Steven Horwitz
Aeon J. Skoble
Aeon J. Skoble
He writes:"Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. No one wants an average neurosurgeon or even an average carpenter, but when it comes time to vest a man or woman with more power and responsibility than any person has held in human history, Americans say they want a regular guy, someone just like themselves….This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism."
Just so. I wish I had written that.
Mark Brady
Wendy McElroy
And the smart just keeps coming...
The San Francisco Chronicle reports, The boyfriend of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's unwed, pregnant daughter will join the family of the Republican vice presidential candidate at the GOP convention in St. Paul, Minn. Levi Johnston's mother said her 18-year-old son left Alaska on Tuesday morning to join the Palin family at the convention where Sen. John McCain will officially receive the Republican nomination for president. The boy's mother, Sherry Johnston, said there had been no pressure put on her son to marry 17-year-old Bristol Palin and the two teens had made plans to wed before it was known she was pregnant."This is just a bonus," Johnston said.
This is exactly what Palin needs to do -- embrace the young man as family and publicly glow about the expected grandchild as wonderful news. Make the liberals (and not the conservatives) be the ones to cry out"OMG, a teenager had sex! The horror! The horror!" Make them look petty and ridiculous, anti-family and anti-forgiveness. Let them take the rap for politically exploiting the sex life of a 17-year-old; let them be the ones to smirk with glee or foam with faux outrage over a child that is wanted and welcomed. Meanwhile, as long as Palin's daughter carries the fetus to term and marries the father, will show compassion and applaud the manner in which a commonplace -- albeit unfortunate --
I wouldn't be surprised if Palin literally embraces Johnston on the GOP convention stage. What a photo op that would be! Not that Palin needs to draw media attention by dangling enticements. The woman has accomplished a near-impossible feat. She's made Obama 2nd-page news.
Jane S. Shaw
I’m pleased to be a part of the Liberty and Power blog. You won’t see me writing much about Obama or Palin, though. I’m pretty much tone deaf with respect to politics.
Policy is different. My obsession (and also my job) is the reform of higher education, which I pursue as president of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. We all know that campuses lack an appreciation of liberty--of free markets, limited government, even the rule of law. They go to extreme lengths in the other direction, lauding Marxism in the guise of social justice, women’s studies, and globalization.
That’s one of the things I want to change, and I’d like your help. An organization called the Association of Core Texts and Courses is a non-ideological group that fosters the teaching of great books in colleges and universities. Okay, the group is a little timid--the leadership is uncomfortable with the term great books because of its dead white male “baggage,” so they don’t use it. But its members do love classics, they are enthusiastic teachers, and at their annual meeting every paper is supposed to include a discussion of a single work along with anything else that the author writes about.
At the last meeting (April 2008 in Plymouth, Massachusetts) there were great presentations (including a panel on science and the humanities led in Liberty Fund style by Jim Otteson); there were also a few clunkers. But here’s the point: I saw little about the classic writers on liberty--no John Stuart Mill, no Adam Smith, no Hayek. Helping these enthusiastic faculty members understand that the civilization they value is based on a tradition of liberty could have major ramifications. So--please join me in a panel or make your own proposal for a session on libertarian thinkers at the next meeting in April in Memphis.
Aeon J. Skoble
That's all true, except the first part. Sadly, most Americans can't see through the smoke and mirrors of most politicians' economic schemes, don't understand any of the relationships described above, and continue to vote for more of the same.
Wendy McElroy
Like everyone else, I was stunned by John McCain's choice of VP: Sarah Palin. I fall on the"stroke of brilliance" side of the debate on whether his choice was wisdom or folly. Why? With one announcement, McCain changed the election dialogue -- something he needed to do because the conversation wasn't going at all well for Republicans. He established a wow factor for his campaign; the spotlight shifted from Barack; the evangelical GOP base consolidated and opened its wallet; women voters are likely to be more receptive; the Dems are scrabbling on exactly how to lambast Palin. Even the mud being flung at Palin is not likely to stick. Her 17-year-old daughter's pregnancy is not alienating the conservatives who are applauding the daughter's decision to carry the child to term and to marry the father. Meanwhile, the liberal criticism re: the pregnancy revealing Palin's hypocrisy about teens abstaining from sex is strange; as one blogger commented,"[it is] as misguided as asking a non-violent person why her spouse is violent toward her." And, even if the scandal about her arranging to have her brother-in-law fired from his government post is true, the apparent circumstances are such that Palin may become a heroine in the eyes of other women. Those circumstances apparently include the man's tendency to brutally beat Palin's sister. As for her inexperience...frankly, I think that is a selling point. She is not an insider, she is a fresh voice and a new force. What's Barack been running on and for: CHANGE.
