Reblogged:5-21-16 Hodgepodge

[Gus Van Horn blog]

Business, Not Charity, Helping the Poor

David Harsanyi writesabout the latest leftist apoplexy about non-unionized "sweat shops" run to produce a line of celebrity-branded clothes. Harsanyi, after helping the reader -- with an assist by Paul Krugman of all people -- put such shops "into proper context," he notes the following:

f you want to help the world's impoverished, you should probably buy Beyoncé's products. The more demand there is for tight-fitting, overpriced celebrity clothing lines, the more factories Sri Lankans will have to work in. As those workers have more choices, salaries will rise and so will the quality of life. This competition will impel employers to increase productivity and, if Sri Lanka doesn't revert to its old ways, the economy will grow. The children of these workers will turn to white-collar professions. And before you know it, factories will be taken over by automatons and the Sri Lankan middle class will grumble about how the Indonesians are stealing their jobs.

This brings to mind the following quote, from a Harry Binswanger column late last year:

There is another, and truly amazing, proof that the altruist-collectivists, contrary to their claims, have no concern whatever with the fate of the poor: the story of India and China. The quickest and largest-scale betterment of the poor in all of history came to these 2 billion people once they moved away from socialism toward capitalism.

What do we hear from the Left about this unprecedented improvement in the lot of the most vulnerable? Nothing. They are not mystified by it, embarrassed by it, or deterred by it. They simply refuse to look at it. It's a monumental evasion.

The left evades the cumulative results of semicapitalist improvements, in those instances they don't succeed in stopping them dead in their tracks, as they try to do in cases like Sri Lanka.

Weekend Reading

"Thoughtful action, even in the simplest day-to-day endeavors, comes before self-esteem -- not the other way around." -- Michael Hurd, in "What Confidence Really Means" at The Delaware Wave

"The issue of first impressions is related to the issue of judgmentalism, i.e., the elevation of emotions above the facts when evaluating someone." -- Michael Hurd, in "The Benefits and Hazards of First Impressions" at The Delaware Coast Press

A Term I Like ... For the Moment

Via Word Spycomes a term that could describe whole categories of cultural phenomena today, mostly emanating from the left:

mathwash -- v. To use mathematics, logic, or a similar rational argument to make something inherently subjective appear to be objective. [format edits]

I wouldn't define it quite this way, but the idea, of giving a patina of rational credibility to an irrational idea, is clear.

So why do I anticipate disliking this clever neologism some time soon? Because I fully expect some mathwasher to be among the first to use the term to smear an opponent for offering a truly rational counterargument to his pseudoscientific drivel.

-- CAV

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