sexta-feira, 31 de julho de 2015

Salário mínimo como instrumento de eugenia

The Eugenics Plot Behind the Minimum Wage

There really was a white male scheme to exterminate African Americans 

A careful look at its history shows that the minimum wage was originally conceived as part of a eugenics strategy — an attempt to engineer a master race through public policy designed to cleanse the citizenry of undesirables. To that end, the state would have to bring about the isolation, sterilization, and extermination of nonprivileged populations.
The eugenics movement — almost universally supported by the scholarly and popular press in the first decades of the 20th century — came about as a reaction to the dramatic demographic changes of the latter part of the 19th century. Incomes rose and lifetimes had expanded like never before in history. Such gains applied to all races and classes. Infant mortality collapsed. All of this was due to a massive expansion of markets, technology, and trade, and it changed the world. It meant a dramatic expansion of population among all groups. The great unwashed masses were living longer and reproducing faster.
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Efeito do salário mínimo

Black Teens Are Fired When the Minimum Wage Rises

The sector where many work is part of the problem.

quinta-feira, 30 de julho de 2015

Educação privada

For-profit education

The $1-a-week school

Private schools are booming in poor countries. Governments should either help them or get out of their way

This pattern is repeated across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. The failure of the state to provide children with a decent education is leading to a burgeoning of private places, which can cost as little as $1 a week (see article).
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Beijos - nunca mais

(Foto: Thinkstock)

Beijo causa mais câncer do que bebida e cigarro

(Foto: Thinkstock)
Cigarro e bebida sempre são relacionados à saúde do ser humano como fatores agravantes e capazes de produzir doenças. Entretanto, um médico australiano destacou uma prática comum do dia a dia do ser humano e que pode ser tão letal quanto o tabaco e o álcool: o beijo.

Mahiban Thomas é chefe de cirurgia maxilo-facial, de cabeça e pescoço no Hospital Real Darwin, na Austrália. Segundo ele, em entrevista ao jornal “Metro”, o beijo pode ajudar a transmitir o vírus do papiloma humano, o HPV, uma família de vírus que pode levar ao cancro.

A relação entre câncer e o HPV é bem conhecida, mas na maior parte das vezes é relacionada ao câncer cervical.
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Piketty - destribuição

How Piketty Misses the Point

By Deirdre N. McCloskey
Thomas Piketty has written a big book — 577 pages of text; 76 pages of notes; 115 charts, tables, and graphs — that has excited the left worldwide. First published in French in 2013, an English edition was issued last year to wide acclaim and a top position on the New York Times bestseller list. It has been a long time since a technical treatise on economics has had such a market. An economist can only applaud. And an economic historian can only wax ecstatic.
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quarta-feira, 29 de julho de 2015

Escravidão

Um barão negro, seu palácio e seus 200 escravos

Família resgata memória de um dos homens mais ricos do Brasil Imperial e que ganhou título da princesa Isabel

© 1996 - 2015. Todos direitos reservados a Infoglobo Comunicação e Participações S.A. Este material não pode ser publicado, transmitido por broadcast, reescrito ou redistribuído sem autorização.

terça-feira, 28 de julho de 2015

República "concurseira"


Guilherme Perez Cabral

A educação do cidadão na república "concurseira"


Guilherme Perez Cabral



O acesso a um cargo público, no Brasil, para quem não é do mundo da política, não tem curral eleitoral, nem é indicação de algum dono do poder, passa pelo (des)caminho dos concursos públicos. Então, prepare-se. Digo, não para o cargo. Não para o trabalho. Não para o exercício da cidadania. Prepare-se para a prova das múltiplas escolhas.
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Memos (textos narrativos) em vez de PowerPoint

Amazon demanda: 
Well structured, narrative text is what we're after rather than just text. If someone builds a list of bullet points in word, that would be just as bad as powerpoint.
The reason writing a 4 page memo is harder than "writing" a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what's more important than what, and how things are related.
Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the innerconnectedness of ideas.

segunda-feira, 27 de julho de 2015

A criação do Meio Oriente

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East 

"The greatest accomplishment of the book is to dissect the mentality of British policymakers, which by today's standards was almost ghoulishly primitive."

