My Vote; Arguing with college students; Podcasts

I missed last week for an assortment of reason which would just take up space were they to be printed here, so this week will have an extra long version of the ramblings.

I voted

I sent in my absentee ballot a few days ago, I voted for Bob Barr, for two main reasons:

1. I narrowed it down to him or Chuck Baldwin and I could not get over Baldwin’s protectionist position
2. Barr has polled at 6% and has a lot greater chance of showing America there are more than two choices.

A very strange statement

I got into an argument with another student here last week, he acknowledged that my economic thought made sense, but said there was no way someone could actually run for president and be as famous a Barack is while having such faulty positions, for that reason he still supports Barack.

Using this logic no famous person could possess any wrong conclusions.

Thomas Jefferson is also pretty famous, yet he would probably recommend Barack be deported to North Korea for a few years, because of Barack’s economic position, were he alive today.

Libertarian Podcasts

There are a number of great libertarian podcasts that can be downloaded daily, weekly, etc.

To find this just download iTunes, then go to the music store and search the following terms:

• EconTalk – George Mason Professor Russ Roberts has a weekly about an hour long interview
• Cato – I do not download this, but for those interested the Cato Institute has a daily podcast and also makes available a number of speeches from its events
• Foundation for Economic Education – FEE has all of its summer lectures available
• Lew Rockwell Show – Lew Rockwell interviews many of the people from the Ludwig von Mises institute, or those who write for his site, this is daily
• Ludwig von Mises Institute – This is my favorite podcast, the Institute has numerous speeches (from half twenty minutes to two hours, there are probably about 25 currently available) and the audio of many books, including For a New Liberty, The Law, The Case Against the Fed and Conceived in Liberty
  
• Reason TV – This is my favorite video podcast, it is produced by Drew Carey and sometimes hosted by him, the episodes come out pretty sporadically and are usually about ten minutes long.

If you’re not voting third party

Please vote for McCain. I know he’s an imperialist and barely less socialist than Obama, but the congress will most likely be won by the democrats and historically government has grown a lot less when the two branches battle each other.

A Christian socialist (or even democrat for that matter) is a hypocrite

Socialism is based on, “spreading the wealth around,” as Barack Obama put it. Since people are inherently unequal this involves the stealing from one person to give to another, therefore any Christian (or any other person morally against stealing) who is for socialism or even any form of taxation is a hypocrite.

There is no argument to this.

Salary Caps are insane

A trend in almost all sports today is to institute a salary cap. The salary cap limits the amount of money a team, can spend on all its players. Theoretically this would limit the ability of big towns with a lot of fans to just buy up all the players, which would kill any chance that small towns could win the championship.

However, this does not seem to work (the Yankees have long had the highest payroll in the league, but haven’t won the World Series since 2000, and failed to make the playoffs this year; the Rays are in the World Series with the second lowest payroll in the league), and even if it did would that be desirable?

This is just the exact same subsidization that successful Americans are forced to endure in our current Welfare State. Why not allow teams to compete in all levels, if a town cannot support a team it is most likely because they do not care about it (Green Bay supports an NFL team with just 100,000 residents), not because they are unable to, what better way is there to find the best cities to support teams?

Quote of the Week

“It is easy to be conspicuously "compassionate" if others are being forced to pay the cost”
– Murray N. Rothbard