#Jon Miltimore

[barbarian15]

"For years, I never really understood this scene.

Thulsa Doom’s answer to the riddle didn’t jive with my teenage mind. Power is brainwashing soft-headed hippies and convincing them to jump off rocks? The answer seemed absurd, or at least incomplete.

It was not until many years later, while studying Ludwig von Mises’ text Human Action, that Thulsa Doom’s answer made complete sense to me. Mises, like Thulsa Doom, understood that power comes from action, and ideas are what drive human action.

“Ideologies have might over men,” Mises wrote. “Might is the faculty or power of directing actions.”

When Thulsa Doom, with a mere word, beckens a beautiful young woman to throw herself from a cliff, he’s showing Conan his power, or what Mises called “might.”

“Might is the power to direct,” Mises wrote. That power, Mises understood, stems not from swords or “steel,” but ideas.

“He who is mighty, owes his might to an ideology. Only ideologies can convey to a man the power to influence other people's choices and conduct. One can become a leader only if one is supported by an ideology which makes other people tractable and accommodating. Might is thus not a physical and tangible thing, but a moral and spiritual phenomenon.”

This is what Thulsa Doom meant when he says it’s not steel that’s strong, but flesh. The person who can use ideas to command people is a person who has true power, true might.

Unlike Thulsa Doom, Mises of course saw power as a dangerous and corrupting force, which is why he opposed concentrating might in the most powerful, and deadly institution in modern history: the state."

[gettothestabbing]

Available here, and an article that confirmed with the author that it was NOT satirical here.

[adribosch-fan]

Cómo Javier Milei está cambiando la economía argentina

Bajo el mandato de Javier Milei, Argentina ha registrado su mejor mes en términos de crecimiento económico. Muchos predijeron que no podría suceder. Javier Milei By Cancillería Argentina – https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrecic-argentina/53396149399/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=142242748 FEE septiembre 24, 2024 Por: Jon Miltimore Durante su primer año como…

[futuramb]

Understanding second order effects of policies is what really makes a difference. Maybe even more so in crisis situations.

And this is probably exactly where populism goes wrong. Since the masses gather around emotionally driven opinions they always seems to only see first order consequences.

This was the fatal flaw—quite literally—of the Covid state. Its engineers didn’t realize they were not saving lives, but trading lives

[commonsensecommentary]

“In a sense, there’s nothing inherently wrong with many of the ends social justice advocates seek. There’s nothing intrinsically good about “privilege��� or wealth concentration. The primary problem is one of means.

Social justice advocates—then and now—tend to seek to resolve what they see as structural inequities in society through illiberal and coercive means. In its most basic form, it means taking from those who have more (the privileged) and giving it to those who have less.”

(One might choose to not agree with the observations made in this article, but they are food for thought. Do our country’s social justice warriors understand the long-term societal implications of their ideology and the methods they use? This is a provocative article that should provoke discussion.)

[dertaglichedan]

Argentines witnessed something amazing last week: the government’s first budget surplus in nearly a dozen years.

The Economy Ministry announced the figures Friday, and the government was $589 million in the black.

Argentina’s surplus comes on the heels of ambitious cuts in federal spending pushed by newly-elected President Javier Milei that included slashing bureaucracy, eliminating government publicity campaigns, reducing transportation subsidies, pausing all monetary transfers to local governments, and devaluing the peso.

Javier Milei's minister of economy just announced an "emergency package" of measures to completely balance the budget in 2024 equivalent to over 5% of GDP.

This would be equivalent to a $1.4 trillion austerity package in a single year in the U.S. economy.

The measures include:…

— Daniel Di Martino 🇺🇸🇻🇪 (@DanielDiMartino) December 13, 2023

Milei’s policies, which he has himself described as a kind of “shock therapy,” come as Argentina faces a historic economic crisis fueled by decades of government spending, money printing, and Peronism (a blend of national socialism and fascism).

These policies have pushed the inflation rate in Argentina, once one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America, above 200 percent. Today nearly 58 percent of the Argentine population lives in poverty, according to a recent study.

And Milei rightfully blames Argentina’s backward economic policies for its plight—policies that, he points out, are spreading across the world

[mattili-blog]

Days before the 70th anniversary of his death, Reuters ran an article exploring Stalin’s “mixed” legacy in the nations he once terrorized. Readers can determine for themselves whether Stalin was a Communist hero or an evil tyrant.

[arcticdementor]

Do something.

This is a response—and perhaps a natural one—to a human tragedy or crisis. We saw this response in the wake of 9-11. We saw it during the Covid-19 pandemic. And we’re seeing it again following three mass shootings—in Buffalo, New York, Uvalde, Texas, and Tulsa Oklahoma—that claimed the lives of more than 30 innocent people, including small children.

In this case, the “something” is gun control. In Canada—where no attack even occurred—Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the introduction of legislation that would freeze handgun ownership across the country.

…

In the United States, the rhetoric has tended to be more heated but also vague, though some specific proposals have emerged.

Over the weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris called for an all-out ban of “assault weapons.”

“We know what works on this. It includes, let’s have an assault weapons ban,” Harris told reporters in Buffalo after attending the funeral of a victim.

