Apr
15
2024

This Post is for Mature Audiences Only

Via Power Line, some rough language:

Okay, you ready to learn about the six lessons? Here you go, from Clint Smith: The 6 lessons of Ludwig Von Mises.

And he proceeds to itemize seven lessons. Oh well, give or take. They are (1) Methodological Individualism; (2) Subjective Value; (3) Praxeology; (4) Spontaneous Order; (5) Business Cycle Theory; (6) Economic Calculation Problem; and (7) Critique of Interventionism.

That last one may be a bonus. Perhaps produced by spontaneous order.

Also of note:

  • Unwarranted Optimism Department. Kevin D. Williamson has some unsolicited advice for the Biden campaign: Democrats think that simply not being Trump is enough to beat him — but it won’t be.

    Democrats seem to have lost one of the most basic of all political skills: asking those who are not already committed supporters for their votes.

    It is an elementary thing, but, as with many other elementary things, Joe Biden does not seem quite up to it.

    If he wants to win, he should figure that out.

    I am not sure that there is such a thing as a “Nikki Haley Republican,” but the former South Carolina governor beat Donald Trump in the Vermont and DC Republican primaries, took about 40% of the vote in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and finished up her campaign having won more than 20% of the vote in the races she contested.

    That’s not nothing.

    True, that support wasn’t nearly enough for Nikki Haley to beat Donald Trump in a Republican primary.

    But it would be more than enough for Joe Biden to beat Donald Trump in a general election.

    The share of alienated Republicans who don’t want to vote for Trump isn’t 40% — it isn’t even 20%.

    And it doesn’t have to be.

    Well less than half that would do it for Biden — if he would lift a pinky finger to try to win those votes.

    Note KDW seamlessly adapting the New York Post editorial style of one-sentence paragraphs.

    He doesn't do that in any other forum, as far as I can tell.

    But as to his main point: I'm not sure what Biden could do to win my vote in November.

    That's just not in the cards, Joe.

  • The windmills of his mind. James Lileks has an amazing essay at Discourse: Art That’s Just for Me.

    I’m working on a book celebrating the work of a commercial artist, Chester Gallsworth Dahleigh—“Chet” to his friends. He signed his most personal work “Petey,” so I suppose Chet G. “Petey” Dahleigh is the proper term. This summer, I plan to release an online collection of his most striking work, an examination of the works he did not for paying corporate clients, but instead rendered in his sleep.

    There are hundreds of such works, and they all express a peculiarly cheerful nightmare about American culture in the 1950s.

    Some say they’re a result of his wife’s long effort to poison her husband with various herbs and mushrooms from the family garden—a theory bolstered, no doubt, by her conviction for murdering her husband by poison in 1960—but others insist that Dahleigh’s daytime work painting anodyne scenes of commercial joy posed an affront to his talent and soul, and he would rise at night to explore the id of the American dream in the 1950s. In his work, there is always joy:

    Eventually, Lileks confesses: "Chet G. Petey Dahleigh" is actually Chat-GPT Dall-E. And those illustrations (seven at the link) were AI-generated, and they are, indeed, cheerful nightmares. Check 'em out.