Back in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church and some other unaffiliated snake oil salesmen, sold what were called indulgences. These indulgences offered penance for a variety of sins and could either commute or completely eliminate one’s arduous trip through Purgatory. Today, we have a similar situation; we have an entire market of carbon credit traders. Basically, you buy offsetting carbon credits (for someone, probably in a third world country, to plant trees or something like that) to make up for your “carbon footprint.”
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The Market and Global Warming: Alternatives to Cap and Trade
under: Energy, Game Theory, Individual v. Collective, Taxes, Trust
Tags: acid rain, Al Gore, Bjorn Lomborg, Cap-and-Trade, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon indulgences, Catholic Church, China, Christianity, communism, Congress, Congressional Budget Office, Copenhagen Consensus, corn ethanol, Environmental Protection Agency, geoengineering, global warming, hacked emails, hackers, hemp ethanol, Heritage Foundation, indulgences, International Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, Iraq War, James Kynge, Joseph Stalin, Kyoto Protocol, lobbyists, Mao Zedong, Michael Kinsley, Middle Ages, nuclear power, oil, pollution, property rights, Purgatory, regulation, Richard Dawkins, Robert Murphy, salt water, Senate, Stephen Dubner, Steven Levitt, Tad Patzek, Three Mile Island, Time Magazine, tragedy of the commons
Slipping Gay Marriage Through the Back Door
Marriage may be a covenant, but legally speaking, it is nothing more than a contract. Thus, since an entity or contract can contain more meaning to the people involved than the actual contractual arrangement written up and filed at the local courthouse, anything that gets the job done can do. Perhaps the very institution of marriage should be opened up to a little bit of healthy market competition from other contractual arrangements.
under: Complete Whimsy, Game Theory, Individual v. Collective, Trust
Tags: Aldous Huxley, Bible, Christianity, civil union, concubines, democracy, federalism, gay marriage, George Bush, George Orwell, heterosexuality, homophobia, homosexuality, honor killings, interracial marriage, Islam, LLC, marriage, Mormonism, partnership, Penn Jillette, polygamy, Proposition 8, Qur'an, Saint Paul, Sharia Law, slippery slope, Solomon, suttee, Thomas Jefferson, U.S. Constitution, Warren Jeffs, welfare
The Uselessness of Political Terminology: Part 2
As seen in Part 1, political terms, such as liberal, conservative or libertarian, are muddled enough. Unfortunately, political organizations, popular terms and ideologies have many of the same issues. The political parties in the United States have gone through whole sale shifts in political ideology. Republicans used to be the party of tariffs and protectionism, now they are avid free traders. Democrats were the party of slavery and Jim Crow, before becoming the party of Civil Rights and Affirmative Action.
under: Individual v. Collective, Live and Learn, Trust
Tags: ACLU, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Catholicism, Change, Christianity, civil rights, democracy, Democrats, equality, feminism, freedom, freedom fries, George Bush, Gnostic Christianity, Iraq War, Islam, Korean War, libertarianism, Mel Gibson, NRA, Patriot Act, political correctness, political terminology, Protestantism, Reformation, Republicans, Shiite, Sri Lanka, Sunni, Tamil Tigers, U.S. Constitution, Vatican II, Vietnam War
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