Surviving a Week Without News

rsz_110712_fb_napAbout a month ago, I took a trip with my sister to Chicago and New Orleans by train. It was a fun trip, and we learned a lot about each other by being packed into a box effectively for nearly a day thrice, and then the cheap airbnbs we stayed in. Away from our lives and our mother. Since my laptop died November 2015, I have been reliant on a smartphone mainly for internet access, and starting a few months after that, a desktop computer. That means no more laptop on the road. You can do almost anything on a modern smartphone that you can on a computer; its just more difficult. Because of this, and not wanting to get bogged down reading the dozens of articles from Drudge and elsewhere that I usually do, rather than enjoy my trip, I simply gave up. I read a few things here and there, but mostly focused on the trip and my journal.

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Journalist Discovers the Difference Between Central Planning and Real World Experience

439px-ludwig_von_misesIn 1929, our intellectual forefather Ludwig von Mises penned a lengthy tome about how socialism does not work. Not only does it not work in practice, he noted, it does not even work in theory, as some people say. The fundamental premise of his argument is that socialism cannot allocate resources effectively. Only the price system of the market (capitalism) can do that. No one person or committee of persons can appropriate resources for millions of people. In fact, even within a family unit, there is a good bit of friction when making such decisions. Scaling that up any further causes problems. The only thing that really can be done is provide a very basic distribution, but even that quickly becomes a logistical nightmare when scaled up too high.

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Where Were You People the Past 100 Years?

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CNNs Wolf Blitzer

There should be two groups in the United States that must be ripping their hair out in a fury: Trump supporters and libertarians. Now, thats not to conflate the two groups. There is more overlap than libertarians like to admit, however, they are quite distinct. In any case, both have to be frustrated with the media coverage of the new president. Trump supporters are angry that the media will not let go of its deranged pathological hatred of the man, and libertarians wonder where this skeptical media has been.

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