"In A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin reveals how and why the Allies drew lines on an empty map that remade the geography and politics of the Middle East. Focusing on the formative years of 1914 to 1922, when all seemed possible, he delivers in this sweeping and magisterial book the definitive account of this defining time, showing how the choices narrowed and the Middle East began along a road that led to the conflicts and confusion that continue to this day."
This is the story of the greatest watershed of the 20C: sowing the seeds of the end of western domination as the impulse grew in colonial peoples to govern themselves. Not only did Turkey reinvent itself, but the Soviet Union was born, and the western powers (with the exception of the US) had squandered their human and financial resources catastrophically. Amazingly, what was going on in the Middle East at that time was seen as a backwater sideshow: virtually no one recognized the magnitude of change that was unleashed.
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O grupo Milner

Carroll Quigley's Conspiracy Theory: The Milner Group
Academic historians dislike the concept that history is often made by groups of individuals plotting together in confidence, even though one obvious way to get big things done is to make plans with your friends and allies while keeping your rivals in the dark as long as possible.
One exception is the late Georgetown history professor Carroll Quigley, who in 1949 completed a book rather grandly entitled The Anglo-American Establishment.
Decades later Bill Clinton was an undergrad student of Quigley (he got a B from him). In Clinton’s 1992 acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, he cited Quigley as an inspiration.
In reality, Quigley’s book, which wasn’t published until much later, was only very tangentially related to American institutions such as the Council of Foreign Relations. It actually focused on one group of British establishmentarians, the progressive imperialists who set up the British equivalent of the CFR, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (a.k.a., Chatham House), edited The Times of London for most of the first four decades of the 20th Century, and largely controlled the peculiarly influential All Souls College at Oxford.
Quigley calls them the Milner Group after Alfred Milner (1854-1925), an eminence grise who more or less started the Boer War of 1899-1902, then mentored “Milner’s Kindergarten” of bright young men in running South Africa, and finally popped up again in Lloyd George’s five-man war cabinet in 1917. But Milner mostly served behind the scenes.
Quigley traces the Milner Group back to the far more colorful Cecil Rhodes’ desire to start a “Secret Society” to promote Angl0-American unity and global domination. In the first five wills written by the mining tycoon of southern Africa, Rhodes (1853-1902) called for his estate to fund a secret society to reunify America with Britain and promote Anglo settlement of the world. For example, Rhodes wrote in his first will that he was leaving his fortune:
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Fascismo brasileiro

 Paulo Roberto de Almeida

O Estado Fascista do Brasil
O fascismo, reduzido à sua expressão mais simples, é quando o Estado manda em você, e você sequer tem consciência disso, uma vez que tal interação passa quase despercebida, já foi embutida pela sociedade. O contrário do fascismo é, obviamente, uma sociedade libertária, onde cada um usa de seu livre arbítrio para guiar-se na vida e nas atividades cotidianas. Tomados nesse entendimento ideal-típico mais simples possível, é claro que ambos os conceitos não expressam nenhuma sociedade concreta, nossa contemporânea, mas eles podem ajudar a situar os casos nacionais num ou noutro extremo desse espectro que leva do fascismo explícito ao libertarianismo utópico. Em outros termos, uma sociedade será tanto mais fascista, ou tendencialmente libertária, quando os comportamentos típicos dos indivíduos se aproximarem do inferno dirigista a cargo do Estado, ou da mais plena liberdade pessoal, sem interferência estatal.
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sábado, 25 de julho de 2015

Antologia filosofia, política e economia

Philosophy, Politics, and Economics: An Anthology 1st Edition

1. POLITICAL AUTHORITY
Plato, Crito
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
John Locke, Popular Basis of Political Authority
David Hume, Of the Original Contract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

2. RATIONAL CHOICE
Gary Becker, The Economic Way of Looking at Behavior
David Schmidtz, Reasons for Altruism
David Gauthier, Rationality: Maximization Constrained
Gregory Kavka, The Toxin Puzzle

3. GAME THEORY
Simon Blackburn, Game Theory and Rational Choice
Thomas Schelling, Dynamic Models of Segregation
Gerry Mackie, Ending Foot Binding and Infibulation: A Convention Account
Geoffrey Brennan and Gordon Tullock, An Economic Theory of Military Tactics: Methodological Individualism at War

4. PROPERTY
John Locke, Of Property
David Hume, Of Justice and Property
Karl Marx, Capital, Primitive Accumulation
Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice
David Schmidtz, The Institution of Property

