February 2012
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Intranational intertemporal introspective...
American culture of 1963, the thursday when JFK was assassinated, was a far more monolithic one than we know of today. How often do we consider this?
“On this Thursday, November 21, television’s prime-time lineup included The Flintstones, The Donna Reed Show, My Three Sons, Perry Mason, and The Perry Como Show, but it was the fourteenth-rated show, Dr. Kildare, that made Time...
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A lesson in economics from Hong Kong
It is widely agreed upon by independent sources that Hong Kong is one of the most, if not the most, free economy in the world. As such, let us review a few numbers:
Population: 7 Million; Working population: 3.75 Million
A single person can earn HK$108,000 a year (about US$14,000) before owing any tax
a married person with a dependent spouse can earn HK$216,000 (US$28,000) tax-free.
For...
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“The electors of a ‘legislature’, whose members are mainly concerned...”
– Freidrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, volume III (1981)
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January 2012
27 posts
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“A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be...”
– John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
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“The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
– Japanese Emperor Hirohito, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
My vote for understatement of the 20th century
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Flight anecdote
I flew over part of North Korea a couple hours ago on my way to Shanghai. It’s night time here, so of course I couldn’t see anything on the ground. It truly is a pitch black country at night. There’s something truly disturbing about that: a landmass that is also a shrouded prison, defined by its absence of life. It’s an incredible sight.
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December 2011
6 posts
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November 2011
8 posts
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The boldness of Igor Stravinsky
All the excitement [of Igor Stravinsky’s early career] was nothing against the impact of Le Sacre du printemps [The Rite of Spring], which had its premiere on May 29, 1913 [when he was thirty]. Stravinsky had conceived the idea for it while working on Firebird. ‘I dreamed of a scene of pagan ritual in which a chosen sacrificial virgin danced herself to death.’ Work on Le Sacre was dropped for...
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“‘People think Columbus dropped off the Pilgrims and sailed home.’...”
– Tony Horwitz, A Voyage Long and Strange
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Extraordinarily high-yield savings account →
If you open a floating interest rate deposit (savings) account at this bank, in Mongolian Tugriks, you earn a 13.44% yearly interest rate. If you open it in USD, it’s 6% - which is still vastly superior to any account you can open in the US.
Bit of advice: so many American banks are actually insolvent, and when the central bank interest rate eventually rises, it wil become readily apparent....
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“The Constitution of this Republic should make special provision for medical...”
– Benjamin Rush, MD
Signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Father of American Medicine
AMA, take note.
October 2011
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“Peter Pan opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre on 27 December 1904, the...”
– Piers Dudgeon, Neverland, pg. 176-177
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A second list: maxims and quips
This go around I didn’t feel it inherently necessarily to title these.
1. It is often implied by statists that there is a pie that has to be divided up, that the ‘rich’ must attain their wealth at the expense of the poor. It is often said outright by free market proponents that to grow wealth, the pie must be made bigger. These are both incorrect. The truth is that the economy...