individualism for the masses

BK Marcus is an amateur political economist with no formal education in the subject.

He works from Charlottesville, Virginia as an editorial consultant for the Ludwig von Mises Institute and managing editor of Mises.org.

He is no longer a house husband, nor a faculty spouse, but he is still a dilettante and a layabout, at least in spirit.

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"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."

Murray Rothbard

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Benjamin Tucker Marcus
February 19, 2010

glass

February 8th, 2010 by bkmarcus

Posted in comics | No Comments »

nominal wage hike

August 1st, 2009 by bkmarcus

Posted in comics, economics | 2 Comments »

why go green?

July 14th, 2009 by bkmarcus

Posted in comics | No Comments »

the best and the brightest

July 12th, 2009 by bkmarcus

Forwarded by Scott Lahti:

Posted in comics | No Comments »

Krugman’s intellectual Waterloo

June 22nd, 2009 by bkmarcus

Napoleon Krugman at WaterlooLast Monday evening, Lew Rockwell, from a tip by someone named “Travis,” posted this damning quote of Paul Krugman’s from a 2002 New York Times editorial:

To fight this recession the Fed needs … soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. [So] Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

Krugman. 2002. Calling for a housing bubble. FULL ARTICLE

A nice note/blog post from the author:

My piece Krugman’s Intellectual Waterloo has been made today’s Daily Article on Mises.org. Check out the hilarious “Krugman-as-Napoleon” image they put together. My thanks to Jeffrey Tucker for selecting it, as well as to nirgrahamUK on the Mises boards and anyone else who passed it on to others.

I consider the Mises Institute web site to be the greatest source for truth and wisdom on the web. So it’s an honor to have something I wrote featured on its main page, and it’s a kick to see my name in the list of Mises Daily Authors, along with the names of a great many of heroes.

I hope my characterization of Krugman’s twisting in the wind will be convincing to people and that this piece will help spread the word regarding the damning quotes that Lew Rockwell and Mark Thornton have discovered. If I could help soften the ground under Krugman’s pedestal and cause it to sink just one inch, I would feel I have truly done good in the world.

Please join the assault on neo-Keyneseanism by contributing a comment to the article’s entry on the Mises Blog.

Posted in LvMI, comics | 2 Comments »

more desert-island economics

June 18th, 2009 by bkmarcus

(via blog.Mises.org)

Posted in LvMI, comics, economics | No Comments »

fun with heresy

June 1st, 2009 by bkmarcus

Two weeks ago, I “tweeted” the following:

Was Jesus a hologram? Or was he a human possessed by a noncorporeal extraterrestrial called Christ? This was the division within Docetism.

I have to say, studying the ancient heresies is the perfect geek hobby. Better than Star Trek. Similar, in some ways, as my Docetism tweet should illustrate. (By the way, the two varieties of Docetism are called phantasmal and separationist respectively.)

And as with any new obsession, once you start to learn the ins and outs, you start seeing it everywhere. Recently, I’ve been seeing signs of the heresies in Doonesbury:


(click to enlarge)

This distinction between God and His son smacks of Arianism. I suspect a lot of present-day Christians are Arian heretics without realizing it.

There’s also this past Sunday’s strip:


(excerpt from this full strip )

All my life, I’ve heard this observed distinction between the Old Testament God of wrath and the New Testament God of love. Without building an explicit theology from it, many modern Christians — especially religious liberals, I suspect — see the old Jewish God and the new Christian God as different gods. This isn’t a new phenomenon. In the 2nd century, Marcion of Sinope, led a very large and influential rival movement to proto-orthodox Christianity. Marcion

argued for the existence of two Gods: Yahweh, who created the material universe, and the Heavenly Father of the New Testament, of which Jesus Christ was the living incarnation. Yahweh was viewed as a lesser demiurge, who had created the earth, and whose law, the Mosaic covenant, represented bare natural justice: i.e., an eye for an eye. Jesus was the living incarnation of a different God, a new God of compassion and love, sometimes called the Heavenly Father. The two Gods were thought of as having distinct personalities: Yahweh is petty, cruel and jealous, a tribal God who is only interested in the welfare of the Jews, while the Heavenly Father is a universal God who loves all of humanity, and looks upon His children with mercy and benevolence. This dual-God notion allowed Marcion to reconcile the apparent contradictions between the Old Testament and the tales of Jesus’ life and ministry. [Wikipedia]

I mention this “lesser demiurge” of the Marcionites in this earlier blog post of Calvin & Hobbes:

When I was kid in an Episcopal choir school, attending services 2 or 3 times a week, I think I was guilty of both Arianism and Marcionite dualism. I was also guilty of the heresy of Patripassionism, the belief that God the Father was incarnate and suffered on the cross. I guess I’ve never grokked the Trinity.

Posted in autobiography, comics, culture, religion | 2 Comments »

decimate

May 20th, 2009 by bkmarcus

(via the Hannibal Blog, “Humor for pedants”)

Posted in comics, history | No Comments »

Crusoe Economics

May 17th, 2009 by bkmarcus

Posted in comics | No Comments »

punch line

May 17th, 2009 by bkmarcus

Posted in comics, economics | 1 Comment »

authority

May 8th, 2009 by bkmarcus

Posted in comics | No Comments »

strategy

May 4th, 2009 by bkmarcus

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name dropping

May 3rd, 2009 by bkmarcus

I confess that I identify a lot with Dill:

Posted in autobiography, comics, history | No Comments »

the benefit of Econ 101

April 25th, 2009 by bkmarcus


(Or rather, in this case, the benefit of teaching mainstream blather in Econ 101)

Posted in comics, economics, schooling | No Comments »

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