Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011
Christopher Hitchens has died. Here is a brief profile at Vanity Fair. Here his is at his best in this rousing, witty, and impassioned defense of free speech:
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Politics
Subprime mortgage crisis — history flowchart
Here is a simplified flowchart, developed for my business ethics courses, reflecting my understanding of subprime mortgages’ contribution to the crisis. Let me emphasize that this is only about the subprime contribution of the overall crisis. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac enabled much spillover into non-subprime mortgage sectors, government-set capital requirements and other regulations enabled
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Deregulation? The Federal Register’s size
Following up on my post entitled “When was the financial sector deregulated?” Another crude measure of regulation or deregulation is to count the number of pages in the U.S. Federal Register. The Federal Register is the government’s daily publication of new and proposed rules. Some of the rules are trivial and some have large impact;
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More: Do conservatives really value economic liberty?
Some do, sort of. But most of its major representatives do not. Another example is GOP hopeful Newt Gingrich. In his 1984 book, Window of Opportunity, Gingrich attacks laissez-faire and proposes what he calls “opportunity society conservatism”: “The opportunity society calls not for a laissez-faire society in which the economic world is a neutral jungle
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When was the financial sector deregulated?
One popular meme is that the financial crisis was caused by deregulation in the banking and financial sectors. Accordingly, suggest the memists, free markets should take the blame and more government regulation is the solution. When did this deregulation take place? One measure of the degree of regulation is how much the federal government spends
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What is the OWS complaint?
The philosophy of Left-ish people is that economic decisions should be political, not private — made by government rather than by the market. Lefties also believe that public interest, not profitability, should be the criterion. The response to the financial crisis was: a) made in the political sector, b) to help firms that were not
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My upcoming lectures at Universidad Francisco Marroquín
From November 3 to 6, I will be giving an invited series of lectures and seminars (nine hours worth of them!) at the Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala. My general themes will be entrepreneurship, ethics, philosophy, and political economy. The times titles of my various talks are as follows. Open Lecture (Thursday, November 3): “Entrepreneurs
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My upcoming talk at Rock Valley College
“Occupy Wall Street–or Occupy Pennsylvania Avenue?” That is the title of a talk I’ll be giving to the Philosophy Club at nearby Rock Valley College. Time and place: Tuesday, October 25, 3:00-4:00 in classroom building CL1, room 227, on the RVC campus. Should be fun. Thanks to Christopher McGill for the invitation.
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