5. MARKETS
Market Advantages
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Of the Division of Labor
Friedrich Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society
Leonard Read, I, Pencil
Market Fairness
St. Thomas Aquinas, Sins Committed in Buying and Selling
John Locke, What is a Fair Price?
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, "Of the Expences of the Sovereign"
Market Failures
Tyler Cowen, Public Goods
Jonathan Anomaly, Public Goods and Government Action
David Friedman, Market Failures

6. COLLECTIVE ACTION
Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action
Jean Hampton, Free Rider Problems in the Production of Collective Goods
Elinor Ostrom, Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, The Evolutionary Basis of Collective Action

7. JUSTICE
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Gerald Cohen, Robert Nozick and Wilt Chamberlain: How Patterns Preserve Liberty

8. EQUALITY
Harry Frankfurt, Equality as a Moral Ideal
Richard Arneson, Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare
Amartya Sen, Equality of What?
Robert Nozick, Equality of Opportunity
Kurt Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron

9. COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS
Steven Kelman, An Ethical Critique of Cost-Benefit Analysis
Elizabeth Anderson, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Safety, and Environmental Quality
David Schmidtz, A Place for Cost-Benefit Analysis

10. PUBLIC CHOICE
James Buchanan, Public Choice: Politics without Romance
Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy
Michael Munger, Rent-Seek and You Will Find
James Buchanan, How Can Constitutions Be Designed so that Politicians Who Seek to Serve the "Public Interest" Can Survive and Prosper?
Michael Huemer, Why People Are Irrational about Politics

11. REASONS TO VOTE
Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Is There a Duty to Vote?
Jason Brennan, Polluting the Polls: When Citizens Should Not Vote
Geoffrey Brennan and Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Voting and Causal Responsibility

12. LIBERTY AND PATERNALISM
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Gerald Dworkin, Paternalism
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Libertarian Paternalism Is Not an Oxymoron

13. MARKETS ON THE MARGIN
Sex
Martha Nussbaum, Whether from Reason or Prejudice: Taking Money for Bodily Services
David Friedman, Marriage, Sex and Babies
Drugs
Michael Huemer, America's Unjust Drug War
Peter de Marneffe, Against the Legalization of Drugs
Jeffrey Miron, The Economics of Drug Prohibition and Drug Legalization
Organs
Arthur Caplan, Organ Transplantation
Gerald Dworkin, Markets and Morals: The Case for Organ Sales
Sweatshops
Benjamin Powell and Matt Zwolinski, The Ethical and Economic Case Against Sweatshop Labor: A Critical Assessment
Mathew Coakley and Michael Kates, The Ethical and Economic Case for Sweatshop Regulation
Price Gouging
Michael Munger, They Clapped: Can Price Gouging Laws Prohibit Scarcity?
Jeremy Snyder, What's the Matter with Price Gouging?
Matt Zwolinski, Price Gouging, Non-Worseness, and Distributive Justice
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Normas sociais e pobreza

The stat comes from a 2009 book by Haskins and Sawhill called Creating an Opportunity Society. Haskins and Sawhill analyzed income data from 2007 and broke down households based on whether the head of household followed three norms:
  • They work full-time.
  • They graduated high school.
  • They waited until they were married and at least 21 to have a child.
They found that only 2 percent of persons in families that followed all three norms were poor, whereas 76 percent of persons in families that followed none were poor, and 73.8 percent of those who followed all three were at least middle-class:
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sexta-feira, 24 de julho de 2015

Universidade pública aumenta desigualdade

Como a universidade pública e gratuita aumenta a desigualdade de renda

Existe um grande paradoxo na realidade política brasileira. Aqueles que usualmente se colocam como defensores da justiça social e dos mais vulneráveis, normalmente também entendem que as universidades públicas devem ser financiadas do modo que são hoje: com dinheiro de impostos. Tentativas de financiamento privado da universidade pública – por meio de empresas e fundações privadas – ou de cobrança de taxas de mensalidade e matrícula para os estudantes mais abastados – como tentou fazer, durante algum tempo, a UFMG – são rechaçados como métodos de privatização da universidade pública, gratuita e de qualidade.

Pós-Capitalismo

The end of capitalism has begun

Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian
As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started.
Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.
Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.


Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a direct result of the shattering of the old structures in the post-2008 crisis.
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Veja também
Crítica

A agenda de falsificar história

Falsifying History In Behalf Of Agendas

In an article on April 13 I used the so-called Civil War and the myths with which court historians have encumbered that war to show how history is falsified in order to serve agendas. I pointed out that it was a war of secession, not a civil war as the South was not fighting the North for control of the government in Washington. As for the matter of slavery, all of Lincoln’s statements prove that he was neither for the blacks nor against slavery. Yet he has been turned into a civil rights hero, and a war of northern aggression, whose purpose Lincoln stated over and over was “to preserve the union” (the empire), has been converted into a war to free the slaves.
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quinta-feira, 23 de julho de 2015

Limites do mercado livre

Don't Worship the Free Market - Faith in Freedom Need Not Be Blind by 

“I’m tired of hearing that ‘liberty’ will take care of it!”
My young friend was explaining to me why she’s become less enthusiastic about libertarianism than she was a few years ago. I suspect she speaks for many smart young people who are just learning about libertarianism and getting a lot of bumper sticker ideas. Our belief in human freedom can strike them more as religious doctrine than as reason.
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Hamburguer americano


quarta-feira, 22 de julho de 2015

Saúde - quem paga

O paciente de R$ 800 mil

A história do rapaz que recebe do SUS o tratamento mais caro do mundo revela um dos maiores desafios do Brasil: resolver o conflito entre o direito individual e o direito coletivo à saúde

CRISTIANE SEGATTO

Imigração América

37 maps that explain how America is a nation of immigrants

American politicians, and Americans themselves, love to call themselves "a nation of immigrants": a place where everyone's family has, at some point, chosen to come to seek freedom or a better life. America has managed to maintain that self-image through the forced migration of millions of African slaves, restrictive immigration laws based on fears of "inferior" races, and nativist movements that encouraged immigrants to assimilate or simply leave.
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Século 19

7 razões porque você odiaria viver no século 19

Talvez você ainda não tenha se tocado disso, mas há centenas de escravos trabalhando para você. Sim, isso mesmo que você leu: centenas de escravos. Todos os dias, de domingo a domingo.
Repare como é o seu dia. Você acorda esticado num lençol de tecido chinês, assiste a seu seriado favorito num televisor com partes eletrônicas de Taiwan e da Coreia do Sul, dirige um carro provavelmente alemão, japonês ou italiano, conversa num celular com plástico tailandês e borracha malaia, troca emails através de um servidor americano e agora provavelmente está lendo esse texto por uma tela de led fabricada em Cingapura. E isso é apenas a ponta do iceberg. Em poucos minutos, você consome produtos dos mais remotos cantos do mundo, que movimentam um batalhão de seres humanos, atravessando oceanos, rompendo barreiras, com um único propósito: servi-lo. Há pessoas extraindo petróleo por você, cultivando alimentos, desenvolvendo medicações, softwares, obras culturais. Talvez você sequer tenha percebido tudo isso, mas consome frações do trabalho de centenas de pessoas, das mais diversas nacionalidades, todos os dias.

terça-feira, 21 de julho de 2015

Baixar a idade para tomar alcool

Lower the Drinking Age! 

The law is causing worse problems than it solves - by 

It’s rush time for fraternities and sororities on college campuses right now. That means dressing up, networking, socializing, attending parties, and staying up late nights. It also means, whether parents know it (or like it) or not, astonishing amounts of drinking of very potent liquor. One of the most famous “drinks” is called “jungle juice”: trash barrels filled with random spirits and mixtures, consumed one red cup at a time.
Many of these kids are away from home for the first time, able to drink to their heart’s content. A huge culture as grown up around this practice, including a full vocabulary, games, and rituals. Mostly it is just fun, but it can also lead to serious trouble for everyone involved. Let’s not be squeamish: it leads to very un-adult-like amounts of personal abuse and, often, the abuse of others.
Most of these kids have never been socialized in what it means to drink responsibly. They are living for the thrill that comes with defiance. The combination of new freedom, liquor, and sexual opportunity leads to potentially damaged lives.
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O mito da "guerra civil" americano

Historical Truth

We call the war of 1861 the Civil War. But is that right? A civil war is a struggle between two or more entities trying to take over the central government. Confederate President Jefferson Davis no more sought to take over Washington, D.C., than George Washington sought to take over London in 1776. Both wars, those of 1776 and 1861, were wars of independence. Such a recognition does not require one to sanction the horrors of slavery. We might ask, How much of the war was about slavery?
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Efeito ecologico do petroleo

