Similarly, rent is much higher in San Francisco than in Sacramento, which is higher than San Antonio... The idiocy is beyond my ability to fathom. The funny thing is trying to talk with someone who holds the idea that this is a good thing. It's amazing how inept they are at dealing with it and how adept and dancing around the issue.

I love this piece. Thank for posting it Lady Di. For those who are interested, Mr. Rosling has several other videos with similar trajectories and data presentation at ted.com. Highly recommended.

tax cuts that "give the money to those who...would keep the money for themselves..."

1) What does it mean to "keep the money for themselves? It means to invest it in business/funds or purchase products and services from individuals/businesses. What a dreadful thing!

2) They earned that money in a free system. To keep it for themselves is just.

Olbermann speaks from and sums up the central ideas of progressives:

a) Your earnings/wealth is the governments first and foremost. If the government let's you "keep" it, that is a gift.

b) The government knows best how to spend all the money there is, and you wanting to keep yours is arrogant, immoral, and disgusting.

c) Any politician, pundit, or person who does not hold this as an absolute principle of leadership and policy will be "weighed in the balance and found wanting." 

With friends like this, who needs enemies. Or, to echo Paul's central point, the enemy of our enemy is sometimes our friend...and by "enemy" I mean people who disagree with "us" - right Obama?

And since we brought up Bjorn, I find him to be the best source/path for conservatives to go beyond the skepticism typical of the right. http://bit.ly/g6DMGw 17 minutes. or http://bit.ly/gucby1 1 hr.

Society will not slow down (it might crash, but that outcome is moot). 

Solar technology is the only known solution that will work. We will continue our current "doubling" of cost-efficiency/use of solar every 2 years. This technological compound interest creates exponential growth. 2-year doubling will increase our cost-efficiency/use by 1000 times in 20 years. http://bit.ly/fepRHW Solar is about 1/2 of 1% now. It will supply 95% in 20 years, even though we will use 5 times as much energy globally.

(I assert that Nuclear is a suicidal technology. Terrorists will to use it against us, and if society does collapse, this threat - and accidents - increases exponentially.)

BTW, the only AGW skeptic question that matters is cloud feedbacks. As Roy Spencer's statistics work gets integrated it will change the models downward. And, if the feedbacks end up not being positive multiples (which I expect) we have ample time for technological solutions.

The thing I appreciate about Paul's article is that it is does not claim to debunk the Thanksgiving day myth, but speak to the real issue at hand - that private enterprises leverages and inalienable self-interest. That is the heart of the issue on this day of ThanksGiving.

As for the Limbaugh/Stossel version that it was the switch from "socialism to free enterprise" that led from famine to Thanksgiving, there seems to be serious scholarly doubt/criticism of this basic story. NY Times has an article "The Pilgrims Were … Socialists?" that CLAIMS to debunk it, but starts with the phrase "Historians quibble with this interpretation."

The key fact this article disputes is that the Thanksgiving celebration was in 1621 and the shift from "the common course" to family parcels was in 1623. The source in the article is "Richard Pickering" who is cited as "deputy director of Plimoth Plantation." I cannot find the source text where Pickering says this, or the source texts that he is drawing on, but this seems to be a critical fact.

Anyone? Bueller?

Also, the History channel History of Thanksgiving show uses Plimoth Plantation, attributes communal ownership to success. Great show. Recommended.

Yes. I stated it poorly. Not "in spite of" but "in the face of"

It's funny. After reading The Road To Serfdom in the early 90's, I had been getting progressively pessimistic about the course of USA politics. In the last decade, I have become increasingly hopeful.

The dispersion of technology and the infrastructure to create technology into the hands of the average joe changes the nature of the political game in a way unseen before (or orders of magnitude more than the printing press). "We The People" can now monitor our government more effectively than they can monitor us. This shift in visibility is just crossing threshold, and will increase exponentially, with the "market" growing faster than the government.

The bond market ignoring the Fed is a perfect example of this.

Paul - As a Hayek fan, your words are mellifluous!

ending the fed, or radically restructuring it has two stages.

First, we must make the process transparent - so the average "intellectually curious" person can see the shenanigans involved.

Two, people will push for simplification once they see it.

Ron Paul's Audit The Fed bill is the next step towards this.

I hope we get a "health care transparency" process in order soon, so people can understand what a bad idea it is when it comes to the realities of implementation.

When the rubber meets the road, let's hope we are watching where it steers the car!

WIth y'all on board, I think I will attend next year. I wonder - is it as fun and high quality as the Rico Soiree in SF?

I will say - meeting the players on Ricochet has transformed my relationship with this community, vs. the other internet communities I play within. Ricochet is MY community, because I met and partook of food and drink with y'all. NRO cruise sounds very good...

Kenneth - Please add wry and insightful musings on the cruise here...

It was wild to see Ricochet.com on my local news station. They took the least complimentary part of Pat's post and made it super dramatic. 24hr news cycles, here we come!

However, this is well within 140 characters, with lots of room for others to RT (re-tweet) it..

Claire, YES!

I think, when it all comes down to it, there are two fundamental attitudes.

1. People who think that humans (especially, but not necessarily themselves) can successfully adapt to a changing society (avoiding poverty, suffering, disease, and the social stigma of failure), especially THEMSELVES, think that such dynamism is good. In that game, they have a fighting chance to win, and that is all they want for themselves and others.

2. People who think that human beings are ill-equipped to adjust to a free society, and will predictably end up crushed by the machine/man. They believe the game is rigged against them and the masses, and it is unfair to expect them to compete in that game. Hence, we need to lease/bridle the powerful/skillful/talented and connected/privileged/inherited-wealth to make the game "fair" for everyone.

Of course, to admit this is so condescending and embarrassing that most people dress it up in self-righteous BS to assuage the egos involved...

Continuing...

In the market, it is accumulative, diverse, and synergistic. We can support dozens/hundreds/thousands of parallel experiments in value and efficiency, from companies, to products, to product variations. As long as a company is profitable, their flower can bloom, each of which can cross pollinate.

In politics, it is all or nothing, mono-culture, and monopolistic. When we elect one politician we dis-enfranchise all competitors. When we pass one bill/proposition we outlaw all competitors. One flower gets all of the sunlight, water, soil, and we uproot the other flowers, losing their capacity to bear fruit and cross-pollinate.

The ecology of the free market adapts to technological changes by integrating them, growing and thriving based on the greater efficiency and cross-pollination.

The ecology of a political system becomes rigid in response to technological changes, first creating barriers to change that protect the current balances of power, like dams holding back the river, then leading to massive shifts in power as the dams burst and the political power floods the previous structures, creating new power players and barriers/dams to contain/leverage the water/power.