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Libertarian Civil Rights
The recent clamor over Rand Paul’s comments on the Civil Rights Act were a useful indicator of one of the problems with the libertarian approach to society. Paul was clear, in retrospect, that he supported the Civil Rights Act, but he was also clear that he was concerned about its effect on business owners. Any…
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Destructors
The Go language does not have destructors. Instead, it has two more dynamic mechanisms. A defer statement may be used to run a function on function exit or when processing a panic. A finalizer may be used to run a function when the garbage collector finds that a block of memory has nothing pointing to…
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Stay Home
I’m puzzled by people who travel to the few remaining parts of our world that are untouched by people, write about how beautiful they are, and encourage us to do what we can to save them in their natural state. The way to save untouched nature is to not go there at all (we could…
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Market Complexity
The stock market gyrations last Thursday may be a nice example of the issue of complexity I’ve discussed in the past. When the financial markets are too hard to understand, failure modes become unpredictable. Because there is profit in complexity, or at least the chance of profit, we can expect more of this going forward.…
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Government spending
Greg Mankiw, a well known economist, has a nice picture of projected U.S. government spending in 2020. Refer to this when you hear somebody say that we can balance the budget by eliminating waste. I believe that this picture does not cover things like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which the Bush administration funded through…