Ahoy Matey

The really important news of the day is that it is International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Arrrrrrr!

Higher Education Loan Bubble

Instapundit has had a number of posts regarding the supposed higher education bubble. However, to me, the most disconcerting part is the massive amount of student loan debt that exists (it exceeds total credit card debt now) and the onerous terms that are attached to that debt as shown by the graphic below.

Infographic by College Scholarships.org

A whole generation has mortgaged their future (literally). Where are tomorrow's entrepreneurs going to come from if nobody can afford to take risks?

So you want to be simpleminded?

The world is very complex. It generally pays to look at things from many different perspectives drawing upon history, data and theory. My experience is that very few people are willing to do that, especially in a political discussion. Well, if anyone insists on being simpleminded...

via redstate

h/t instapundit

Flawed Metrics

One of the repetitive debates throughout society is when to leave things to individual action and when to have government intervention. Eric Raymond points out that flawed and incomparable metrics are sometimes used to compare private and government action. In his post he focuses on an example of a "collective-action problem" which anti-statists often have to answer for.

Our key insight is a pessimistic one: this is the sort of situation which, though individuals and markets don’t handle it well, isn’t actually handled well by governments either. The fundamental mistake of statist thinking is to juxtapose the tragically, inevitably flawed response of individuals and markets to large collective-action problems like this one against the hypothetical perfection of idealized government action, without coping with the reality that government action is also tragically and inevitably flawed. [...]

The second level of error, once you get this far, is to require that the market action achieve a better outcome without including all the continuing, institutional costs of state action in the accounting. So, for example, other parts of the continuing costs of accepting state action to solve this individual toxic-exposure problem in the Deep Horizon aftermath is that Americans will be robbed every April 15th of five in twelve parts of their income (on average), and be randomly killed in no-knock drug raids. And it’s no use protesting that these abuses are separable from the “good” parts of government as long as you’re also insisting that the prospect of market failures is not separable from the good behavior of markets! [...]

Rational anarchists like myself know that stateless systems will have tragic failures too, but believe after analysis that they would have fewer and smaller ones.

If this seems doubtful to you, do not forget to include all the great genocides of the 20th century in the cost of statism.

In other words, don't take imperfect and possibly even very bad situations and make them even worse because you assume that individuals who act badly in the private sphere will suddenly become virtuous when they are part of the government.

Tea Party Organization Phenomenon

Whether or not you like the Tea Party's politics, and whether or not they succeed in achieving any of their objectives, I find their "Radical Decentralization" fascinating. Jonathan Rauch has documented the Tea Party's structure in a recent and well written article.