Last week, New York state assemblyman Felix Ortiz (D-Brooklyn) introduced a bill to ban the use of all salt in restaurant cooking and impose a fine of up to $1,000 on violators. Like all legislators who introduce absolutely insane legislation, he says he is trying to “make sure that we bring awareness.” Oddly, Ortiz seems to be raising awareness about someone else’s bill
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More on the NY Salt Ban Bill
Appearing on Real Time With Bill Maher , amateur Latin America scholar Sean Penn details his recent humanitarian trip to Haiti, reveals that he has started an NGO, and praises the United States military’s reconstruction efforts in Port-au-Prince, calling it the “most noble [military] mission since World War II.” (Penn has apparently forgotten the 2004 operation to provide relief to parts of tsunami-ravaged South Asia.) But as is his wont, Penn couldn’t get through the interview without reference to the beneficent Venezuelan and Cuban governments (who supplied “narcotics” in Haiti, despite their own drug shortages) and how Hugo Chavez is unfairly maligned in the United States media. How should one combat this misinformation campaign?
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Sean Penn Wants Me Thrown In Jail
For those of us who place more trust in free markets than state-directed economies, we must inevitably (and repeatedly) confront the skeptical interlocutor who details the “successes” of Swedish social democracy. “If state intervention into the economy is so bad, high taxes so destructive, then why is Sweden such a success?” It’s an irritatingly simple question with a incredibly complicated answer, though I do recommend pointing out, when the conversation turns to health care and secondary education, that nothing, in a state the confiscates a massive portion of your income, is “free.” But as many have pointed out, during its boom years, Sweden was a pretty free market place; from the 1970s through the 1990s—when taxes and regulation dramatically increased—the economy slowed until it spun out in the early 1990s.
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“So Why Is the Swedish Welfare State So Successful?”
In 1992, Jim Gray, a conservative judge in conservative Orange County, California, held a press conference during which he recommended that we rethink our drug laws. Back then, it took a great deal of courage to suggest that the war on drugs was a failed policy.
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Reason.tv: Judge Jim Gray on The Six Groups That Benefit From Drug Prohibition
The horrible situation in Juarez and across Mexico detailed in my November 2009 Reason interview with sociologist Howard Campbell is getting still worse so far in 2010, as per the Drug War Chronicle . That report, filled with gruesome details, was dated a week ago, on Feb. 26.
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Mexican Drug War Violence Still Getting Worse
Over at PJTV , Glenn ” Instapundit ” Reynolds talks with George Mason University economist Russell Roberts, who coauthored the enormously popular and fun Hayek vs. Keynes rap video that has pulled some 750,00 views on the YouTube
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Instapundit Talks to Russ Roberts About Hayek-Keynes Rap Vid
Howard Barrell, who I interviewed last week about the end of apartheid, has passed along an amendment to one of his remarks: Kurt Schock has pointed out to me — and I accept — that I misrepresented the argument he puts forward in his book Unarmed Insurrections: People Power Movements in Nondemocracies ….I implied in the interview that Schock had suggested a deterministic argument regarding the decline of violent revolutionary movements and the ascendance of nonviolent “people power” movements.
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More on Unarmed Insurrections
During his interview with CBS news anchor Katie Couric on Sunday, President Obama said he wants to “make sure that the 30 million people who don’t have health insurance can get it.” Obama and his underlings have been using that figure since last fall at least. It corresponds, conveniently enough, to the number of people the Congressional Budget Office estimates would obtain coverage under the Senate health care bill.
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Obama Cuts the Number of Uninsured People by One-Third
Reason magazine invites you to join us for appetizers, drinks and the opportunity to meet with Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico and honorary chairman of the Our America Initiative . Tonight, Gov
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Attn, DC Reasonoids: Conquer Snowpacalypse 2 Tonight With Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson at Reason’s DC HQ
The John Templeton Foundation has just awarded $4.4 million to Florida State University philosopher Alfred Mele to research the question: Do we have free will? As the press release explains : The project, “Free Will: Human and Divine — Empirical and Philosophical Explorations,” is not quite as esoteric as the topic might suggest. For thousands of years the question of free will was strictly in the domain of philosophers and theologians.
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Researching Free Will
