Big moves and much talk about net neutrality in recent days. If your head is swimming, maybe try these two videos from Reason TV:
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Video: Instead of Internet Neutrality
Month: February 2015
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Arthur Latham Perry
One of the chief charms of Political Economy is the open secret, that it deals not with rigidities and inflexible qualities and mathematical quantities and the unchanging laws of matter, but with the billowy play of desires and estimates and purposes and satisfactions, all of which are mental states, and all of which are subject in the general to ascertainable laws, though laws of a quite different kind from those of Mechanics. Values come and they go. Within certain limits and under certain conditions they may be anticipated and even predicted, but never with the precision of an eclipse or the result of a known chemical combination.
A scientist has a problem: no problem.
Sounds like a Zen riddle, but it’s really about the riddle of victimhood-worship.
Emily Yoffe writes an advice column called Dear Prudence. A female reader reported a problem pertaining to workplace bias against women. Although she works in a “very masculine scientific field . . . I have never really suffered from sexism.”
Hmmm. Why not? “Maybe I’m just awesome at playing the man’s game (or in denial and don’t have an eye for sexism?).”
It is probably not denial. It is pretty easy to detect abusive treatment when you’re on the receiving end and not rationalizing it away. The bigger problem, though, is that “even quite reasonable and pleasant women” of her acquaintance get nasty when she can’t “contribute to their list of crimes committed by the patriarchy.”
What to do? She dislikes unpleasantness, but doesn’t want to lie.
One thing to do is recognize it’s not up to you to make unreasonable people reasonable. When no discussion is possible, take your conversation elsewhere. I also advise skipping gratuitous self-doubt.
Happily, Ms. Prudence and I are on the same wavelength.
“My general advice,” she writes, “is that it’s best not to engage with unpleasant people. . . . But if you feel like it, you can also counterpunch by saying something like, ‘It’s funny, but the only people who try to bully me are women who aren’t in my profession.’ ”
Commonsensical minds think alike, I guess. Ask me for advice any time.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On February 27, 1830, American economist and free trade advocate Arthur Latham Perry was born.
| The Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution, limiting Presidents to two terms, was ratified on February 27, 1951.
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Yves Guyot:
“The effect of a protective duty on any commodity is to raise the price, not only of the amount imported, but of the whole quantity sold in the country; it is a private tax placed upon consumers for the benefit of producers.”
Yves Guyot (6 September 1843 – 22 February 1928) was a French politician and economist.
He was an uncompromising free-trader.
“The very same government that couldn’t even build a functional website and leaked massive amounts of personal data while doing it just took over the entire Internet.
And people everywhere are telling me that places like Amazon (a company that can deliver almost anything to my door within 24 hours with the click of a button) are making the Internet less free.
Raving, barking lunatics.”
—Justin M. Stoddard
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