…

There are numerous problems with this proposal, starting with the sticky question of defining what an “assault weapon” is.

Assault rifles, which by definition are capable of selective fire, are already banned under the National Firearms Act of 1934. The vague phrase “assault weapon” is basically a tautology—by definition, any weapon can be used to assault someone—and virtually useless. The term might be effective politically, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, the guns politicians choose to define as “assault weapons” typically “are no more dangerous than others that are not specified.”

We know this because the US had a ban on “assault weapons” as recently as 2004, something gun control supporters recently pointed out on Twitter.

“We had an assault weapon ban for 10 years: 1994-2004,” said Dr. Joanne Freeman, a historian at Yale University. “The world didn’t end. People kept their (other) guns. They bought new guns. It was hardly an attack on gun ownership.”

…

Freeman is right that the ban lasted a decade before expiring on September 13, 2004. She’s also right that the world “didn’t end” and Americans continued to use and purchase other types of firearms.

What Freeman didn’t bring up was the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the government’s Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Nearly two decades ago the Department of Justice funded a study to analyze this very topic, and it concluded that the assault weapon prohibition had “mixed” results.

Researchers noted there was a decline in crimes committed with firearms classified as assault weapons, but noted “the decline in AW use was offset throughout at least the late 1990s by steady or rising use of other guns.”

In other words, there was a decline in crimes committed with firearms that were banned, but the drop was replaced by crimes committed with other types of firearms that were not banned.

While gun violence overall fell in the US during this period—just like many other countries around the world—the decline continued even after the Federal Assault Weapons Ban ended in 2004. Authors of the government-funded study plainly stated “we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence” and any future reduction in gun violence as a result of the ban was likely “to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

One might contend that this is just one study. No study is irrefutable, after all, even ones commissioned by the Justice Department. However, other studies since then have yielded similar conclusions.

…

Unfortunately, when people say “do something” they tend to mean “pass sweeping legislation that infringes on the civil liberties of others.” Such thinking spawned the super-state that sprang forth in the War on Terror following the 9-11 attacks. It also produced government lockdowns during the pandemic, the worst and longest depression in American history, and a host of other disasters.

If history has taught us anything, it’s that the impulse to use collective force to “do something” in the wake of a tragedy or crisis has created far more problems than it has solved.

The economic historian Robert Higgs has noted that the most sprawling encroachments of freedom in history spawned during crises and tragedies; they have given rise to tyrants from Lenin to Mao and beyond. Even when powers are relinquished by government, they are rarely relinquished completely (a phenomenon Higgs describes as the Ratchet Effect).

…

As we mourn the victims in Buffalo, Uvalde, and Tulsa, we’d do well to remember that one true moral purpose of government is to protect individual rights, and any attempt to deprive humans of these rights for “a greater good” is a perversion of the law.

[adribosch-fan]

Las propias palabras de Joseph Goebbels demuestran que amaba el socialismo y lo veía como "el futuro”

Los socialistas seguirán argumentando que el nazismo no era “verdadero” socialismo, pero el propagandista nazi despreciaba el capitalismo y hablaba como Karl Marx. Foto archivo Hitler y Goebbels Jon Miltimore Uno de los consuelos de hacerse mayor es saber que algunas cosas nunca cambiarán. Los aficionados al deporte siempre discutirán sobre la regla del bateador designado y sobre quién fue el…

[didanawisgi]

Mises: There’s No Ought in Science

“The economist Ludwig von Mises once observed the problem with using scientific claims to shape the modern world. He suggested that in many cases people invoke science simply to tell people what they must do. “The planners pretend that their plans are scientific and that there cannot be disagreement with regard to them among well-intentioned and decent people,” Mises wrote in his 1947 essay “Planned Chaos.” Most people agree that science is a useful tool, and Mises was certainly one of them. The problem Mises was getting at was that science can’t actually tell us what we should do, which is the realm of subjective value judgments. Science can only tell us what is. “[T]here is no such thing as a scientific ought,” Mises wrote, echoing a famous argument by David Hume. “Science is competent to establish what is.” (For a deeper dive on the is-ought problem, read Hume’s celebrated 1729 work, A Treatise on Human Nature.) The economist continued: “[Science] can never dictate what ought to be and what ends people should aim at. It is a fact that men disagree in their value judgments. It is insolent to arrogate to oneself the right to overrule the plans of other people and to force them to submit to the plan of the planner.””

-excerpt from A 75-Year-Old Warning about Those Who Say ‘Listen to the Science’ When people say “follow the science,” often what they’re really saying is “follow our plan.” by Jon Miltimore

[married-to-a-redhead]

Interesting - a full and complete study that showed no significant statistical difference between wearing a mask and not wearing a mask. I expect all kinds of negative comments because this runs against the current conventional wisdom.

[mojave-pete]

… and they are not caused by global warming, climate change or fake science!    

FYI newsom shove your lies and bullshit way far up your ass!

[mattili-blog]

“[I saw in Mao] something no picture has ever caught, an inexpressible look of kindness and sympathy, an obvious preoccupation with the needs of others…”