i'm home again, and tomorrow i have to start work on college apps. jen emailed me today with a bunch of information for the site, so i spent the afternoon setting up the basics for her page. i'll have to flesh out the details with her later, when i have a better idea what kind of design she wants to follow.

so it's back to the routine for me. i stopped reading a week or so before we left, since i was studying so much and generally too stressed to focus even on bastiat's clever analogies. so here's my current reading list: human action, the foundation of morality, economic sophisms and a borges collection of fiction before bed. that's pretty much it, at any rate.

i've just been told off for having peanut butter and crackers upstairs. time for me to shower and dump said peanut butter over my head.

a tribe called quest
i've just started reading bastiat's 'economic sophisms', and i can really see where the foundation of several of hazlitt's ideas comes from. it's quite exciting, reading the original book that influenced hazlitt himself- besides which, bastiat is plain fun to read. he has this way of reducing complex problems to very simple explanations, and he's extremely witty.

i finished tuchman, just yesterday, and now i'm extremely eager to learn more about the first world war beyond the month of august and all that led up to the marne. i've found a couple of fantastic websites, and i'm slowly making my way through them. i wish there were more hours in a day.

in other news, schwarzy has, apparently, won the californian election. i couldn't be happier about that, although, judging from bustamante's concession speech, i kind of wonder whether he got the memo.

yay for being cold
i've discovered the wonder that is henry hazlitt, and i'm just about to embark on a bastiat reading experience. you know, after studying economics, reading certain eye-opening books and then applying that knowledge in order to analyze the situation for myself, it truly never ceases to amaze me that so many others are buying into economic fallacies that are so very easily discredited. hazlitt says the reason for this is that the discrediting process often requires an actual attention span from the public, not to mention a mere quarter of a brain (all right, so he was much kinder about it, but there's how i see it). seriously, people, how hard can it possibly be to see the repeatedly nasty effects of rent control, tariffs, price parity, minimum wage laws and all that other shit? it's a very simple exercise in logic combined with a basic grasp of economics, but people prefer to make themselves susceptible to the emotional exhortations of liberal politicians. here's the very first principle of economics: to consider all groups affected by any one incident, and to consider all trade-offs involved by any one decision. how difficult can that possibly be? even so-called economists often betray that one fundamental princple- hence keynes, for example. it's not higher math or rocket science, it is simply the ability to see things from an objective, logical perspective. pressure groups, though, are gravity wells of power and attention, so the typical story is that visible group A sways economic policy to the severe disadvantage of invisible group B...and people are left, standing around going 'duh?', wildly back-pedaling or deceitfully claiming that 'it's all capitalism's fault' when it was precisely the intervention in capitalism that landed them in such unexpected predicaments...although they SHOULD have been expected by anyone who understood the patterns of reality. claiming that minimum wage laws protect the innocent from exploitation and save jobs doesn't make it so (although it's very good in the Emotional Exhortation area with those who are easily deceived), especially in light of so much overwhelming, hard evidence to the contrary that certain people would rather bury in order to keep pursuing their personal agendas of attaining power. gah, people, read a book and use your brains.

something wicked this way comes...
...and his name is the taxman. or, if you prefer, hillary clinton, al gore, dick gephardt, tom daschle, etc. it never fails to amaze me...despite all evidence in decided favor of the tax policies of, for example, reagan (that is, tax-cutting and moving down the laffer curve), liberals (who had to steal that name from the british liberal party in order to smudge the true definition of the term 'liberal') are still able to convince the Blind Faith Anointed that tax increases are the way to go.