-Bruce Lee

Also be sure to check out Mark Canuel's The Shadow of Death: Literature, Romanticism, and the Subject of Punishment. Canuel argues that the romantics were critical in motivating social change away from corporal punishments. I wonder if his claim would also suffer criticism from a dose of the Martin via Levy-Peart Hypothesis. Smith and Bentham were some of the loudest critics against torture on economical / epistemic grounds.

and Steven Pinker on Violence:

HT Art Carden at Division of Labor

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issed by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the department of labor and the occupational safety and health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then log on to the internet which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic.com and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right.

This brief post made me think of Russ Roberts' general intention behind Invisible Heart - empathetic classical liberalism. Roberts' sort of describes the brilliance and majesty of iPencil stories, the power of choice and the wonderment of spontaneous orders. Isn't it all so obviously good? Dan Klein's friend Joy would certainly agree.

When we compare Roberts' project to this post (or something like it) - mainly an artistic device that communicates an opposing perspective - it holds another implication that the conclusions of social science are merely matters of interpretation. In that sense social science is no science at all.

At this point the debate almost inevitably appears empirical. From which source is the majority of social order stemming from - voluntary exchange or governmental design and prodding? Can we measure this, if yes then how do we know that we're doing it right?

Robert's approach wins here, his ongoing collection and restating the beauty of iPencil stories gives his readers a vision as to the infinite complexity and size of the economy.

I don't think secession type movements can sustain on ideology alone. So I'll ignore it momentarily.

My first impression is that Tiebout competition would drive "good" results. Regardless of whether the heads of such movements, "get the rules right," increasing the supply of governance should drive down price. Leaders would want a greater tax base through economic prosperity. Rational expectations plus economic freedom index shazaam! global prosperity.

That's probably a best case scenario. More likely:

Whether the growth / transition periods of these islands was fast or slow would determine their sustainability. It might help to think of young states, post war contexts, post soviet contexts, post natural disaster contexts... geez! wonder why this sparked your interest Pete?

My guess is these experiments would be stuck in a sort of horse race between being captured by existing interests on the one hand and failing to develop on the other. Much like the market place, certain policy baskets can systematically crowd out particular sectors - inexpensive private schools, small scale charity, why not sizes and or types of governments? Maybe existing states are benefiting from economies of scale so these newbies wont be able to provide competitive public goods packages?

My guess is that the market is dynamic in service offerings enough and debilitating in taxation and regulation enough currently that some industry more probably some slough of industries would find some significant gains from moving to a stateless society. Server hosting has been one to date, so were many financial serves essentially - Cayman islands bank accounts and the like.

If small scale experiments had long periods of developing then mechanisms to increase the scale and quicken the pace of development could be ensured through constitutional foresight. But in such a case owners of current capital would have to share the role as Kirznerian entrepreneurs. One could only expect innovation in government when the owners of existing dominant capital stocks also discovered the opportunities for improvement. But only in so far as those benefits of innovation outpace their current benefits gained through the status quo.

Since larger scale sea-steads or sea steads that could develop more quickly would presumably have a better chance of survival than perhaps large scale corporations would fund such projects, such a dominant vested interest in the original stages would likely try to insulate its corporate interests. If firm zero that was attracted to seasteadia was Microsoft and they fronted a bunch of money to build infrastructure etc. I doubt they would be honky dorey if Apple was the next invite.

In this sense the world the world would look a lot like it does now, but hopefully wealthier.

The Supreme Court doesn't care about criminal justice

Calculation problems in the war on drugs

Abolish life without parole sentences!

Is Michael vick being over punished?

Crime rates in major cities have dropped. Is deterrence working?

Just to be clear I explicitly told the reporters during my interview that I thought federal and large scale government involvement post-Katrina had done more harm than good. The successful rebuilding and know resilient endurance through the financial crises that New Orleans has experienced is a testament to the power of markets and capitalism.

Yes, the world's poor are striving to better their lot. But what they really need isn't small-scale entrepreneurship and micro-credit. It's employment in the formal sector, and access to international credit markets. What they need, in short, is globalization. Either they need to come to us, or our institutions need to go to them.

In my experience this attention to funneling the bottom classes into the formal sector is explicitly mentioned as a primary goal of microfinance programs, but this leaves a few very important clarifying questions:

1. The typical Austro-Virginian political economy critique: do micro-finance programs have the knowledge or the incentives to accomplish this goal?

2. Do we (economists skeptical of microfinance) or they (microfinance proponents) have a good accounting of the fundamental causes for why these lower class populations are stuck in the illegitimate - dare one say "black market" - sector?

3. Is there a full accounting of all or at least most of the obstacles that may arise with the application of new micro-finance policies?

I share Caplan's general point mostly because I think the answers to number one aren't good because most of the support for microfinance programs are coming from the public or quasi public sectors. I think the answer to number two is a mild yes for we but a resounding no for they. And the response to three is dependent on the answers for one and two.

The total volume is so massive we couldn't consume that top 10% if we tried with all our might... Friedman's problem is that he ignores the countervailing effects of population and wealth. Lots of creative people serving a big market of rich consumers is a recipe for progress - and that is precisely what see we all around us.

On this note I highly recommend: Rip: A Remix Manifesto.

a public school teacher in our congregation had been encouraged by the School Board to highlight the "fact" that overpopulation is our #1 environmental problem as part of the Earth Day curriculum. That this is demonstrably false doesn't seem to trouble anyone. In the face of compelling evidence, people cling nonetheless to environmentalist mythology.

Behavioral economists are always so worried that we under-estimate the likelihood of catastrophe's because of cognitive biases and inabilities to deal with very big and very small numbers. But the political sphere seems to have force fitted this issue so that the bias runs the other way.