I have devoted a fair amount of coverage recently to protests in Spain, Italy and other places. The US has seen massive protests in Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, and now Oregon. The protests in the US and Europe have a common theme “gimme gimme gimme”. Everyone wants something, and they want to take it from someone else to get it. In the US, the SEIU is right at the top of the list in wanting to pick the pockets of everyone else for their own self-serving benefit.

The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim.

‎”A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that … it gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

To hate is always injurious to the soul. To hate because another person or class of people has done well for itself compounds the injury. But that is precisely what policies that survive solely to punish people for making money, or for living well, are really all about. It’s been going on for a very long time. It strikes me as a form of institutionalized immorality. Under ideal conditions, our law should elicit from us the best that we have to offer, always appealing to the highest impulses of our nature. Policies that harm people solely because they are winners in life appeal to the lowest impulses in our nature.

There is another name for declining manufacturing employment. It is called technological progress. Technology makes workers more productive. Simply, we can make more and more stuff with fewer and fewer people as time goes on. This is what progress entails. Not that long ago, almost all humans were involved in the agriculture business. Now, only a tiny percentage (in the developed world) produce food, and even if we count all people involved in the production and sale of food, including restaurants, it is not that high. Do we refer to this as a decline in the food industry? Only poor, undeveloped countries have large agricultural sectors.

In 2003, an I.M.F. study of itself, coauthored by Harvard economics professor Ken Rogoff, concluded that its policies rarely work. Countries that follow its economic reform plans (in exchange for conscripted capital) often suffer a “collapse in growth rates and significant financial crises,” with open currency markets merely serving to “amplify the effects of various shocks.” So the I.M.F.’s continued existence is a scandal in itself. Its ostensible justification for existing ended with the collapse of Bretton Woods anyway. It is run by people who earn bloated, tax-free salaries that are much higher than they could ever earn if their salaries were based on their own productivity in the market. It’s like the post office, only sexier. And like the post office, its policies seldom work.

I think our destination is neither utopia nor dystopia nor status quo, but protopia. Protopia is a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. Protopia is much much harder to visualize.

There are lots of services like this–I’m generally in favor of the government being the single-source provider of police and military, for example. On the other hand, I don’t want to get them into the business of manufacturing police cars or fighter planes.

This is really the slaughtering of the future of a generation, and it is wholly artificial, due mostly to wage restrictions, payroll taxes, regulations on business start ups, and mandated benefits – all of which have keep hiring to its lowest possible levels during this “recovery.” Overeducated, underemployed, and with no marketable skills: the U.S. looks more and more than a European-style welfare state.