WeblogBahamas.com

Dumbfounded by Mr. Brave Davis in The Bahamas

by Rick Lowe (http:/www.weblogbahamas.com)

Sometime back I watched Mr. Davis, MP for Cat Island make his contribution to Parliament on a Bill before the House. He was excellent. No hyperbole and lots of reasoned arguments.

Now we fast forward to June 2009 and according to press reports he tells Parliament that the Government needs to write off the millions or hundreds of millions that people owe in Property Tax.

Lessons in Freedom: The Nonsense of "A new world order"

by Tibor R. Machan (http://www.weblogbahamas.com)

It is only in the last 400 years or so that the classical liberal idea of a relatively free economy has caught on here and there, and even then mainly in the rhetoric of various, sometimes admittedly prominent academic economists, not in the public philosophies of nations.

Business Week reports--July 6, 2009, page 8--that Roger Altman, Deputy Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, now CEO of an investment banking boutique (Evercore Partners), has, like President Sarkozy of France, concluded that it's the end for capitalism. As Business Week tells it, Boltman wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine that "The era of laissez-faire economics is over, and statism, once discredited, is making a comeback--even in the U.S. Also out of vague is globalization."

JJ Grey & Mofro - Song of the week - June 29, 2009 - Orange Blossoms

by Rick Lowe (http:/www.weblogbahamas.com)

Back in December when I posted this blog someone by the name of "fpo" posted a comment to suggest that I might like JJ Grey and Mofro.

Well I finally got the CD and he is right.

Check out their web site here...

And their Myspace site here...

Hope you enjoy Orange Blossoms, the title track of their most recent CD.

Cato's Letter: Jeffrey Miron - In defense of doing nothing

by Rick Lowe (http://www.weblogbahamas.com) 

Jeffrey Miron, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute  and director of undergraduate studies in the department of econmics at Harvard University get's it right. At least from my point of view.

"The stimulus was not about improving economic efficiency but about distributing funds to favored interest groups. If the administration was really concerned about education, for example, it should have promoted policy changes that improve outcomes while saving money, such as reduced restrictions on who can become a teacher. The administration instead chose to shovel money to the teacher’s unions."

Read the entire piece here... (PDF)

Going green in The Bahamas?

by Rick Lowe (http://www.weblogbahamas.com)

Enough talk about going green in The Bahamas, I've got a proposal for the Government.

Buy $1.5 million of Fluorescent light bulbs from me to distribute to the poor.

It's time to save The Bahamas Electricity Corporation (BEC)

by Garth Buckner (http:/www.weblogbahamas.com)

The following piece, first published in The Tribune, Letters, is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.

Once again the news comes out that BEC is failing, that it spends more than it earns, that it is in debt and that it needs bailing out. Once more we are presented with two false choices; Government can let BEC raise its rates or Government can inject more public money into the failing corporation. These are false choices because they amount to the same thing; if BEC raises rates then the Bahamian consumer is forced to pay more, if Government injects more public money into BEC then the Bahamian taxpayer is forced to pay more and, in the final analysis, the Bahamian consumer and the Bahamian taxpayer are one and the same.

The Bahamas and "the middle road between the extremes of capitalism and socialism" - another response to Avid Reader

by Rick Lowe (http://www.weblogbahamas.com)

Thanks to Avid Reader for having written again to suggest there are benefits to "the middle road between the extremes of capitalism and socialism" telling us that he or she seeks that "elusive Utopia where capitalism with a human face resides".

One would say both major political parties here are somewhere between capitalists and socialists, using the mixed economy economic model, and the country does not appear to function very well in numerous areas as Avid Reader pointed out a couple weeks back.

But neither capitalism or socialism have a "human face". As Ludwig von Mises tells us, in economics there is "Human Action".

Lesson's in Freedom: One's Right to be Wrong

by Tibor R. Machan (http://www.weblogbahamas.com)

In a recent demonstration outside the Earl Warren Bldg in San Francisco someone was waiving around a sign that read: "A moral wrong can't be a civil right." Well, in fact it can! A simple case in point is when someone writes something that is immoral or produces pictures or movies that are morally corrupt or writes a book that praises Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot (Khmer Rouge). In America one definitely has a legal or civil right to do all this even though it's all arguably morally wrong. And all human beings have this right, actually, whether their legal system acknowledges it or not.

Indeed, the entire point of having rights is to be in charge of a sphere of one's life, which means one is free to act well or badly within such a sphere--it is entirely up to the individual and others may not invade the sphere even if quite rightly they judge what one is doing morally wrong.

Seeking the middle road between the extremes of capitalism and socialism in The Bahamas

by Rick Lowe ( http://www.weblogbahamas.com )

Avid Reader has responded to my response.

Download his or her Letter to The Editor (PDF) here...

I'm working on another response.

This is fun actually.

Tough Call aka Larry Smith on "What the Economic Crisis Holds in Store" for The Bahamas and the world

by Rick Lowe ( http://www.weblogbahamas.com )

Tough Call by Larry Smith, is always good. Well researched and readable. Whether I agree with him or not.

This week he tries hard to refute Dr. Robert Murphy's take on the US economy at a recent Nassau Institute (video) event.

In the end, it appears to me that he and Dr. Murphy are on the same page though?

Read the entire piece here...