing those powers in the men who hold its offices and staff its bureaucracies, which hold ever more nearly absolute power over our property and our lives. (And given that the Obama administration has made a policy of assassinating U.S. citizens without legal process, we might as well call that power “absolute.”) But if those elective offices and regulatory fortresses are to be staffed with men who are corrupt and corruptible, then the progressive vision of the morality-infused state must falter.
And they — we — are all corruptible.
Lord Acton was right, once again, about the power of power to corrupt.
Asimov’s Laws Of Robotics
Why they can’t protect us.
Unfortunately.
Government Ranges
We can’t rely on them for commercial spaceflight. It’s truly appalling that we’re going to have a multi-week delay at the Cape because the infrastructure lacks robustness. Unfortunately, the incentive structure for government expenditures allows this to happen.
Ariane 6
The Germans want ESA to rethink it.
SpaceX is being very disruptive.
Anthony Weiner To Elon Musk
Stop being such a disruptive innovator!
Why should anyone care what Anthony Weiner thinks about anything?
There Is College
…and then there’s college.
It’s foolish, even devastating, to put yourself deep into undischargeable debt to get a worthless degree. In a sane world, the people promoting this would be jailed for fraud.
Kathleen Sebelius
Why does she still have a job?
Treacher explains.
A Book Review
It’s not really a review, per se, but the book is featured at Ricochet today.