Petrol power: an eco-revolution

The rise of petroleum-powered transport was an environmental boon.
Apart from their stench, urban stables and the manure piles that filled practically every vacant lot were prime breeding grounds for house flies, perhaps three billion of which hatched each day in American cities at the turn of the twentieth century. With flies came outbreaks of deadly infectious diseases, such as typhoid and yellow fever, cholera and diphtheria. Workhorses’ skittishness in heavy traffic also meant that they stampeded, kicked, bit and trampled a number of bystanders. According to one estimate, the fatality rate per capita in urban traffic was roughly 75 per cent higher in the horse era than today. The clatter of horseshoes and wagon wheels on cobblestone pavement was also incredibly noisy. They also created significant traffic congestion, because a horse and wagon occupied more street space than a modern truck, while a badly injured horse would typically be shot on the spot or abandoned to die on the road, creating a major obstruction that was difficult to remove in an age without tow trucks. (Indeed, street cleaners often waited for the corpses to putrefy so they could be sawed into pieces and carted off with greater ease.)
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Pobreza infantil

Report suggests US children left behind in economic recovery


Report on child welfare suggests many US children were left behind in economic recovery

segunda-feira, 20 de julho de 2015

Anti-Natalismo

We Are Creatures That Should Not Exist’: The Theory of Anti-Natalism

Sobre Adam Smith

adam smithIn the “Overture” to his grandly symphonic The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Peter Gay describes the “international type” of the philosophe as a “facile, articulate, doctrinaire, sociable, secular man of letters.” On this definition, was Adam Smith a philosophe?
Yes and no. Unlike his French counterparts, and even his bosom friend David Hume, he led a retired life, much of it in the small Scottish town where he was born, and he lived with his mother until she died at a very advanced age. He was shy, destroyed most of his letters, and did not seem to relish giving brilliant performances, either in print or in conversation. He never fell afoul of civil or religious authority, had no mistresses, and engaged in no public quarrels.
(A semi-public one, though. Shortly after Hume’s death, Smith met Samuel Johnson at a party. Johnson spoke slightingly of Hume, Smith defended him, and their exchanges grew increasingly heated until Johnson exclaimed, “Sir, you lie!” To which Smith retorted, “Sir, you are the son of a whore!” and stalked out.)

O Heinsohn hiato

Working backwards through the mainstream historical narrative we arrive at the Heinsohn Horizon in the 930s where the mainstream narrative falls into The Academic Abyss and degenerates into fiction, fantasy and fabrication for a period of 700 [phantom] years.
Mainstream historians [and tributary catastrophists] clearly have their eyes wired shut and their index fingers firmly wedged into their ears as they chant: “I can’t hear you Heinsohn”.
Therefore, some 700 years of the 1st millennium (230 to 930s) have neither strata nor tree samples for C14 or dendro-chronological dating.
Archaeological Strata Versus Baillie’s Tree-Rings: Proposal for an Experiment
Gunnar Heinsohn – 8 September 2014
http://www.q-mag.org/_media/gunnar-strata-vsbaillie08-09-2014.pdf
http://www.q-mag.org/the-1st-millennium-a-d-chronology-controversy.html
The problem for many mainstream and tributary historians is that their professional lives are dedicated to filling The Academic Abyss with fiction, fantasy and fabrication.
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Anti-Política

"Perhaps counterintuitively, there is an authoritarian critique of politics just as there is a libertarian one. For example, as political theory scholar David Held observes, Karl Marx looked forward to an “end of politics,” a world without political or economic classes, in which the “political supremacy” of the proletariat and the end of material scarcity would be realized. Ironically, Marx presents a vision in some ways quite similar to that of libertarians, treating politics as “the official expression of antagonism in civil society” and anticipating the dissipation of the state and the related growth of a new, different kind of governing system. Taking Marx’s stateless, anti-political reverie on its face, libertarians may be tempted to think that it doesn’t sound half bad. Who wouldn’t want a society without unjust, coercive class rule, where permanent material plenitude has replaced poverty and want? If only we could call a halt to the messy, obstructive, and—perhaps worst of all—corrupt process of politics, we might get on our way toward utopia. Inspirited by seemingly endless scientific advancements and technological developments, utopians of all kinds once confidently forecasted the day when society would be cleansed finally and fully of politics. In the United States, the authoritarian variety of this anti-political thinking reached its apogee during the Progressive Era. But while the progressives purported to be anti-political, they, like Marxists, were not anti-state; they sought not to replace or discard the state, but to purify it, to make it the instrument of the empirical method, of objective, scientific knowledge used to execute and administer a rational ordering of society from the top down. Specialization and expertise were in the ascendant, attended by a new contempt among intellectuals and elites for all things political and ideological. According to the progressive thinking, if everything is reducible to hard science—to empirical data, duly analyzed and quantified—then there is no longer a need for either politics or ideology. Trained experts in central government agencies, assigned to specific social problems and tasks, need only determine the correct, scientific solution and determine a plan for its implementation.
"The fundamental mistake of such thinking is one that Hayek identified in his Nobel Prize lecture, “The Pretence of Knowledge,” in which he explains the problems with applying the methods of the physical sciences to the social sciences. Progressivism is an example of this kind of “scientism,” an attempt to coopt, in Hayek’s words, “the dignity and prestige of the physical sciences” for public policy decisions made by a burgeoning class of bureaucrats—as opposed to either state legislatures or the U.S. Congress. The twentieth century academy likewise embraced the intellectual vainglory of scientism, the economics profession, for example, coming to treat economies as “engineerable systems, i.e., machines.”2 Many free market economists espoused this “modernist genre of economic theory,” even as they battled the ideas of Keynesianism and socialist economic planning. The space of thought, inquiry, and political debate was narrowing, giving way to a monotonous climate of conformity."
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Protecionismo brasileiro

