It was amazing to me how quickly she overturned the power structure within her family,” Leslie Chang writes in Factory Girls, her 2008 book on internal migration within China. Chang is marveling at Min, a 17-year-old who left her family farm to find work in a succession of factories in the rapidly urbanizing city of Dongguan. Had Min never left ( Read more... )

Boy builds windmill, brings electricity to his village.

Obama is willing to spend political capital to shut down payday lenders. Never mind that the people will pay for his good intentions.

In a December 2008 working paper, [Dartmouth economist Jonathan] Zinman concluded that former payday customers in Oregon ended up using less desirable alternatives such as overdrafts and utility shutdowns, and that ( Read more... )

Capitalism = voluntary trade

Humanity is benevolent to the extent humans have satisfied their own needs.

(Both empirical, as all good claims and concepts are.)

I recommend the Objectivism 101 website.

Atlas Shrugged selling better than ever since its year of publication.

Atlas Shrugged No. 1 seller in Amazon "classics" category.

Hopefully you've all heard about and delighted in the arrest of a corrupt politician, the governor of Illinois. I delight in the mild irony that this man's bad luck brings joy to good people.

The FBI complaint, chock full of the most blatant corruption you may ever see.

Thanks to john_j_enright for the link to the actual complaint. It's a fun read over ( Read more... )

"Did you partake of the miracle of human flight you non-contributing zero!"

Click to view

Hat tip to Stephen Hicks, who links to really neat stuff daily.

What a great theme for a blog:

The Left has traditionally assumed that human nature is so malleable, so perfectible, that it can be shaped in almost any direction. Conservatives object, arguing that social order arises not from rational planning but from the spontaneous order of instincts and habits. Darwinian biology sustains conservative social ( Read more... )

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