Source: Frontpage Mag.

Do you want to know about the witch hunts in Europe? The author debunks a number of common misconceptions by citing contemporary sources and recounting recent scholarship. The beneficial result is somewhat surprising: The medieval Catholic Church was not to blame; Christianity did not cause a “Dark Age,” and science didn’t save humanity from paganism. The author’s conclusions ring true this Halloween, as witch hunting, lately, is a familiar pastime.

Always the procrastinator, I just finished reviewing the list of candidates I’ll be voting for on Tuesday. You can too, here:

https://www.elections.virginia.gov/casting-a-ballot/candidate-list/

This year I am happy to see that my selections will be politically correct by ethnicity and by gender. Two-thirds of my statewide choices will be minorities (Black and Hispanic), and of the eight offices I’ll be voting to fill, almost half of my choices will be women.

This accounting is mildly surprising to me, since I often hear that my political party (Republican) is a patriarchal, white supremacist group.

The question this video addresses came up in another thread.

Continue reading “Fairfax High School FCPS Board Meeting – Stacy Langton – Citizen Participation 9-23-2021” →

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fox-poll-youngkin-takes-the-lead-in-virginia/

An 8-point lead, according to the report. What is going on here?

My guess is that many Virginians are planning to vote against Stumble Joe Biden and against Democrats this cycle. Because Terry McAuliffe has campaigned as an empty suit, he will become the scapegoat for the generalized distaste his superiors in the party have earned.

Economist Steve Keen previews his upcoming book with a discussion of accounting for the role of energy in models of production (or GDP).

Keen notes that the standard model treats energy as a “factor of production,” meaning that energy consumption levels of a process have a direct effect on output levels. This makes intuitive sense, but Keen argues that the intuition is flawed. Instead of a simple factor of production, energy must be viewed as a discrete input.

(You can see the math in the video here, at 18:20-24:00 minutes.)

Continue reading “Accounting for Energy in Economics” →

Source: Frontpage Mag.

Thomas Sowell comments on public schools as an issue in Virginia’s upcoming election. He writes, “When school propaganda teaches black kids to hate white people, that is a danger to all Americans of every race.”

Sowell recommends allowing parents to choose the schools their children attend. I would do a bit more. I would eliminate compulsory education altogether.

The concepts of supply and demand as economists understand them are thousands of years old, but were only formalized in 1767 by the Scottish writer James Denham-Steuart in his Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (Wikipedia). Denham-Steuart and his contemporaries understood supply and demand as a theory of pricing; that is, as a mechanism for establishing the price of goods in an economy. It was not, however, a particularly strong starting point for a general theory of pricing for two reasons:

Continue reading “Supply and Demand” →

Economists often describe money as having three distinctive characteristics, or functions. Money is:

• A medium of exchange
• A store of value
• A unit of account

I prefer a different typology in which money has three powers:

• The power to bring goods into life
• The power to trade for any object
• The power of measurement

Continue reading “The Powers of Money” →

Source: Jonathan Turley.

Short answer: Yes.

This sort of thing angers me more than I can say. You can’t teach religion in public schools because that would violate the separation of church and state, but apparently you can use churches to engage in electioneering. IF you are a Democrat.

My reaction is to say that being a Democrat is something to be ashamed of.

Source: Mises Institute.

This story fascinates me because it disconnects profit from self-interest.

That the profit motive is immoral is one of the most basic complaints about capitalism, but also one of the most fallacious. It misses the fact that profit is the source of process improvements that increase productivity. Instead of pretending to be psychologists whose theories depend on incentive networks, economists should talk more about the “process improvement motive,” or about profit as a business expense.

In any case, the notion that so-called public goods would not exist unless government provided them is thoroughly debunked. The singular role of government to serve as the producer of public goods is simply mythical.