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.
Roger Simon writes about Obama’s strange apparent affinity for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Scott Johnson writes about the true nature of this Fascist organization.
Hans von Spakovsky writes about the historical connections between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Nazi party, as well as the MB’s current Nazi-like behavior: Kristallnacht in Egypt.
This article is a summary of our book America 3.0. It appeared in The American: The Online Magazine of the The American Enterprise Institute.
[T]he political and economic model we now live under cannot go on forever. Some shock may force reform. Let us hope disaster doesn’t strike before we can replace and rebuild our current rickety system. The best course would be for the American people to find the will and the leadership to build something better.
We will get through the painful transition to a new economic and technological age, as we have done before. And the bedrock of our freedom-loving and hard-working culture will remain, evolving but continuous, as it has for over a thousand years
Thank you to AEI for publishing this piece.
…and lots of other things, by the always-interesting Paul Graham. Excerpt:
People trying to be cool will find themselves at a disadvantage when collecting surprises. To be surprised is to be mistaken. And the essence of cool, as any fourteen year old could tell you, is nil admirari. When you’re mistaken, don’t dwell on it; just act like nothing’s wrong and maybe no one will notice.
One of the keys to coolness is to avoid situations where inexperience may make you look foolish. If you want to find surprises you should do the opposite. Study lots of different things, because some of the most interesting surprises are unexpected connections between different fields. For example, jam, bacon, pickles, and cheese, which are among the most pleasing of foods, were all originally intended as methods of preservation. And so were books and paintings.
Whatever you study, include history– but social and economic history, not political history. History seems to me so important that it’s misleading to treat it as a mere field of study. Another way to describe it is all the data we have so far.
House Republicans have to learn and proclaim the basics of money and taxes because balancing the budget could be a disaster for the economy as even more money is pulled out of the productive economy to pay for their past sins. The best example of how to get out of debt remains what England did after Waterloo and the massive debt of the Napoleonic War. Parliament dumped the income tax immediately, returned to sound money in 1821 and went to free trade later. The economy exploded and led to a century of prosperity like none seen before. They didn’t pay off their wartime debts, a huge sum for the time, they froze it and paid interest. As time went by, that once inconceivable mountain of debt shrank to insignificance in the shadow of the world’s most powerful economy.
He gets it. Economic growth is the solution to most of our problems. Growth requires investment capital. The less investment capital that gets diverted from the private sector into unproductive govt spending and misguided debt paydowns, the more growth there will be.
Read the whole thing.
(Via Lex.)
This is am image taken from a book on tower clocks, published in 1911. The book itself is from the Building Technology Heritage Library at the Internet Archive.
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The apparatus above, from page 34, powers both the dial and bells of a tower clock. The opening in the floor is for a pendulum of about 175 lbs. I find the image much more striking (pun quite intended) than those of the exterior, dials and all, of tower clocks. Besides the handsome illustrations, the book offers technical details and a description of the operation of tower clocks. There also is a directory of the companies installed tower clocks in 1911, as well as testimonials by satisfied customers.
If you are interested in historical buildings and / or engineering this book is for you.