[SL: I have long been of the view--while I have great sympathy for my libertarian and leftist friends who want calamity in the developing world taken as seriously as calamity in the developed world--that the lesson that Jacques teaches below is important, and needs to be taken seriously. There is a reason why 'if it [...]
This is a guest post by Steven Horwitz which was originally posted at Critical Thinking Applied but which Dr Horwitz has kindly agreed to be also posted here. Dr. Horwitz is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. He is the author of two books, Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: An Austrian Perspective (Routledge, 2000) and Monetary [...]
By Lorenzo
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Also posted in Economics, History
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Tagged Austrian business cycle, Austrian school, Carl Menger, central banks, Great Depression, James Buchanan, Jean-Baptiste Say, John Maynard Keynes, money, Peter Lewin, Say's Law, Steve Horwitz
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[SL recently discussed Christos Tsolkias' piece in her recent post on left-wing politics. At the end she said: Tsiolkas’s essay impressed me so much that I decided to review the book from which it comes, Left Turn, which is edited by two prominent lefties, Antony Loewenstein and Jeff Sparrow. But then I thought better of [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Australia, Books, Economics, Feminism, Human/Civil rights, Media, Personal liberty, Philosophy, Politics, Society, The Left, The Right
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Tagged Adam Smith Institute, Antony Loewenstein, book review, Christos Tsiolkas, Dave Bath, Guest Post, Jeff Sparrow, Left Turn, Media, Politics, The Economist, The Left, The Right
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[SL: This great piece by our redoubtable admin, Jacques, came up on my facebook news feed this morning, and I thought it deserved wider prominence. Yes, it's about food and dieting, but gets there by means of a great deal of interesting industrial technology and very cool diagrams. In the meantime, I will be back [...]
[SL: Last night, I went to a debate hosted by the Edinburgh University Debates Union (sic), on the proposition 'this house supports same-sex marriage'. I was going to say that the Oxford Union it ain't, but that would be giving them too much credit. Let's just say that 'outstandingly crap' goes some way towards describing it. [...]
[LE: Something I often wonder about when studying history is: why do certain civilisations develop in certain ways, and others (which are equally technologically advanced, if not more so) do not develop in the same way? I suppose it's one of the reasons why I enjoy speculative fiction so much: speculative fiction plays a game [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in History, Law, Middle east, Religion
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Tagged brahmins, china, christianity, divinely ordained law, europe, global history, Guest Post, Hinduism, History, industrial revolution, islam, japan, Judaism, Lorenzo, Mesoamerica, Middle east, Sharia, sharia law, South East Asia, Western Civilisation
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November 8, 2011 – 7:47 am
[LE: Regular commenter Lorenzo has written a post on what the role of central banks ought to be in setting financial monetary policy goals. He starts with some historical examples, and continues on to contemporary central banks. Part of the issue (as I read his post) is that people must get some idea of where [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Economics, History
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Tagged Australian Reserve Bank, central banks, defalation, Economics, Great Depression, Guest Post, Inflation, information, Lorenzo, transaction costs, transparency, US Federal Reserve
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October 19, 2011 – 12:34 am
[SL: On September 18, I published a piece on the religious transformation currently going on in Europe, pointing out in passing that monotheism -- if one examines its geographic origins -- is almost as foreign to Europe as it is to India or China. In the post below, regular commenter Lorenzo has attempted to explain why: [...]
By skepticlawyer
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Also posted in Feminism, History, Law, Middle east, Religion, Skeptics
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Tagged 2005 Eurobarometer poll, Akhenaton, Byzantine Empire, cousin marriage, ibn Khaldun, islam, islamism, Kerry Greenwood, kinship, Mesopotamia, Mongols, monolatry, monotheism, Out of the Black Land, pastoralists, queer-hatred, Sassanids, social geography, Zoroastrianism
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October 5, 2011 – 3:39 pm
[SL: it is now compulsory, in order to practice in either England or Scotland, to study European Union Law (I managed to evade it at Oxford, just), which I suspect is misconceived, at least on the part of those who rather like the European Union. It exposes the bones of an organisation so badly run [...]
By skepticlawyer
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Also posted in Economics, England, scotland
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Tagged Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, default, democratic deficit, England, Euro, European Central Bank, European Union, Greece, scotland, SNP
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A wee request
In the last six months or so, we’ve received a number of requests to publish guest posts on this blog from people who are strangers to us. At first, I assumed the messages were spam, and just ignored them. However, over the last couple of months the volume has increased considerably and it’s become clear [...]