Politics

August Landmesser, Heinrich Himmler, Michael Karkoc, and Alfred Rosenberg

A busy week for Nazi-related news items: * A profile of August Landmesser, the man who famously crossed his arms and refused to salute Hitler, and how the Nazi regime destroyed him and his family. * A short, blunt, and horrifying speech given by Himmler to a group of SS officers: “I am talking about […]

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The Crisis of Socialism [EP audiobook]

This is the fifth chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube] [74 minutes total] Marx and waiting for Godot [mp3] [YouTube] Three failed predictions [mp3] [YouTube] Socialism needs an aristocracy: Lenin, Mao, and the lesson of the German Social

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Interview with Robert Salvino

Robert Salvino (Economics, Coastal Carolina University) spoke at Rockford College on “Entrepreneurship and Public Policy.” In this follow-up interview, Salvino and I discuss entrepreneurial success traits, the institutional framework within which entrepreneurship best flourishes, the relative success of market-friendly versus government-chosen entrepreneurship policies (including examples such as Google, Apple, Solyndra, etc.), the effect of employer-provided

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The Climate of Collectivism [EP audiobook]

This is the fourth chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube] [102 minutes] From postmodern epistemology to postmodern politics [mp3] [YouTube] The argument of the next three chapters [mp3] [YouTube] Responding to socialism’s crisis of theory and evidence [mp3]

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Freedom in the 50 states, and Illinois in particular

How free are individuals in all 50 states? Political scientists Jason Sorens and Will Ruger have crunched the numbers in over 30 areas — civil liberties, travel freedom, drug enforcement, business regulation, tax policy, and so on — as well as computing overall rankings for each state. And the winner is … North Dakota, followed

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The two Americas: 13 countries’ GDP

I’ve started reading Guillermo M. Yeatts’s 2010 Plunder in Latin America. Yeatts lists thirteen American countries’ per capita GDP in 2008 US dollars, first alphabetically by country: Argentina 8,281 Bolivia 1,948 Brazil 8,379 Canada 46,826 Chile 10,933 Colombia 5,478 Cuba 4,840 Ecuador 3,770 Mexico 10,278 Peru 4,454 Uruguay 8,942 USA 46,647 Venezuela 4,315 I re-arranged

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