The Economic Way of Thinking

Prychitko's Wager

Ian Vasquez over at the Cato@Liberty blog reports that Venezuela's Hugo Chavez said

Every day I’m more of a revolutionary, every day I’m more socialist… I’m going to take Venezuela toward socialism, with the people and the workers…The revolution is not negotiable, socialism is not negotiable, because every day I’m more convinced that socialism is the kingdom of God on earth. That is what Christ came to announce.

Apparently Chavez has a God-given right to expropriate the privately owned means of production.  I suppose he believes that the Lord on his side, so how can he possibly fail to deliver his people out of the world of scarcity and into the world of heaven on earth?

As for me, I'll bet on the economic way of thinking against Chavez's religion from now until doomsday.

Undesigned Orders: Darwin And Smith

Darwin’s debt to the political economists is considerable. In his last year at Cambridge in 1829, he reported in a letter, ‘My studies consist in Adam Smith and Locke’. At Maer, his uncle Josiah Wedgwood’s house in Staffordshire, he often met the lawyer and laissez-faire politician Sir James Mackintosh (whose daughter married Darwin’s brother-in-law and had an affair with his brother). On the Beagle, he read the naturalist Henri Milne-Edwards, who took Adam Smith’s notion of the division of labour and applied it to the organs of the body. Darwin promptly re-applied it to the division of labour among specialised species in an ecosystem: ‘The advantage of diversification in the inhabitants of the same region is, in fact, the same as that of the physiological division of labour in the organs of the same individual body — a subject so well elucidated by Milne-Edwards.’

That's from Matt Ridley's The Natural Order of Things.

HT:  Walter Grinder

Religulous and the Logic of Collective Action

My wife and I watched Bill Maher's Religulous this weekend.  I'll talk a bit more about the movie in a future post.

One of the many things that caught my attention in the movie was a claim Maher made about the fraction of agnostics, atheists, and people who don't want to be bothered by religion in the US.  According to Maher, the fraction is 16%, which he points out, is a larger slice of the American population than African Americans and Jewish Americans.

Assuming Maher's figure is correct, why don't we see the formation of more anti-religion interest groups from the millions who want to be left alone on the religion margin?  Does do people who do not want to be bothered with religion tend to be people who do not want to be bothered by politics and political action, too?  Or, is the energy of agnostics and atheists being directed towards other ends, such as the environmental movement and civil rights?