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The Students for Liberty Annual Report for 2008-09 is out. I have a blurb on page 17: Observing events at home and abroad, it is often easy to be discouraged both by the incompetence and corruption of our leadership and by the extent to which people look to government for solutions to their problems. But then [...] There is a variety of methods by which we lower the transaction costs of interacting with other individuals. Among these is a set of conventions that, while they vary from society to society, can be conceptualized as “politeness.” As far as I can tell, lowering transaction costs is the one of the main virtues of [...] The Economist writes: Belief in conspiracy theories can be comforting. If everything that goes wrong is the fault of a secret cabal, that relieves you of the tedious necessity of trying to understand how a complex world really works. And you can feel smug that you are smart enough to “see through” the official version of [...] This is certainly one of the best, most inspiring, defenses of globalization I have heard. Although, you really should listen to the talk (it is less than 15 minutes), here are some tidbits and some comments of my own: “China is the world’s greatest anti-poverty program over the last three decades.”
Some of this would actually be funny, if it wasn’t so sad, especially the bit about Turkmenistan: In a frankly insane healthcare reform effort, [President-for-life Niyazov] restricted the public’s access to care by replacing up to 15,000 doctors and nurses with unqualified military conscripts. The next year, he ordered hospitals and clinics outside of the capital, [...] John Mackey, the co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods, and a libertarian, writes: Although Canada has a population smaller than California, 830,000 Canadians are currently waiting to be admitted to a hospital or to get treatment, according to a report last month in Investor’s Business Daily. In England, the waiting list is 1.8 million. At Whole Foods [...] Ben Casnocha says: I don’t have an opinion on healthcare. I’m not following the debate that’s currently dominating the headlines in America… I’ve decided I’m just going to read it about once it’s resolved. Often, I feel the same way, both about healthcare and other topics, especially those being deliberated by a government body. My thinking is that [...] See here. The article implies that profit-seeking in the microfinance industry is the problem: Some observers blame a fundamental shift in the microfinance business for feeding the problem. Traditionally, microlenders were nonprofits focused on community service. In recent years, however, many of the larger microlending firms have registered with the Indian [...] Joel has a couple of interesting posts, one on incremental change that leads to a phase change, and another entitled “Complexity and Collapse“. In the former, he worries that a marginal change in the state of affairs may lead to a phase change. As an example of this, think of how Lehman’s bankruptcy is what [...] |
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Copyright © 2012 Amol Kapila - All Rights Reserved |
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