De skulle hellere bare eliminere filmstøtte generelt. Så kunne vi slippe for at blive tvunget til at betale til noget, som vi ikke kan lide, og som bruger 3,5 kr. i filmstøtte per krone, som den tjener ind i udlandet.

Det er simpelthen for dumt, hvis vælgerne falder for dette. En populistisk idé fra starten, og det kunne ikke lade sig gøre juridisk eller praktisk – men det skal ikke afholde Socialdemokraterne i at holde vælgerne for nar ved at gøre det til national politik. Vælgerne beder jo selv om det.

Er jeg i øvrigt den eneste, der er træt af at se en smilende og fuldt sminket Helle Thorning, i et smigrende lys, taget lidt nedefra, hver gang Socialdemokraterne gør den mindste ting?

Economics and Happiness

Bluematter via Marginal Revolution:

Bluematter thinks learning economics has made him happier:

1. I cherish my consumer surplus. I value most of the stuff I buy way more than what I have to pay for them; vanilla ice cream makes me happy beyond belief, and the same is true for the music of Dream Theater and the (soon to be purchased) Apple iphone. And what am I asked to pay for them? Peanuts.

2. I cherish my producer surplus. I am getting paid way, way more than the salary that would make me indifferent between supplying labour and staying at home.

3. I never have regrets: I did the best I could given the information available to me at the time. Judging I could have done better using information I acquired at a later date makes as much sense as regretting the existence of gravity. On a related topic, I understand the irrelevance of sunk costs.

4. While I do care for my welfare in relative terms, my welfare in absolute terms looms large in my utility function – and, boy, look how its value has been growing.

5. The selfishness of my fellow human beings does not make me anxious or depressed. Adam Smith (or was it Mandeville?) taught me that humans, selfish as they are, can make happy societies. And perhaps more to the point, they can make me happy.

And from the comments on Marginal Revolution:

I am fairly confident that I would be significantly happier if I had never switched my major to economics in college. I certainly would be more ignorant if I had opted to stay with government, but at least it would have been a blissful ignorance.

Perhaps my sentiment is related to having gone to Mason where a strong emphasis is placed on destroying your soul. Well, not really. However, an econ course load at Mason does place heavy emphasis on and open your eyes to the fact that politicians are no less corruptible than anyone else (and probably more so), voters prefer terrible policies (and far too often act on those preferences) and government does more harm than good (especially when it makes a big show about how much they are helping) all of which (and so many more examples exist) are a tremendous departure from the life-view a public school education creates.

Blandt andet af de grunde, som jeg refererer nedenunder, er 180graders optimisme på liberales vegne gal. Tror de virkelig, at 13.000 nogensinde ville gå på gaden i protest mod skatter? Kun 4.000 kunne tage sig sammen til at skrive under på Liberalisternes vælgererklæring. Forbavsende få stemmer med fødderne ved at flytte til udlandet. Desuden er de fleste borgerlige/liberale vælgere (eller rettere dem, der reelt kunne være det) alt for integrerede i deres arbejdsliv og alt for afskårne fra højere, mere flyvske debatter i samfundet. De har andre ting at tænke på. De er apolitiske. Det sidste er ikke en dårlig ting – det er netop hvad liberale vil have.

Men hvordan apolitiserer man samfundet, hvis man er apolitisk? Det er en fundamental ulempe, som vi har. Hvordan kan vi politisere de apolitiske til at kæmpe politisk for apolitiseringen?

Civil anholdelse på Rådhuspladsen.

Mere her.

“[P]issing off the Guevaras is small potatoes indeed. Unless of course millions of lefties around the world read of this outrage and exclaim with one voice: “That does it. Not the Guevaras. How dare they silence these hereditary paragons of revolutionary virtue. We will now support the USA against the Islamists until the Islamists are utterly crushed. Then we will sort out the USA.” That would change things a bit.”

samizdata.net via instapundit.com. Also including what must be the most incredible association ever: “the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom”. If they can do it, might libertarians also, after all?

Partiløs

For pokker:

Statsminister Anders Fogh Rasmussens (V) beslutning om at udskrive et lynvalg fanger partiet Liberalisterne på det forkerte ben. Det nystiftede parti har kun fået indsamlet 5000 underskrifter i forsøget på at blive opstillingsberettiget og når derfor ikke at komme på stemmesedlen den 13. november.

Jeg ved virkelig ikke, hvad jeg skal (brev)stemme på! Hvad gør en liberal i dagens Danmark, må jeg høre?

At Liberalisterne har det svært som parti er ikke underligt. Partier er i sagens natur kollektivistiske, hvilket strider mod liberales inderste overbevisninger. (Man kan også formulere det som at logikken for kollektiv handlen især ramme liberale). Desuden er der problemet med, at liberale netop ønsker at depolitisere verdenen – og at gå ind i politik for at gøre dette virker mod-intuitivt for disse. Den eneste reelle mulighed et liberalt parti has (sans en generelt liberal befolkning) er at basere sig på én frontfigur, hvis hjerte brænder for sagen, men som samtidig har al den tid og penge (og karisma) i verden til sådan at gå ind i politik.

Economists as the vanguard of free market advocacy? Well, in a way

Some statistics that might shock some people:

We surveyed American Economic Association members and asked their views on 18 specific forms of government activism. We find that about 8 percent of AEA members can be considered supporters of free-market principles, and that less than 3 percent may be called strong supporters.

[A]lmost all scholarly free-market supporters are economists. [...] [F]ree-market supporters are practically nonexistent in anthropology, history, political science, and sociology.

This is according to a survey published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. I am too afraid to consider what the result would’ve been in Denmark…

Other interesting parts of the article:

Expert economists often reach a conclusion in favor of liberalization. [...] [I]n many areas of microeconomic regulation, the expert economists who express a policy judgment do largely reach a general conclusion about the desirability of liberalization. Consider the case of economists’ views on the Food and Drug Administration. In our survey of AEA members, the average (economist) score on “pharmaceutical market regulation by the Food and Drug Administration” was 2.0, or “support mildly.” However, the economists who study and judge FDA regulation very clearly come down in favor of liberalization. [...]This general pattern holds for many issues[...].

Ikke bare skal de tilsyneladende ikke betale for et nyt Ungdomshus, de skal ikke engang betale for deres ugerninger.

Det ansvarsløse samfund.

I wish they’d expand this logic to other areas.