{"id":15402,"date":"2015-12-18T07:01:53","date_gmt":"2015-12-18T12:01:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15402"},"modified":"2015-12-18T07:02:24","modified_gmt":"2015-12-18T12:02:24","slug":"15402","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15402","title":{"rendered":"The Statist Mindset"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"art-postmetadataheader\">\n<h3 class=\"art-postheader\"><a title=\"Permanent Link to The Statist Mindset\" href=\"http:\/\/www.acting-man.com\/?p=42138\" rel=\"bookmark\">The Statist Mindset\u00a0<\/a><\/h3>\n<p class=\"art-postheader\"><strong>The Key Logical Fallacy of Statism<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"art-postcontent\">\n<p>I just read\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloombergview.com\/articles\/2015-12-14\/prophets-psychics-and-phools-the-year-in-behavioral-science\">an article\u00a0<\/a>in\u00a0<em>Bloomberg View<\/em>\u00a0yesterday by Cass Sunstein, who is a law professor at Harvard.\u00a0 It was a roundup of a number of books published last year on \u201cbehavioral economics\u201d.\u00a0 For those who don\u2019t know it, behavioral economics typically focuses on the biases and systematic errors in human behavior.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-42140\" src=\"http:\/\/www.acting-man.com\/blog\/media\/2015\/12\/communist-angels.jpg\" alt=\"communist angels\" width=\"500\" height=\"501\" \/>Surely everyone has heard an argument along these lines before: socialism would really work if only it were done right! For starters, it would need to be administered by a host of angels, so what you see above should be considered the ideal communist bureaucrats.\u00a0Image via pixgood.com<\/p>\n<p>In his review of the book\u00a0<em>Phishing for Phools<\/em>\u00a0by George Akerloff and Robert Shiller, Sunstein concludes that one of the major contributions of the authors \u201cis to show that if we care about people\u2019s well-being, the invisible hand (i.e., free markets) is often the problem, not the solution.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-42139\" src=\"http:\/\/www.acting-man.com\/blog\/media\/2015\/12\/cass-sunstein-cia.jpg\" alt=\"cass-sunstein-cia\" width=\"640\" height=\"404\" \/>Cass Sunstein, a committed, and as we believe, truly dangerous statist, who would likely have felt right at home in Stalin\u2019s politburo. We have discussed this crypto-communist weirdo previously in these pages (see\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.acting-man.com\/?p=29458\">The Taming of Deluded Conspiracy Theorists<\/a>) and so has incidentally Dr. Machan (see\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.acting-man.com\/?p=40126\">Rights and Government<\/a>). Sunstein is not only an enemy of the free market, he inter alia once opined (in an academic paper, no less) that Americans should henceforth only be fed government-approved information. In order to achieve this, he proposed that government agents should infiltrate the web sites of \u201cconspiracy theorists\u201d (=anyone who thinks the government may be lying about something) to spy on them and discredit them, and if that doesn\u2019t help, government should\u00a0<em>tax them or<\/em><em>outright ban\u00a0<\/em>\u201cconspiracy theorizing\u201d (wise men like Mr. Sunstein would presumably determine what does and doesn\u2019t constitute a \u201cconspiracy theory\u201d). He failed to mention how those breaking the ban should be punished (forcible relocation into a reeducation camp perhaps?)\u00a0Photo via 911blogger.com<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Statist Mindset\u00a0 The Key Logical Fallacy of Statism I just read\u00a0an article\u00a0in\u00a0Bloomberg View\u00a0yesterday by Cass Sunstein, who is a law professor at Harvard.\u00a0 It was a roundup of a number of books published last year on \u201cbehavioral economics\u201d.\u00a0 For those who don\u2019t know it, behavioral economics typically focuses on the biases and systematic errors [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5728,11097,11096,158,11098,8446,2799,3991,972],"class_list":["post-15402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-acting-man","tag-behavioural-economics","tag-cass-sunstein","tag-conspiracy","tag-logical-fallacy","tag-politburo","tag-socialism","tag-stalin","tag-statism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15402"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15404,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15402\/revisions\/15404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}