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pryvateer.news : Global online news portal for business success. Provides daily information on economics (and a little politics) necessary to identify and act on global business opportunities.
There's nothing like live music, but let's hope some of these kids listening to the Live Propaganda concerts have at least some skeptical abilities intact. The musicians and politicians pushing this feelgood event are quite hypocritical -- i.e., Al Gore's outrageous electricity usage, Madonna's prduction of 485 tons of carbon dioxide in four months, the idea of rich, Western musicians calling for policies that will ensure the enduring poverty of poor folks.
There are two main branches of the sciences of human action: praxeology and history. History is the collection and systematic arrangement of all the data of experience concerning human action. It deals with the concrete content of human action. It studies all human endeavors in their infinite multiplicity and variety and all individual actions with all their accidental, special, and particular implications. It scrutinizes the ideas guiding acting men and the outcome of the actions performed. It embraces every aspect of human activities. It is on the one hand general history and on the other hand the history of various narrower fields. There is the history of political and military action, of ideas and philosophy, of economic activities, of technology, of literature, art, and science, of religion, of mores and customs, and of many other realms of human life. There is ethnology and anthropology, as far as they are not a part of biology, and there is psychology as far as it is neither physiology nor epistemology nor philosophy. There is linguistics as far as it is neither logic nor the physiology of speech.[1]
In April 1979, 64 percent of the black citizens of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) lined up at the polls to vote in the first democratic election in the history of that southern African nation. Two-thirds of them supported Abel Muzorewa, a bishop in the United Methodist Church. He was the first black prime minister of a country only 4 percent white. Muzorewa’s victory put an end to the 14-year political odyssey of outgoing prime minister Ian Smith, the stubborn World War II veteran who had infamously announced in 1976, “I do not believe in black majority rule–not in a thousand years.” Fortunately for the country’s blacks, majority rule came sooner than Smith had in mind.
Think about those big scary trucks that sandwich you on the Great Canadian Highway. In Ontario those big scary trucks are now going to have speed limiters on them. The Ontario Government is mandating that the trucks will not be able to go above 105 clicks per hour. You now feel safer. How will you feel when some day you are driving a car that understands the meaning of the word torque and you're told by the government, in the name of fighting climate change, street racing and all other important issues that you can put the "pedal to the metal" but the puppy won't go any faster than 105. And please don't even think of screaming dinosaur words like personal freedom. You will be told, " Hey Dino. Park your macho in the museum. Your speeding days are history." I'm Charles Adler
Just about the most difficult lesson for first-year economics students, and sometimes graduate students, is that economic theory, and for that matter any scientific theory, is positive or non-normative. You might ask, "What's this business about positive and normative?" It's easy. Positive statements deal with what was, what is or what will be. Normative, or subjective, statements deal with what's good or bad, or what ought to be or should be. Confusing the two leads to considerable mischief.
BY WALTER E. WILLIAMS
The statement "Scientists cannot split the atom" is a positive statement. Why? If there's disagreement with the statement, there are facts to which we can appeal to settle the disagreement -- just visit Stanford University's linear accelerator and watch atoms being split. The statement "Scientists shouldn't split the atom" is a normative statement. Why? There are no facts whatsoever to which we can appeal to settle any disagreement. One person's opinion on the matter is just as good as another's.
How about the statement "Gasoline prices are unreasonable"? If some think they're reasonable while others don't, the argument can go on forever without resolution because there are no facts to which we can appeal to settle the disagreement. However, there are facts that tend to back up the statement: Buyers of gasoline prefer lower prices while sellers prefer higher prices.
When my research assistant and her husband took my wife and me to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, I was impressed when I heard her for the first time speak Chinese as she ordered food. My assistant was born and raised in China, so I should have been impressed that she spoke English. But I took that for granted because she always spoke English to me.
We all have a tendency to take for granted what we are used to, and to regard it as somehow natural or automatic -- and to be unduly impressed by what is unusual. Too many Americans take the United States for granted and are too easily impressed by what people in other countries say and do.
