Disqus - Latest Comments for Elephex

Re: A Sensible Natalist Proposal

Elephex — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 04:36:37 -0000

Interesting idea, but it falls apart fast when you think for a couple of seconds.

What happens to parents who have four kids, but all of them die or emigrate? Who makes sure kids don't let their elderly parents die of neglect to get out of paying? Does a woman whose father raped her repeatedly when she was a child have to pay him once she gets old enough to run away from home?

There are only two (non-mutually exclusive) things that can result from this kind of a policy: it's blindly applied, and large numbers of individuals are penalized for things that were beyond their control; and the government is forced to become even more intrusive to monitor all inter-family interaction.

Of course, the alternative to outright cruelty and intolerable intrusiveness is to abstract out the flows of payments to anonymise the cash stream, so that people are supported anonymously by aggregate cash flows contributed by everyone who had the good fortune to be born and remain healthy enough to be a contributing member of society.

Gee ... that sounds familiar somehow.

Re: Yuval Levin on Haidt

Elephex — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 03:55:22 -0000

Aha!

I've been reading discussions of Haidt on blogs all over recently, and Levin's commentary keeps coming up, and I've been dissatisfied every time I've seen it, but haven't had the time to really sit down and figure out why, and here you come and do it for me.

Re: Belgium and the Global Polycentric Order

Elephex — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 22:06:22 -0000

The NAU, should it ever arrive, will contain either Quebec, or the rest of Canada, but not both.

I'm pretty sure that if anyone got up the energy to start up a Quebec ejection campaign, the Quebecois would finally get that sovereignty they've been whining about for years, although not on the terms they delude themselves into believing they'll get.

Re: TIGER WOODS; SPEAK! (PLEASE) | The District Weekly

Elephex — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 02:03:52 -0000

My reaction to the whole mess when I heard Tiger's response was that Sabbatini was a cretin who got off far easier than he deserved for having made a spectacularly stupid comment.

My reaction to your last two paragraphs was that you're a identity politics wielding tool.

Somehow, I think Tiger did a better job of it.

Re: Food at the Fore of Cuban Government’s Baby Steps

Elephex — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:37:07 -0000

Huh.

That sounds familiar. It was one of the early steps in the death of communism in the USSR. Small private farms to provide the food the machine couldn't.

Let's home that's an omen.