shanedk

This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately as we live through the COVID-19 pandemic. What's flabbergasting to me is that I see a lot of people claiming that this somehow disproves libertarianism and proves we need government. And it's flabbergasting because, as has been incredibly well-established, this only got as bad as it did because of government screw-ups, from the initial Chinese coverups to the WHO, as well as the CDC's screwed-up testing. But I don't want to talk about the screw-ups. I want to talk about how government interference in medicine prevented us from having the tools we need to mitigate and possibly even cure COVID-19. It's interesting that, from what I've seen, no one has even tried the whole canard about how our founding fathers never could have foreseen this situation when they wrote about our right to peaceably assemble. And I think it's because, even though no one says it, they deep down know the truth: our founders were very familiar with

By viewer request, I'm posting a transcript of my 2015 video "Why Minimum Wage Proponents Are Pseudoscientists." One small problem: the folder on my archive drive that houses the source files got corrupted, so I don't have access to the original graphics. I'll try to describe them as best as I can, but any confusion can be cleared up by watching the original video. So the Minimum Wage debate continues unabated. It doesn't matter that every school of economic thought except the Keynesians agree that Minimum Wage destroys jobs for the very people it's supposed to help. It doesn't matter that it's by far the consensus of labor economists. And it doesn't matter than I've completely destroyed the research showing small Minimum Wage increases having no disemployment effects. Why? Because to lift a phrase from James Randi, they're unsinkable ducks. They're just pseudoscientists peddling their bogosity for the sake of their own political gain, going against every principle of science along

By popular demand, this is a transcript of my oft-referenced video, "Libertarianism and Property Rights from First Principles." Here's the thing about logic: it's completely objective. There is no "my logic" or "your logic"; there's just logic. So if you have a logical position, then it's an objective argument that stems from First Principles. First Principles are foundational propositions and axioms that do not have to be defended. As long as your argument is purely from First Principles, meaning that it's linked back to these First Principles with no breaks in the chain and no fallacious reasoning, then you don't actually need empirical e