Epithets like “fascist” and “imperialist stooge” became common currency, along with unbridled expressions of tribal chauvinism.
A 1972 study showed that the amount of pollution per mile traveled by horse was a hundred times the amount of pollution per mile traveled by automobile.27 Since the cars produced in later years have had reduced pollution levels, the disparity today would be even greater. It should also be noted that the replacement of horses by automobiles made it possible to “restore more than 80 million acres of forestlands that had once been cleared for horse pasture.”28.
Nothing is more complex than avoiding the obvious.
The built-in excuse has become as standard in discussions of black crime as it is unsubstantiated, except by peer consensus among the intelligentsia. The phrase “troubled youth” is a common example of the unsubstantiated but built-in excuse, since those who use that phrase usually feel no need to offer any specific evidence about the specific individuals they are talking about, who may be creating big trouble for others, while enjoying themselves in doing so.
Engels said: “what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.
In its pursuit of justice for a segment of society, in disregard of the consequences for society as a whole, what is called “social justice” might more accurately be called anti-social justice, since what consistently gets ignored or dismissed are precisely the costs to society.
People who have already been out in the real world, practicing for years whatever their particular specialty might be, have some basis for determining which things are relevant enough to go into a curriculum to teach those who follow. The idea that students can determine relevance in advance is one of the many counterproductive notions to come out of the 1960s.
The next time you see a bum leaving drug needles in a park where children play or urinating in the street, you are seeing your tax dollars at work and the end result of the vision of the anointed.
There cannot be a law-abiding society if no one knows in advance what law they are to abide by, but must wait for judges to create ex post facto legal rulings based on “evolving standards” rather than known rules.
Moreover, even in the absence of accumulating personal experience, it was difficult to believe that soaring murder statistics reflected simply better record keeping, since it had always been hard to ignore a dead body.
Just as price fluctuations allocate scarce resources which have alternative uses, price controls which limit those fluctuations reduce the incentives for individuals to limit their own use of scarce resources desired by others.
Piketty’s crucial misstep is verbally converting a fluid process over time into a rigid structure, with a more or less permanent top one percent living isolated from the rest of society that is supposedly subjected to their control or influence. It is a vision divorced from demonstrable facts, however consonant it may be with prevailing preconceptions.
In short, rent control reduces the rate of housing turnover.
Japan, newly emerging on the world scene in the late nineteenth century, sought its science and engineering in Scotland.
That educators who have repeatedly failed to do what they are hired to do, and trained to do, should take on sweeping roles as amateur psychologists, sociologists, and social philosophers seems almost inexplicable – except that they are doing it with other people’s money and experimenting on other people’s children. There.
In short, some of the least qualified students, taught by the least qualified professors in the lowest quality courses supply most American public school teachers.
Much of what is taught in our schools and colleges today seeks to break down traditional values, and replace them with more fancy and fashionable notions, of which “a duty to die” is just one.
The virtually unanimous support of bilingualism among Hispanic activists, “leaders” and “spokesmen” – in contrast to Hispanic parents – is understandable only in terms of the self-interest of those activists, “leaders” and “spokesmen,” who benefit from the preservation of a separate ethnic enclave, preferably alienated from the larger society.
The prevalence and power of a vision is shown, not by what its evidence or logic can prove, but precisely by its exemption from any need to provide evidence or logic – by the number of things that can be successfully asserted because they fit the vision, without having to meet the test of fitting the facts.
Among the precepts that Andrew Jackson’s mother taught him were never to sue anybody for slander or for assault and battery: “Always settle them cases yourself.