Monday, September 13, 2010

A Reprieve from Bureaucrats

by on September 13, 2010 @ 8:38 pm · 2 comments

in Nanny Statism

Our friend Fester writes:

The other day a friend on Facebook commented on the show “Hoarders”. In this show they have a psychologist and a junk clean up crew come into a house and clean it up. She was upset because she did not feel as if the crew helped the people they cleaned up because they only spend about a week at the house and she didn’t feel like this was enough time to address the deep psychological issues these people have.

While I agree that these people probably have mental issues that are not being addressed by the show, if you watch the show you will notice that almost all of the people who ask to go on the show have a legal issue surrounding the hoarding. These people are being pursued by code enforcement officers, by child protective services, by fire marshals, etc. They may not be getting the psychological help they need, but they are getting a reprieve from the evil government officials who would kick these people out of their homes, or steal their children away from them, etc. It may only be temporary, but if it gives them another year of peace from the bureaucrats then the show is doing a good service to these people.

You can watch Hoarders on A&E.

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All You Ever Need to Refute a Paul Krugman Column

by on September 13, 2010 @ 11:02 am · 1 comment

in (Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism

Courtesy of Tim Cavanaugh at Reason, we now have a basic template to refute just about anything Nobel Laureate, neo-Keynesian, and regime apologist Paul Krugman ever publishes:

[destroy whatever economic fallacy Krugman promotes this week]

The rest of his column is political speech and unworthy of note. The above is all the intellectual content, and it is very shabby.

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Against Political Panglossianism

by on September 13, 2010 @ 4:02 am · 1 comment

in Anti-Statism, Vulgar Politics

I offer to readers a term of my coinage: polidicy.

I construct it as “theodicy” was constructed, and I do so in the spirit of the copycat. A theodicy is a vindication of divine goodness in the context of the existence of evil. It is an important theological concept, and you will find theodicies embedded in most understandings of Providence, and nearly everyone who believes in a deity has some sort of theodicy in tow.

Polidicy, then, is a vindication of a state or government body in the context of its own obvious crimes. Most people who are loyal to some state and pretend to possess a moral sense, or conscience, have some polidicy in their head, some set of excuses for why the state’s many crimes do not amount to a moral case against the state as such, and how, even, the state can be said to be “basically good.”

[Keep reading…]

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