Quick Roundup 376

Light Blogging Possible

I have a very full plate this week. If I skip blogging entirely now and then, that's why.

Blogroll Updates

Fans of Brian Phillips will now find his blog listed as Live Oaks, its new name, rather than as Houston Property Rights.

I have also added three new blogs: Ping-Ponging towards Fascism; Quent Cordair Fine Art, Director's Corner; and Wealth is not the Problem. The first was the most recent host of the weekly Objectivist Roundup. The other two I found via The Aesthetic Capitalist in the post, "Requesting Recommendations for Goodness" and its comments. Note that due to space limitations, the first two are listed as "Ping-Ponging" and "Cordair Director's Corner".

New Mailing List

My site statistics indicate that a few of my readers might be interested in joining Dinesh Pillay's new list, "IndianObjectivists":

IndianObjectivists is a private mailing list for Objectivists either based in India or with an interest in Indian society. Its purpose is to facilitate ideas for activism & also for promoting the philosophy of Objectivism in India

And don't forget that Diana Hsieh also runs three Objectivist lists.

Experimental Blog Feature

For some time, I've been toying around with the idea of hosting the occasional open thread, but have been reluctant to do so: Readership here is small enough that I doubt that a post up for just a few days would attract sufficient "critical mass" for a good discussion without some blog post to kick things off.

On the other hand, I frequently get good news tips from off-topic comments and reader email. Sometimes I can use the news tips, and sometimes not. Now, even if I don't actually blog a news tip, it will still appear somewhere, and that "somewhere" will be a place where other readers can expect to find it.

So I am going to try a sort of semi-permanent comment thread. Each month, I'll start a new open thread and link it to the blog template at the upper right as, "Bulletin Board". And I plan to daisy-chain the individual open thread posts so that one can navigate from one to the next.

Good Reading on Economics

Over the weekend, I found a couple of very informative posts on the financial crisis over at Andrew Medworth's blog. In his more recent post, he comments on George Reisman's essay on the financial crisis. In an earlier post, he discusses the financial crisis, and draws heavily from Gene Callahan's Economics for Real People, which, he notes, is available online.

His posts are both excellent, but one passage reminded me of an amusing restaurant sign from my home state of Mississippi.

As Adam Smith aptly put it in The Wealth of Nations in the 18th century, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." Without greed and selfishness -- by which I mean action taken in an individual’s own rational long-term self-interest -- we would all starve to death very quickly.

The rural restaurant sign at the right sums this up very memorably!

Oh? You want the online book? I left it at Andy's, so you'll have to go there to pick it up. And that's just the one useful link I mentioned.

-- CAV