 Acordo elimina tarifas para eletrônicos em 80 países, mas Brasil resolve ficar fora - InfoMoney
Veja mais em: http://www.infomoney.com.br/minhas-financas/gadgets/noticia/4167900/acordo-elimina-tarifas-para-eletronicos-paises-mas-brasil-resolve-ficar

Conceitos básicos do libertarianismo

Com o que sonham os libertários



POR RONALD HILLBRECHT*

Conceitos centrais do libertarianismo começaram a tomar forma no século 17, com foco ora em direitos, ora em consequências

Libertarianismo é a filosofia política da liberdade. Seus conceitos centrais foram sendo desenvolvidos ao longo dos séculos e podem ser encontrados em textos antigos como o Tao Te Ching e a Bíblia. Entretanto, foi a partir dos séculos 17 e 18 que o ideal de liberdade começou a tomar forma como filosofia política por autores como John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill e Thomas Jefferson. Libertários acreditam que o respeito pela liberdade individual é o requisito central de justiça e que as relações humanas devem ser baseadas em consentimento mútuo. Eles advogam uma sociedade livre baseada em cooperação, tolerância e respeito mútuo. Libertários acreditam que todas as pessoas têm o direito de decidir os rumos das suas vidas e não podem ser forçadas a servir outros nem ser sacrificadas em nome de grandes ideais sociais. Desta forma, libertários enfatizam a dignidade de cada indivíduo, o que lhes confere tanto direitos quanto responsabilidades: adultos não devem ser tratados como escravos ou servos, nem como crianças. Algumas das maiores conquistas da humanidade, como a abolição da escravidão; o estabelecimento de tolerância religiosa; a progressiva extensão da dignidade às mulheres, gays e minorias étnicas e religiosas; a substituição da superstição pela ciência; a subordinação de monarcas a parlamentos eleitos; a proteção de direitos à propriedade para todos; a substituição do mercantilismo por mercados e a substituição de governos arbitrários pelos constitucionalmente limitados, estão todas intimamente vinculadas às ideias de liberdade e dignidade individual.
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domingo, 19 de julho de 2015

Profissionais de pobeza

Jonet diz que há 'profissionais da pobreza em Portugal'

A presidente da Federação Europeia dos Bancos Alimentares, Isabel Jonet,  alertou ontem para a existência em Portugal de pessoas que fazem da mendicidade um modo de vida, referindo-se aos mesmo como “profissionais da pobreza”, lê-se no Jornal de Notícias. 

Derrubando os mitos sobre Revolução Francesa

Secher, Reynald: A French Genocide: The Vendee 
Furet, François: Interpreting the French Revolution
Schama, Simon: Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution

sábado, 18 de julho de 2015

O mito da idade oscura

God's PhilosophersThe Dark Age Myth: An Atheist Reviews “God’s Philosophers”

by  
Filed under Book Reviews
My interest in Medieval science was substantially sparked by one book. Way back in 1991, when I was an impoverished and often starving post-graduate student at the University of Tasmania, I found a copy of Robert T. Gunther's Astrolabes of the World - 598 folio pages of meticulously catalogued Islamic, Medieval and Renaissance astrolabes with photos, diagrams, star lists and a wealth of other information. I found it, appropriately and not coincidentally, in Michael Sprod's Astrolabe Books - up the stairs in one of the beautiful old sandstone warehouses that line Salamanca Place on Hobart's waterfront. Unfortunately the book cost $200, which at that stage was the equivalent to what I lived on for a month. But Michael was used to selling books to poverty-stricken students, so I went without lunch, put down a deposit of $10 and came back weekly for several months to pay off as much as I could afford and eventually got to take it home, wrapped in brown paper in a way that only Hobart bookshops seem to bother with anymore. There are few pleasures greater than finally getting your hands on a book you've been wanting to own and read for a long time.
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Efeitos da redistribuição

