A house<blockquote>'The average working man's salary in 1920 was $1489 dollars a year.
[5] Sears and Roebuck Co. was one of the first to realize the huge potential of these young families, and created the kit house. It was brilliant marketing: a $900 house that would be entirely shipped to you with framing, walls, siding, lights, bathroom fixtures, kitchen cabinets — everything.
...
Imagine it: two-thirds of
one year's wage would buy you your family home. In our current real estate market, most mortgages are paid over 30 years.'
- Anna Wheeler,
A Dream House for the Masses, 9/9/2009
'...There was a couple in Las Vegas: the gentleman was a house painter and his wife was a hairdresser. One day, a lady came in to get her hair done. The hairdresser mentioned to her, "Gee, you know, I'm really interested in getting into real estate." This was 2004, at the height of the real-estate bubble in Vegas.
...
So the painter and the hairdresser bought the seven houses, taking on a debt of $2.6 million. And the real-estate broker said, "You know, you've made a great investment because, based on my calculations about where real estate's going to go in Las Vegas, within five years you're going to have home equity of $1.3 million." Well, you already know how this turns out.
- Doug French,
Bubble Economics: The Illusion of Wealth, 8/12/2009</blockquote>
Polylogism<blockquote>'Ludwig von Mises believed that the topic of polylogism was important enough to put up front in the introduction of
Human Action:
<blockquote>Marxism asserts that a man's thinking is determined by his class affiliation. Every social class has a logic of its own…. This polylogism was later taught in various other forms also. Historicism asserts that the logical structure of human thought and action is liable to change in the course of historical evolution. Racial polylogism assigns to each race a logic of its own.
[1]</blockquote>
...
What's at work here is an unraveling of the entire basis for any form of intellectual discussion. If we can't agree on universal rules of establishing the veracity of truth claims, all discussion is reduced to a series of demands followed by ad hominem attacks on anyone who resists those demands. Mises himself understood that if we are to avoid this fate, there had to be some understanding and agreement on the rules of logic. George Koether reports
[7] that Mises told his seminar students that the first book on economics that they should read is a book on logic by Morris Cohen, a book which is in fact one of the last complete texts on logic to be published for universal use in the college classroom.
[8] Meanwhile, forums on academic discussion boards filled with complaints that logic as a discipline is no longer part of high-school study or even undergraduate college study, which means that after 16 years of formal study, hardly any students are taught even the basic rules on how to think.
...
In what ways might Hoppe's reconstruction of Marxism apply to Marxism's modern spinoffs? Once we strip away the polylogist assumption underlying modern politics, we can see that many group relations are indeed characterized by varieties of Hoppe-style exploitation. And it is precisely law and legislation that make this possible. Laws that privilege one race, one religion, one sex, one class of abilities, over another generate a group of victims and solidify a form of group solidarity that might have previously existed only in nascent form. Whereas group differences might resolve themselves through trade, the entry of the state into the association amplifies and institutionalizes group conflicts.
- Jeffrey A. Tucker,
Marxism without Polylogism , 8/31/2009</blockquote>
Property in Bodies<blockquote>'Protection of and respect for property rights is thus not unique to libertarianism. What is distinctive about libertarianism is its
particular property assignment rules: its view concerning
who is the owner of each contestable resource, and how to determine this.
Property in BodiesA system of property rights assigns a particular owner to every scarce resource. These resources obviously include natural resources such as land, fruits of trees, and so on. Objects found in nature are not the only scarce resources, however. Each human actor has, controls, and is identified and associated with a unique human body, which is also a scarce resource.
[7] Both human bodies and nonhuman, scarce resources are desired for use as means by actors in the pursuit of various goals.
Accordingly, any political theory or system must assign ownership rights in human bodies as well as in external things...'
- Stephan Kinsella,
What Libertarianism Is, 8/21/2009</blockquote>
"radically scornful of human reason..."<blockquote>'But if Keynesianism leads to disaster, wherein lies salvation? One false step, appealing to many, is to cast away theory altogether. The National Bureau of Economic Research has famously attempted to study the business cycle through strict reliance on fact. The Bureau's
<blockquote>proclaimed methodology is Baconian: that is, it trumpets the claim that it has no theories, that it collects myriads of facts and statistics, and that its cautiously worded conclusions arise solely, Phoenix-like, out of the data themselves. (p. 232, emphasis in original)</blockquote>
Rothbard subjects the alleged scientific approach of the Bureau to devastating scrutiny. Although he was of course firmly committed to Austrian economics, Rothbard had a detailed knowledge of statistics, which was at one time his college major (p. 38); and he could meet the measurement devotees on their own ground.
...
Rothbard fully recognizes Hayek's outstanding contributions to Austrian business-cycle theory and to the socialist-calculation argument, as well as the impact of his antistatist classic,
The Road to Serfdom. But after World War II, Rothbard maintains, Hayek strayed from the path of righteousness. "To the extent that Hayek remained interested in cycle theory, he began to engage in shifting and contradictory deviations from the Misesian paradigm" (p. 378).
And worse was in store. Hayek, "radically scornful of human reason," (p. 379) rejected natural-law arguments in support of classical liberalism. Instead, he championed a murky doctrine of social evolution. Rothbard, both here and in "The Consequence of Human Action: Intended or Unintended?" makes crystal clear his aversion to undue stress on Hayek's leitmotif, the unintended consequences of human action.
- David Gordon,
Up from Statism, 9/11/2009</blockquote>
<center><b><a href="[
books.google.com] Cohen, An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method</a></b></center>