Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Belmont Club posts on Zimbabwe.
And so the toll that mounted to a hundred million victims in the twentieth century continues to climb in the twenty-first. And, in America, mid-west farmers are described as voting against their interests when they choose candidates who value limited government. The independence that land gives us, the productivity that comes when we till our own fields are lessons we forget over and over, but then are taught again by the harshest of experiences.
It seems that the United States has 90 guns for every 100 people, making it the most heavily armed civilian population in the world!
Yemen comes in at second place, with a pitiful 61 guns for every 100 people. Pikers!
Of course, the statistics are rather misleading. Most of the people involved in the shooting sports here in the United States have more than one gun, which skews things a bit. I think this is an indication of wealth, since people here can afford to buy more than one of these really expensive precision instruments, just as they can afford to take part in more than one firearm related sport.
The director of the Small Arms Survey said as much himself.
“Weapons ownership may be correlated with rising levels of wealth, and that means we need to think about future demand in parts of the world where economic growth is giving people larger disposable income,”
Anyway, I think it is just great that the United States leads the world yet again.
(Hat tip to Dave of The Nix Guy fame for giving us a heads up to the article. I also cross posted this essay over at Hell in a Handbasket.)
Regarding the comments at Reason and Instapundit and the knee-jerk libertarian response about funding priorities and the Minnesota bridge collapse, Dave E. has this to say:
So no, this was not a matter of priorities. It was a sudden and unexpected collapse of a thought to be serviceable bridge. I like a little snark as much as the next person, but in this case it’s snark that is wrong and intellectually lazy and downright defamatory if you think about it. As though those of us who live in the Minneapolis area would knowingly fund a stadium versus replacing a dangerous bridge that we and our loved ones drive over every day. If that’s the perspective you want to have in the upcoming discussion then fine, you are a moron.
Yeah, sometimes people on our side can be jerks, too. “Instapundit adds his one cent”: I like that. If we claim that leftists infantilize debate (and they generally do), we need to police ourselves pretty carefully.
Via the Ludwig von Mises Institute comes a quite good cartoon version of Hayek’s classic.
Here’s a sample image: