My friend Tibor Machan — co-founder of Reason magazine and Professor of Philosophy at Chapman University — has these useful thoughts on the bailout.
Dear Prudence
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Does anyone know of a blog, group of people, that have got beyond thoughts on the bailout and are actually talking about what action needs to be taken to bring government to heel?
Is Jesus, Ghandi, or King blogging at this time? Is there anyone ready to take up their role and preach their tactics? Is there no one to speak truth to the liars and make his/her voice heard?
We know what happened, now what do we do about it?
Apologies to Gandhi for extypolatin' his name.
I vote for David Allen Coe inspired blog post titles rather than the Beatles
vidyohs, I think the real trouble is that we are not yet evolved enough to have a critical mass appreciation of basic economic fundamentals. It's like knowing that the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun, but living in a world where everyone believes otherwise. I'm just an armchair economist myself. The very basics still can still thrill me, especially when I can identify a common fallacy in real life, without any help. (alas, there are so many!)
Anyone with street experience will tell you that when someone says "Hurry! Give me the money now or the deal is off. Just trust me!" that's a classic Rush Job, Con Man 101. When later they say, "I couldn't get what you wanted, so I got something else, just as good", that's a Bait-and-Switch. We are approaching the end game of the Pyramid Scheme, where the con man takes everybody's cut and splits town, just before his shennanagins fall apart. The common everyday person knows this stuff, so there should be no good reason why they can't get the idea of the Broken Window Fallacy, or the Law of Supply and Demand, or the concept of Gold vs. Fiat money, etc. All this seems like stuff your dad should teach you as you are growing up.
Either there simply aren't enough of us who get it yet, or we've been purposely kept ignorant by our masters on high.
Thanks. Tibor Machan is a brilliant man and I enjoy everything he writes. It's funny how sometimes you read a writer and it's like everything is in sync. Most times when I read someone there are points of agreement and points of disagreement, but so far I've been connected with everything I've read from Machan.
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