Monthly Archives: April 2009
For A Debtor’s Prison
The entire financial crisis of the late 2000s as it has played out has sprung directly from one source. All the affected industries and bad assets have at their core one problem: loan default. The drop in home prices stemmed from people with subprime loans, people who should by all accounts not have had loans [...]Rest and Teleology
Though the expenditure of energy prevents it, physical teleology tends towards a state of rest (diffusion, the second law of thermodynamics). Though the addition of new information prevents it, economic teleology is always tending towards a final state of rest (equilibrium) with regard to prices (Mises, Human Action, Chapter 14.5). Though borrowing, language contact, and [...]The Ends of Faith
Throughout the history of the Church, there have been countless movements that alternately rise and quickly wither, or completely reform the Church. Names like Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards stick out as giants and innovators among the faith, while there are countless other people that perhaps conform better to modern sensibilities as they are, but are obscured by the passage of time (for example, no one regards Pelagius anymore, even though Pelagianism – the discounting of total depravity – has been silently recreeping into pop theology for over a century)…Trinity and Tritheism
I’ve said before that the term “Trinity” is itself a rather unhelpful term in describing God without further explanation. Though the doctrine fully expounded is entirely correct (there, I don’t want anyone accusing me of being a modalist now), the term taken as it is in mainstream Christianity can – and does – lead to misconstructions of the nature of God…The Effectiveness of Overthrow
Machiavelli, almost 500 years ago, had this keen insight on the apparent paradox that the stronger a government is, the easier it is to overthrow. He is of course speaking entirely from the perspective of conquering it as an outsider however – I intend to generalize the notion to include (and focus more on) the overthrow of the government from within…Objective or Subjective Value?
The foundation of liberal (in the classical sense) thought is freedom, for the purpose of the maximization of the happiness of man. Unfortunately happiness isn’t exactly a cut and dry concept. Libertarians of the Subjectivist school (Mises and his followers) believe happiness is maximized when man is free to do as he pleases: value, something’s [...]Do We Need a Government Healthcare System?
The American healthcare system is in trouble: costs are far too high. Not to the consumer – the average consumer pays only 16ยข on the dollar for medical expenses, after government and employers step in. The government pays for 50% of that, and even more for those on medicaid and medicare. The expenses are ballooning, far more quickly than many other areas of government expenditure (not including social security, of course). The government can’t pay a theoretical infinite sum in the indefinite future: something’s got to give. What are the causes of the ballooning costs?…