Nineteen Neglected Consequences of Income Redistribution

Virtually every government action changes the personal distribution of income, but some government programs, which give money, goods, or services to individuals who give nothing in exchange, represent income redistribution in its starkest form.
Until the twentieth century, American governments steered pretty clear of such “transfer payments.” The national government gave pensions and land grants to veterans, and local governments provided food and shelter to the destitute. But the transfers to veterans can be viewed as deferred payments for military services, and local relief never amounted to much.
Since the creation of the Social Security system in 1935, especially during the past 30 years, the amount of income overtly transferred by governments has risen dramatically. In 1960 government transfer payments to persons amounted to $29 billion, or 7 percent of personal income. In 1993 the total came to $912 billion, or nearly 17 percent of personal income.1 In other words, one dollar out of every six received as personal income now takes the form of old-age, survivors, disability, and health insurance benefits ($438 billion), unemployment insurance benefits ($34 billion), veterans’ benefits ($20 billion), government employees’ retirement benefits ($115 billion), aid to families with dependent children ($24 billion), and miscellaneous other government transfer payments ($280 billion) such as federal subsidies to farmers and state and local public assistance to poor people.
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Educação contra instrução

Das Universelle Verblödungssystem
"Bildung ist etwas, was man ganz ohne Beeinträchtigung durch den Schulunterricht erwerben muss."
Mark Twain

"Wenn wir etwas lernen wollen, müssen wir bei Aktionen und Protesten mitmachen, das ist Selbstaufklärung durch Widerstand, und die brauchen wir auch, denn Presse und Universitäten informieren nicht über das, was wirklich passiert."
Maria Mies

"Was nützt es dem Menschen, wenn er Lesen und Schreiben gelernt hat,
 
aber das Denken anderen überlässt?"
Ernst R. Hauschka

"Weil Denken die schwerste Arbeit ist, die es gibt, beschäftigen sich auch nur wenige damit."
Henry Ford

"Der rastlose Arbeitsmensch von heute hat tagsüber keine Zeit, sich Gedanken zu machen - und abends ist er zu müde dazu. Alles in allem hält er das für Glück."
George Bernard Shaw

"Immer, wenn man die Meinung der Mehrheit teilt, ist es Zeit, sich zu besinnen."
Mark Twain

"Für einen intelligenten Menschen ist es Zeitverschwendung, der Mehrheit anzugehören. Per definition tun das schon genug Leute."
 
G.H. Hardy

"Auf seine eigene Art zu denken, ist nicht selbstsüchtig.
 
Wer nicht auf seine Art denkt, denkt überhaupt nicht."
Oscar Wilde

"Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit."
Immanuel Kant

"Über eine gewonnene Erkenntnis sollte man sich mehr freuen als über eine verlorene Illusion."
Horst Friedrich

"Die Leute sind gar nicht so dumm, wie wir sie durch das Fernsehen noch machen werden."
Hans Joachim Kulenkampff

"Der Mensch hat dreierlei Wege klug zu handeln: erstens durch nachdenken,
 
das ist der edelste, zweitens durch nachahmen, das ist der leichteste,
 
und drittens durch Erfahrung, das ist der bitterste."
Konfuzius

"Wenige sind imstande, von den Vorurteilen der Umgebung abweichende Meinungen gelassen auszusprechen, die meisten sind sogar unfähig, überhaupt zu solchen Meinungen zu gelangen."
Albert Einstein

"Glaubt den Büchern nicht, glaubt den Lehrern nicht, glaubt auch mir nicht.
Glaubt nur das, was ihr selbst sorgfältig geprüft und als Euch selbst
und anderen zum Wohle dienend erkannt habt."
Buddha