BTW, I am not exactly what you'd call"a fan" of Sarah Palin. Nor of McCain or the GOP. But McCain is making some wise moves. Another example...his decision to hold a minimalist GOP convention and to tour the expected devastation of Hurricane Gustav instead of being"man of the hour" in Minneapolis. This move accomplished several important goals:
1) Bush and Cheney had an acceptable excuse to NOT attend the Convention and, so, kept a salutary distance away from McCain,
2) the Republicans gave the appearance of putting the American people before party politics;
3) the much, much smaller GOP Convention could not be unfavorably compared by the media to the massive Dem-fest; the almost empty convention center looked like an expression of compassion rather than of unpopularity;
4) on his tour, McCain both acted and looked Presidential; he was"on site" to take credit for the vast improvement over Katrina in terms of co-ordination, police presence in New Orleans etc.; 5) objectionable aspects of the GOP Convention almost entirely escaped media attention -- e.g. the platform's resolution to ban abortion with no exceptions for a woman's health or rape.
As unbelievable as it seems after 8 years of Bush, McCain could win. The world could get Frick instead of Frack and still be f*cked in the process.
Mark Brady
Don't miss today's column which discusses the medicalization of everyday life. Although Goldacre doesn't mention the topic of intellectual property, at least not here, it seems to me that pharmaceutical patents have played a crucial role in this process. In any event, read the article and don't miss his account of how the golden age of medicine has creaked to a halt (see below).
"Before 1935 doctors were basically useless. We had insulin, morphine for pain relief - a drug with superficial charm, at least - and we could do operations fairly cleanly, although with huge doses of anaesthetics, because we hadn't yet sorted out well-targeted muscle-relaxant drugs. Then suddenly, between the 1930s and the 1970s, science poured out an almost constant stream of miracle cures.
"Everything we associate with modern medicine happened in that time: antibiotics, dialysis, transplants, intensive-care units, heart surgery, every drug you've ever heard of, and more. For people who were ill, the difference was spectacular. If you got TB in the 1920s you died, pale and emaciated, in the style of a romantic poet. If you got TB in the 1970s, then in all likelihood you would live to a ripe old age. You might have to take rifampicin and isoniazid for months on end - they're not nice drugs, and the side-effects make your eyeballs and urine turn pink - but if all goes well you will live to see inventions unimaginable in your childhood.
"Times have changed. The pharmaceutical industry is in trouble: the golden age of medicine has creaked to a halt, the low-hanging fruit of medical research has all been harvested, and the industry is rapidly running out of new drugs. Fifty "novel molecular entities" a year were registered in the 1990s, but now it's down to 20, and many of those are just copies of other companies' products, changed only enough to justify a new patent. So the story of "disease mongering" goes like this: because they cannot find new treatments for the diseases we already have, the pill companies have instead had to invent new diseases for the treatments they already have.
"Recent favourites include social anxiety disorder (a new use for SSRI antidepressant drugs), female sexual dysfunction (a new use for Viagra in women), the widening diagnostic boundaries of "restless leg syndrome", and of course "night eating syndrome" (another attempt to sell SSRI medication, bordering on self-parody) to name just a few: all problems, in a very real sense, but perhaps not necessarily the stuff of pills, and perhaps not all best viewed in reductionist biomedical terms. In fact, you might consider that reframing intelligence, loss of libido, shyness and tiredness as medical pill problems is a crass, exploitative, and frankly disempowering act."
