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On Gene Wolfe

On March 17th, I'm planning to attend a special event by the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame to honor the writer, Gene Wolfe . It's a pretty big deal--an especially satisfying deal for a lot of people, even if maybe not the greatest honor he's ever achieved. He's already been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame , he's been acclaimed by writers you've heard of as the best living American writer, the best living writer in English, compared to Mozart, blah blah blah. All these laurels are insufficient to convince you of how good he is at what he does. Imagine a friend told you about this little-known author who wrote stories about elves and hobbit-things and she tried to convince you that his work somehow transcended and redefined the medium. Or imagine this person tried to entice you to read this author of short stories mostly set in India--some of them about a boy raised by wolves and tutored by a panther and a bear. Now suppose she told you that ...
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On how price gouging benefits you

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I often offer this video as an explanation for why "price gouging" should be allowed, especially after a natural disaster. One reason I like it is that it sets up the question under the most dire circumstances: There's a natural disaster and a mother goes out to find a generator to run the refrigerator that keeps her daughter's insulin. She finds that the only generators available are now 3x the price. The best argument the video makes for allowing prices to rise freely as scarcity increases is that it allows people who need the item the most to stake their claim for it over people who need it the least. When a limited resource is under-priced (relative to its scarcity), it is only natural that consumers will use up every little bit of it so it will not be available at all to more people who need it the most. As the video points out, settting a low price ceiling on resource when it is limited means that people don't have to be stingy in using the resource. ...
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Corporations Are People

You say corporations aren’t people. If corporations aren’t people then they don’t have Constitutional rights. Only people have Constitutional rights. In that case, the New York Times corporation doesn’t have First Amendment rights. The NAACP doesn’t have standing to file law suits for civil rights violations. In that case, the government doesn’t need a warrant to enter the property of the Sierra Club and peruse their membership files or bug their phones. If corporations are not people then they can’t own property. They can’t enter into contracts. English Common Law has always treated corporations as people for the purposes of the law. Boston and other colonies were founded by corporations. If corporations are not people, where did all the people in the Massachusetts Bay Colony come from? Typically, no one claims corporations don’t have *those* rights. They usually argue that they merely don’t have the rights (especially free speech rights) that they don’t want them to have. It’s ...
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