We are Students for Liberty and we are hosting a Nanny State Store in Calgary on October 25th. If you haven’t seen our Nanny State activism before, check out our video from our Toronto Nanny State Store. SFL Canada’s Calgary Nanny State Store will open its doors at 9:00am and close at 3:00pm. The store represents what corner stores would look like if the government had its way, and overtaxed, over regulated or straight up banned everything that is bad for your health. Join us for some government approved chocolate bars, chips and pop. The …
How to Map an Interconnected, Antifragile World Globalization is nothing new.
Globalization is nothing new. Although the word only became popular in the late 1980’s, the phenomenon is as old as civilization. Globalization is merely an extension of the tendency of all complex social systems to grow and evolve. Whereas civilizations once grew within disparate regions limited by geography and politics, now it is growing across the entire world. Globalization has been the manifestation of that growth. Rather than depicting human civilization as a set of discrete entities, he depicts it as a network. Brexit has roused concern that the fraying of international organizations might impede, …
Athenians and Visigoths: Neil Postman’s Graduation Speech
While it could be argued that youth is wasted on the young, it is indisputable that commencement addresses are wasted on young graduates. Sitting in a stuffy auditorium waiting to receive a parchment that marks the beginning of one’s student loan repayments is not the most conducive atmosphere for soaking up wisdom. Insight, which can otherwise seep through the thickest of skulls, cannot pierce mortarboard. Read more on Athenians and Visigoths: Neil Postman’s Graduation Speech… The post Athenians and Visigoths: Neil Postman’s Graduation Speech appeared first on Acton Institute PowerBlog. Related posts: Government as Big …
Seminar series: Big Picture Thinking
On long timescales, where is humanity headed? What are the big uncertainties? What does that mean for decisions today? In this series of lectures, led by Dr. Owen Cotton-Barratt, we will tackle these issues, and explore the questions that feed into them. Many are multidisciplinary, and progress often draws on knowledge and tools from economics […] The whole story can be found at The Global Priorities Project
C.S. Lewis on Men Without Chests (And What That Means)
“Men Without Chests” is the curious title of the first chapter of C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man. In the book, Lewis explains that the “The Chest” is one of the “indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.” Without “Chests” we are unable to have confidence that we can grasp objective reality and objective truth. Read more on C.S. Lewis on Men Without Chests …
Peter Boettke’s Splendid Essays on Learning and Teaching Economics
I have just finished reading Living Economics: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, a wonderful collection of essays by Peter Boettke. (It was published in 2012, but I move slowly these days.) The essays were written over a span of some twenty years or so, most of them in the first decade of the present century or soon thereafter. Several have a co-author or two; the co-authors include Christopher Coyne, Peter Leeson, David Prychitko, Steven Horwitz, and Frederic Sautet. I read the book from cover to cover and enjoyed it from start to finish. Broadly speaking, the …
You Aren’t Entitled to a College Education
When I graduated from college, reality hit. I was now considered a “real adult.” In a matter of months I’d be moving out of my parents’ basement and some 700 miles away to start graduate school. I was also struck by something I knew was coming, but hadn’t quite appreciated. That “something” was my student loans. There they were in black and white, those things I’d been taking out for some 48 months to pay for a Bachelor’s degree from a small liberal arts university. I owed tens of thousands of dollars and the bill …
Captain America’s Civil War and Political Principle
Captain America: Civil War blasted into U.S. theaters generating $192 million in its first weekend and more than $700 million worldwide. I’ll confess: I almost passed this one up: All I could envision were lots of explosions and major cities crumbling. I had my fill of that with the destruction of the fictional Sokovia in the predecessor film Avengers: Age of Ultron. But Civil War, while a sequel to Age of Ultron, is in fact a very different film, and I’m glad I didn’t pass it up. Mainstream reviewers have emphasized the familial conflict between …
Inside climate propaganda InsideClimate News excels at propagating environmentalist and Obama thinking and policies
Paul Driessen Have you ever wondered how the LA Times, Associated Press, Weather Channel and your local media always seem to present similar one-sided stories on climate change, fossil fuels, renewable energy and other environmental issues? How their assertions become “common knowledge,” like the following? Global temperatures are the hottest ever recorded. Melting ice caps are raising seas to dangerous levels. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts have never been more frequent or destructive. Planet Earth is at a tipping point because of carbon dioxide emissions. Fracking is poisoning our air, water and climate. 97% of …
Workers Increasingly Prefer Pay More Than “Benefits”
The Employee Benefits Research Institute (EBRI), a research organization with a mission “to contribute to, to encourage, and to enhance the development of sound employee benefit programs and sound public policy through objective research and education,” includes members as diverse as AARP, Aetna, Boeing, Charles Schwab, and Wal-Mart. In the benefits world, it sits firmly inside the establishment. That is why EBRI’s latest research on how employees view their benefits should give some encouragement to reformers who want to change the tax treatment of health insurance, and weaken the iron triangle of big business, big …
Against the Feel-Good Study of History and Literature
The educational establishment seems to be expending a great deal of effort these days to excise “offensive” material from the curricula of history and literature. For example, Mark Twain’s great anti-racist novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been removed from the study materials in many schools because of its use of the word “nigger” in the dialogue—as if any accurate representation of the time and place Twain portrays in this book could have been written without this key word. Recently this censorial campaign has reached such heights of stupidity that new editions of Twain’s books …
Europe Sees the Long March of the Extreme Right
The Austrian flagAustria’s far right candidate, Norbert Hofer, has lost the second round of the election for the presidency by a mere thirty thousand votes to Alexander Van der Bellen, a former Green Party leader. Europe has breathed a sigh of relief, but the stunning success of the nationalists, who won the first round and caused the resignation of the Socialist primer minister, is the symptom of a serious illness in the old world. It calls itself the Freedom Party, but it was founded by former Nazis and is led by a populist firebrand named …
