On behalf of my colleague Jon Rowe, I bid everyone at the League farewell. The merger between The One Best Way and the League of Ordinary Gentlemen has not worked as well as we all hoped, and so we have collectively and amicably decided to dissolve it. The styles just seem not to mesh well, which is no criticism of any of the participants. We appreciate the League extending us the invitation to join them, and it is with regret that make this decision.
It is, at present, unclear what the blogging future holds for those of use leaving. Jon will still be writing for his group blog, American Creation (http://americancreation.blogspot.com/) and posting everything he writes there and elsewhere at his archive site, http://jonrowe.blogspot.com. He is also pondering the possibility of reviving The One Best Way or developing a new group blog focusing on public affairs. I am beginning a new solo blog, The Bawdy House Provisions, which, despite its delicious title, will have little general public appeal. The One Best Way still exists, and while the smart money is probably against it’s resurrection, it’s not beyond the realm of the possible. If anyone wants to revive a blog with a name that none of its principals really liked, you know where to find me.
Speaking entirely for myself now, my decision to return to a solo blog is done with much trepidation. I’ve made some good virtual friends in the past couple of years, and it was a pleasure to me when they found us at The One Best Way after the demise of Positive Liberty, and a pleasure to see them here as well. I know I will lose contact with some of you with this move, and that imposes a very high cost on this decision. As much as I intend not to be commercial on my new blog, I do hope you will stop by now and then. I’ve come to realize I don’t relish a large audience, but I do enjoy a good conversation with a few friends, over beers at the virtual bar, so to speak. If we’ve had good conversation, you’re always welcome at my table. There are obviously good people here at the League as well, and I don’t mean to insult them by exclusion; feel free to stop by and share a glass.
Our best to all the ordinary gentlemen and women, both authors and commenters.
In another thread I argued that U.S. manufacturing output was not in decline. Not to be pushy, but just to back up my claim with data, here is a chart from Bureau of Economic Analysis data, showing the value of U.S. manufacturing from 1987 to 2009. (You used to be able to download data from well before ’87, but not anymore, which is frustrating.) The valuation is shown in a chain-type price index, which is just some fancy technical talk to say that it’s all be adjusted for inflation. The year 2005 is set at the value 100, and the other years relate to that baseline. You’ll just have to take my word for it that the beginning value of ’87 is itself substantially higher than what the data would show from the 1970s. Continue reading this post…
I just had a multi-hour conversation with a colleague that revolved around the question of the responsibility a hypothetical businessman–let’s call him Phil K.–owes to his workers. My colleague’s argument is that when Mr. K opens a factory in a third world country, his employees are coerced to work for him because they don’t have any better opportunities, so he has a duty to treat them better than he actually does treat them. My rebuttal is that they are voluntarily working for him because he’s given them a better opportunity than anything else that’s available to them, so he doesn’t owe them anything more. He says Mr. K is exploiting them–I say Mr. K is exchanging value for value.
Thoughts?
Can this argument actually be resolved, or are the foundational premises too far apart to actually be reconcilable?
Addendum: My colleague argued that Mr. K was exploiting people by taking advantage of them in their desperate condition, and supported this argument by noting that the common law prohibits taking advantage of people in that way. I.e., he noted, you can’t, under the common law, require someone to engage in a sexual act as the price of helping them. If you are dying, I can ignore you and leave you to die. But I can’t save your life at the price of demanding you suck my cock. The latter, while remote from anything I would consider admirable, seems to me less immoral than simply letting someone die, since you do, in fact, save their life. I didn’t, in the heat of debate, think to pose the question to him that way. But he did answer my question as to whether it would be better for Mr. K to not build the factories than to employ people at low wages by saying that it would be better that the factories not be built. He would seem to be forced by logical consistency to also assert that it would be better to let a person die than to save them for the price of a blowjob. This seems to me to be a perverse result that suggests something is fundamentally wrong with his premises.
My children are eagerly watching Santa on the Norad Santa Tracker, which makes me feel good about the use of my tax dollars and Strategic Command’s ability to focus on the real threats to national security (now if they could just manage to hit the fat bastard and bring him down). But it also got me to thinking about Santa’s traveling salesman problem, and I realized that the poor old guy actually has a double-tsp, a nested tsp. Continue reading this post…
A Christmas (Game) Tree to brighten your holidays. (Via XKCD.)
Miss Mary 
Will Truman 
Mali Hawthorne 
Snorkle 
b 
areawoman