Ideas Matter

Those Who Arrange the Blocks

This is just interesting and needs no commentary -- unless you'd like to add some below.

Objective Rules for Subjective Values

Here's a great video for the libertarian philosophers among you. The question is: if value is subjective, how can we have a system of objective rights and rules? Aeon Skoble lays it out nicely in this video. And I think for an introduction to the question, this is a tidy talk. I do, however, have some concerns.

VIDEO CONTEST: What Milton (Friedman) Means to Me

Fire up your video cameras! Your iPhones! Your whatever-gadget-captures-brilliance-for-posterity!

Free To Choose Network -- as part of Milton Friedman's Century -- is proud to announce our video contest:

"What Milton Means to Me"

If you win, you could earn any of $2,500 in prizes. So what does Milton mean to you?

Jazz and Emergent Order: Listen While You Read

You may not like jazz. But the next time your friends tell you that art just has to have heavy public subsidy, tell them that jazz is America's sui generis artform. It got virtually no public subsidy as it began to spring up from the streets of New Orleans, New York and Chicago. And yet it thrived in the the spaces -- between work and love, pain and happiness.

Politicians & Parody: Is "Vermin Supreme" that Far Off?

I wonder: is this politician -- Vermin Supreme -- really far off? There sure are a lot of "friendly facists" out there. What makes candidate Supreme supremely different? Are ponies for everyone and zombie turbines that different from the sorts of things that were funded under the 2008 stimulus package? Is his zeal with respect to gingivitis any less serious than what other nanny statists propose? No one in their right mind should take Vermin Supreme seriously. But we have to wonder whether people are in their right minds when the vote for the leaders they do. 

Christopher Hitchens -- You lived like a tornado, now rest

Christopher Hitchens has died. I know this readership is probably of mixed opinion on the man. I for one could never quite connect with his evangelical atheism. And yet I admired him deeply. He's a writer's writer. He had the power to make you reflect even when you know in your heart you don't agree with him. And if you like to read because you write, he makes you a better writer -- even though you know you'll never be as good. 

Creeping Aesthetics: Capitalism, Excellence and Beauty

I don't want to spoil it. So watch the video above and come back.

Fractal: Pictures of Emergence

This is not offered to aid you in any drug experience. It is rather one of the guilty pleasures lovers of spontaneous order allow themselves: fractals. This particular fractal should remind us of fungi, of brains, of landscapes and of other self-organizing systems. With each passing second you can feel your mind applying schemata to what you're perceiving. It's a fascinating exercise. But it is random in the sense that it is not representational. It's your brain doing the representing -- just as it does with Necker Cubes and Gestalt images.

If there is a God, he programmed the rules. The rest, as they say, is history (unfolding). Likewise, we need to start thinking of society more along these lines. The computer whizzes who brought us "Surface Detail" were not designers in the conventional sense. They were rulemakers playing with recursion. And beautiful things emerge when we focus not so much on the design of society, but on getting the rules right. That is the essence of the rule of law. That is the essence of Hayekian spontaneous order. And that is why we should remain skeptical of people bent on fixing, tweaking or designing society -- whether the economy from the left, or culture from the right. These things are, and should be, emergent phenomena.

Ayn Rand: A Grudging Respect

Like she did for many people, Ayn Rand changed my life. I was in high school. While I don't agree with all her views today, I have a grudging respect for the woman who continues to change peoples thinking like few people have been able. If Mr. Buchanan, my high school creative writing teacher, had not foisted The Fountainhead on me, I would not be writing this. No other person has had so profound an influence on my career -- even though there are thinkers whose work I now admire more. A paradox?

Markets in Everything, Bubbles in Everything

Our recent post on subjective valuation in art got some interesting responses, as well as some links from insightful people, who could very well be better positioned to reflect on art than I. Still, I'd like to complicate matters a little and ask you -- with this clip -- to consider the intersection of economics and art.

It's one thing to value something. It's quite another to demonstrate your preference by acquiring it. Of course value and behavior are linked. But the intersection between subjective values and things values is a very interesting intersection, indeed.