Here are six new thoughts ranging from psychology to public policy to morality.
What would you think of a man who went almost every day to the same bad movie? Some people would laugh at this, or say the man had a mental problem. But how many of us revisit our own terrible internal movies again and again?
Ten times as many people are killed by (more…)
Given my attacks on unethical wealth accumulation, which are probably taken by some as attacks on wealth or the wealthy, I think it’s time for this post. It is about how good money can be, and why we need rich people - even if we never join there ranks.
When Ana (my wife) first came here from Ecuador she was surprised and happy to see people (more…)
A friend that I play chess with recently told me about a young man he knew who was in prison for some crime. This man is developmentally disabled. As a result, he was brutally abused in prison by other inmates. I don’t know what crime he committed, and given his condition, he might not have known. In any case, after too much abuse at the hands of other prisoners, this mentally disabled man had to commit some minor infraction against a guard in order to be put into solitary confinement - the only place he felt safe. It seems likely that the prison could prevent these problems if they truly wanted to.
I don’t care what his crime is. Maybe he (more…)
As humans we tend to measure people and their ways in our minds, based not on any objective view of things, but on our own inclinations and preferences. In other words, how we dress is the measure for what is “normal,” and our own customs are the “correct” ones. Essentially we tend to feel that we are the measure of all things. This tendency makes us very unpleasant at times.
I first thought about this many years ago after cleaning a house (one of 60 various jobs I’ve had) and noting how horribly (more…)
The “exclusionary rule,” as it is called, excludes evidence which is obtained illegally from being used in a criminal prosecution. The intent is to protect people’s rights, even when accused of a crime. Of course, this means that sometimes a criminal who is clearly guilty goes free because of the way the evidence was collected.
Suppose a young woman is killed (more…)
Here are three new ideas I have been playing with in the areas of employment and the economy:
Wages Are Profit?
I sometimes hear people complain about the profits made by large companies. I happen to think that the only problem there is if they made their profits unethically. But in any case, do those who complain ever consider that at least a part of their own wages are “profit?” To make this as clear as possible, consider (more…)
Why get rid of corporate taxes? Because they hurt the poor and middle class. This is easy to understand once you grasp a few basic principles.
The first of these is that any cost imposed on a business is passed on to customers. This is true at all levels. If food and labor costs go up, restaurants raise prices, right? The same is true of large corporations. If a certain return on investment is expected, and taxes (more…)
We need to get beyond words if we are to understand things more fully. Words are not the things they represent. It is easy to understand this intellectually, but we tend to focus on the words anyhow when we discuss things, and so often don’t see clearly the things that they point at. This limits our thinking and our ability to learn new things.
For example, suppose a man says (more…)
This post on the Federal Reserve fraud is part of my series on the redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy. It’s going to be a long one, because the federal reserve system is complicated - made that way on purpose to hide the fact that wealthy investors control our money supply, contrary to what the government says.
In fact, the FED’s official web site says, (more…)
Perhaps the most important and least-understood idea in economics is the role of prices. I was reminded of this by two things I recently saw in the news. One was the price of gasoline in Venezuela - 13 cents per gallon due to government subsidy.
The second news item that caught my eye was a report released by the Texas Highway Department. They found that (more…)
