5 years ago
April 2019
“Weed, and the poor, undocumented immigrants who often bring it with them, no longer cross the border at the rate they once did. This decline has virtually nothing to do with expensive border security innovations and it has everything to do with legalization in the United States. If it were any other industry, you imagine the president would be happy: when it comes to weed, customers prefer to buy American weed.”
David Birra
“The Wall won’t end weed smuggling at the border. Legalization will.”
“It’s just accounting. If you spend more than you earn, someone is giving you a loan. If the US imports computers from China more than it exports soybeans to China, “we” have to provide good-looking IOUs, e.g. engraved portraits of Ben Franklin that cost 12.5 cents each to print. For one of Ben’s portraits we get $100 worth of computers. Pretty good, huh?”
Deirdre Nansen-McCloskey
“Stop worrying and learn to love trading with China”
15 years ago
April 2009
“In the 1880s, when a French crime fighter named Alphonse Bertillon pioneered the mug shot as a unique form of portraiture, the photographs he took were expected to do one thing: help establish an individual’s identity in a a time when driver’s licenses, fingerprint files, and Facebook pages didn’t exist. Today, mugshots are still used to identify, but we also want them to punish, determine, and entertain. Unfortunately, they do such a good job that we remain indifferent to the way But while we gawk at the haunted eyes of a Midwestern meth addict or the haunted hair of Nick Nolte, cops across America are using virtual galleries of criminals to normalize the idea that the government has the right to punish yourself without worrying about convicting you of a crime.”
Greg Beato
“Criminal truth”
30 years ago
April 1994
“Feminists who today draw attention to the lack of women’s rights in the Muslim world are right, but they overlook the fact that men also do not have such rights. Men may indeed be free to oppress women at home or on the job of work, but may themselves be oppressed by others acting with the authority of the State, as David Pryce-Jones has extensively documented in The Closed Circle, in the Arab world the weak are at the mercy of the strong, and in a politics based on power women are destined to be the losers.”
Tom Bethell
“The mother of all rights”
40 years ago
April 1984
“If lovers of freedom must judge foreign policy by the same standards as domestic policy, we cannot adopt the idea that a good end justifies any means. And from the perspective of limited constitutional government, it is difficult to see any principle that justifies the ‘sending the United States armed forces around the world to ensure security that of other people freedom. Since the vast majority of governments systematically violate the rights of their citizens, such a standard would amount to carte blanche for intervention everywhere.”
Robert Poole
“Defend everyone?”
45 years ago
April 1979
“Everyone agrees that we need to abandon the wave of fossil fuels of the last two centuries, not so much because we are running out of them, but because of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The dynamics of the process are poorly understood at the moment. present , but we have some reason to believe that continued dependence on fossil fuels could, in another two centuries, increase the average temperature of the biosphere by six to eight degrees Celsius due to the greater opacity of the atmosphere to infrared radiation (the so-called greenhouse effect) .”
Pietro Vajk
“No More Judgment Day”