Mau Mau

Mau Mau detainees (Getty Images/Getty)
This is the story of a few documents that tumbled out of the secret archives of the biggest empire the world has ever known, offering a glimpse of histories waiting to be rewritten.
When professor Caroline Elkins came across a stray document left by the British colonial government in Nairobi, Kenya, she opened the door to a new reckoning with the history of one of Britain's colonial crown jewels, and the fearsome group of rebels known as the Mau Mau.
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O lado escuro do Churchill

Not his finest hour: The dark side of Winston Churchill 

Winston Churchill is rightly remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour – but what if he also led the country through her most shameful hour? What if, in addition to rousing a nation to save the world from the Nazis, he fought for a raw white supremacism and a concentration camp network of his own? This question burns through Richard Toye's new history, Churchill's Empire, and is even seeping into the Oval Office.
George W Bush left a bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House, in an attempt to associate himself with the war leader's heroic stand against fascism. Barack Obama had it returned to Britain. It's not hard to guess why: his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill's watch, for resisting Churchill's empire.
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Churchill e Índia

How Churchill 'starved' India

Soutik Biswas | 15:50 UK time, Thursday, 28 October 2010
Victims of the famine in Bengal, 1943
It is 1943, the peak of the Second World War. The place is London. The British War Cabinet is holding meetings on a famine sweeping its troubled colony, India. Millions of natives mainly in eastern Bengal, are starving. Leopold Amery, secretary of state for India, and Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell, soon to be appointed the new viceroy of India, are deliberating how to ship more food to the colony. But the irascible Prime Minister Winston Churchill is coming in their way...
Some three million Indians died in the famine of 1943. The majority of the deaths were in Bengal. In a shocking new book, Churchill's Secret War, journalist Madhusree Mukherjee blames Mr Churchill's policies for being largely responsible for one of the worst famines in India's history. It is a gripping and scholarly investigation into what must count as one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the Empire.
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sexta-feira, 17 de julho de 2015

Riqueza facil

 Want to join the 1%? Nothing is stopping you 

Constant churn of capitalism creates lots of class mobility

StevenHorwitz


Critics of the ”1%” frequently speak of them as if they were a modern aristocracy. Yet one of the great myths about income inequality in the U.S. is that the people who are in the top 20%, or even the top 1%, remain the same from year to year or even generation to generation.
The reality is that Americans move out of poverty and fall from wealth because market economies are always churning, rewarding those who deliver value in a free market, and penalizing those who don’t. America continues to be the land of opportunity. Anyone can join the 1%.
What economists call income mobility continues in this country over the course of any individual’s lifetime and across generations. Being poor at any specific point in time, or being the child of poor parents, does not mean people are unable to move up the income ladder. In the same way, there is no guarantee that those at the top will stay there. 
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Você é mais rico que pensa

You’re Richer Than You Think. Really.

The Fiscal Times

This little exercise might make you feel a bit better about your standing in the world. As part of a huge study on the state of the global middle class, the Pew Research Center has created a new tool that lets you see how your income stacks up with that of households worldwide.
To find out, just enter your country, the number of people in your household, and your annual, weekly, or monthly income into the calculator below. (Pew says it doesn’t store or share any of the data you enter.)

quinta-feira, 16 de julho de 2015

Vício

What really causes addiction — to everything from cocaine to smart-phones? And how can we overcome it? Johann Hari has seen our current methods fail firsthand, as he has watched loved ones struggle to manage their addictions. He started to wonder why we treat addicts the way we do — and if there might be a better way. As he shares in this deeply personal talk, his questions took him around the world, and unearthed some surprising and hopeful ways of thinking about an age-old problem.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more.
Find closed captions and translated subtitles in many languages at http://www.ted.com/translate

Desigualdade

Some measures are more equal than others



Is inequality rising or falling? Both, according to a report published on July 16th by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank. In the 1980s a big gap between rich and poor opened up. Since the early 1990s, however, the difference between the incomes of the top and bottom deciles (the “90:10 ratio”) has diminished; the ratio is now at its lowest in more than 25 years. But that is not the whole story. The share of income held by the richest 1%, another measure of inequality, has continued to grow. The 1% now receive more than double the share they took home 30 years ago. The gap between rich and poor has narrowed. But the gulf between the mega-rich and the rest continues to widen.
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Alemanha 2015

Germany Becomes the World’s Perfect Economy

24/7 Wall St.

Expressão livre

“I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.”
Oscar Wilde

quarta-feira, 15 de julho de 2015

Idade Media

Book Review: The Middle Ages