Jun
23
2006

URLs du Jour

2006-06-23

  • Bryan Caplan presents Ten Ideas Worth Thinking About with respect to voting and democracy. Especially pungent:
    9. Politics is the realm of intellectual pollution. Everyone can be worse off if everyone emits toxic chemicals into the air. Similarly, everyone can be worse off if everyone expresses silly beliefs in the voting booth. In both cases, individuals focus on the private good of convenience or feeling good, ignoring the serious side effects on the public good of clean air or wise policy.
    It's pretty sobering reading for democracy fans. Still, there's always Winston Churchill's observation as a counterargument.

  • Best title of the day so far goes to Rachel DiCarlo's Weekly Standard article "A Desire Named Streetcar". It discusses "traffic calming", a term applied to a broad swath of techniques to slow traffic (and maybe encourage you to use mass transit instead, you eco-pig). So the next time you're in bumper-to-bumper land, you can console yourself that it's all by design.

    The Google gives you 1.8 million hits for "traffic calming", a number you might find surprising if you've never heard of the term before. Like, um, me.

  • Here's a listing of libertarian college professors. Only one in the whole state of New Hampshire, and he's in that Other University.

    Massive irony department: Massachusetts claims 14 libertarian profs.

  • I got 13 out of 14 right on the Hitler vs. Coulter Quiz. I think it may be harder if you're a liberal.

  • And I know you've been wondering: is Arianna Huffington a lying liar? Find out in Dr. Peter Rost's blog post, titled "Arianna Huffington is a Lying Liar. Here's the Proof."