Ted Talk: Journalist Sharyl Attkisson: Beware of the Manipulation of Media through Astroturfing!

Beware of the manipulation of media by interest groups, warns multi-awarded investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson at her fabulous Ted Talk!

Much of what you read or see out there has signified an "increasingly artificial paid for reality" through the use of "surreptitious Astroturfing". Astroturfing has become a huge industry according to Ms. Attkisson "than the traditional lobbying of Congress"

Ms Attkisson defines Astroturf [2:00]

What is Astroturf? It is the perversion of grassroots, as in fake grassroots. Astroturf is when political, corporate or other special interest disguise themselves and published blogs, start facebook and twitter accounts, publish ads, letters to the editor or simply post comments online. To try to fool you into thinking an independent or grassroots movement is speaking. The whole point of Astroturf is to try to get an impression there is a widespread for or against an agenda when there is not. Astroturf seeks to manipulate you into changing your opinion by making you feel that you are an outlier when you're not 

So beware of surveys, of news or articles which are in reality press releases, or when applied to economic developments, information based economic sophistry.

Ms Attkisson provides several insights as how to defend against astroturfing by spotting signs of them. 

I would add a more important trait which she has missed: develop critical thinking.

Video: Explaining Regulatory Capture

The following video from EconomicFreedom.org features the fundamental concept of Regulatory Capture as explained by George Washington University professor Susan Dudley.

(Hat tip Frank Stephenson Division of Labour)

Video: Economic and Political Roles of Chain Stores

LearnLiberty.org presents another great educational video. Professor Art Carden explains the economic and political roles of chain stores to our society.

From Learn Liberty,

Are chain stores good or bad? According to prof. Art Carden, there are reasons to both like and dislike chain stores. The reasons to like chain stores include their ability to lower prices, increase variety, and reduce uncertainty. However, chain stores also do things to dislike such as pursuing special government privileges like subsidies and eminent domain.

Essentially, when chain stores respond to the incentives of the market, they create wealth for society. On the other hand, when chains stores respond to the incentives of the political process, they often produce detrimental effects for society.

With the Philippines hosting 3 of the top 10 largest malls in the world (2009), the above discussion seem quite apropos

Video: Differentiating Natural Rights from Legal and Constitutional Rights

The educational video below from LearnLiberty.org, explains the differences of rights.

From Learn Liberty,

Individuals have rights. But are they natural? And how do they compare and contrast with legal or constitutional rights? Are legal or constitutional rights similar to those inalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence? Professor Aeon Skoble distinguishes such constitutional rights, such as the right to vote, from the rights protected by governments and constitutions—natural rights not actually granted by governments themselves. He concludes that legal systems should create rights that are combatable with natural rights.

Video: The Myth of Good Government

The animated video below explains the myth of good government, from the simulated perspective of a "King" [hat tip Jeff Tucker]

Video: Why Tax Increases Are Wrong (and Immoral)

Here is an eloquent video from Center for Freedom and Prosperity which shows why tax increases are baneful to an economy.

Note: these has universal application which means that the enumerated factors applies to the Philippines as well. (hat tip Dan Mitchell)


To add, taxation isn't just harmful, they are essentially immoral.

Ludwig von Mises (Human Action): [emphasis added]

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

To draw attention to this fact does not imply any reflection upon government activities. In stark reality, peaceful social cooperation is impossible if no provision is made for violent prevention and suppression of antisocial action on the part of refractory individuals and groups of individuals. One must take exception to the often-repeated phrase that government is an evil, although a necessary and indispensable evil. What is required for the attainment of an end is a means, the cost to be expended for its successful realization. It is an arbitrary value judgment to describe it as an evil in the moral connotation of the term. However, in face of the modern tendencies toward a deification of government and state, it is good to remind ourselves that the old Romans were more realistic in symbolizing the state by a bundle of rods with an ax in the middle than are our contemporaries in ascribing to the state all the attributes of God.

Murray N. Rothbard (Tax Day):

The first great lesson to learn about taxation is that taxation is simply robbery. No more and no less. For what is "robbery"? Robbery is the taking of a man’s property by the use of violence or the threat thereof, and therefore without the victim’s consent. And yet what else is taxation?

Those who claim that taxation is, in some mystical sense, really "voluntary" should then have no qualms about getting rid of that vital feature of the law which says that failure to pay one’s taxes is criminal and subject to appropriate penalty. But does anyone seriously believe that if the payment of taxation were really made voluntary, say in the sense of contributing to the American Cancer Society, that any appreciable revenue would find itself into the coffers of government? Then why don’t we try it as an experiment for a few years, or a few decades, and find out?

But if taxation is robbery, then it follows as the night the day that those people who engage in, and live off, robbery are a gang of thieves. Hence the government is a group of thieves, and deserves, morally, aesthetically, and philosophically, to be treated exactly as a group of less socially respectable ruffians would be treated.

Video: Tom Woods on the Basics of the Military Industrial Complex

In the video below, Professor and author Tom Woods explains the military industrial complex in 5 minutes (hat tip: Bob Wenzel)

Video: Don Boudreaux On Understanding Trade Deficits

Professor Donald Boudreaux explains why trade deficits shouldn't be feared (HT: Mark Perry)

Video: How Video Will Reinvent Education

I've been saying that the third wave (or the information age) will bring about massive structural changes in how we do things.

Salman Khan in his talk at the TED explains how video will 'humanize' the classroom [via P2P tutoring collaboration etc..] which should reduce the one-size-fits all programs from which the current system operates on.

Great stuff (hat tip: Arnold Kling)

Video: Understanding The Difference Between Private and Public Enterprises

Dr. Robert Murphy explains the fundamental difference between private businesses and public enterprises.

Video: Hans Rosling On How The Washing Machine Enhances Our Lives

Fascinating talk by Hans Rosling. (hat tip: Steve Horwitz)

Video: A History of Central Banking

Here is a short video on the history of Central Banking from Cato’s Dan Mitchell...

Here is the list of US and world financial crisis from Misis.org wiki (click on the link to redirect you to the page)

Here is a graph of the number of banking crisis worldwide post the Nixon Shock or the End of the Bretton Woods standard (from the World Bank)

The reason I had to include these is to illustrate how central banks have fundamentally failed to contain panics-the rationalized role for their existence.

Video: Understanding The Risk of Radiation From Spent Fuel Pools

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow lucidly explains the problem of spent fuel pools which has been the source of the risk of radiation from the damaged Fukishima nuclear power plants. (HT Bob Wenzel)

Video: Lawrence White On Free Banking, Gold Standard and Central Banking

GMU Professor Dr. Lawrence White speaking at a monetary conference at the Cato Institute deals with free banking, the Gold Standard Banking and Central Banking. (hat tip: Tom Palmer)

Video: How Wealth Is Derived From Mutually Beneficial Free Trade

Trade is human action: we do this everyday with the aim at attaining better life and live past self sufficiency which characterized the lives of our primitive ancestors.

Trade today is mostly voluntary, it is done by individuals at the community level or provincial or regional or at the national level. The difference in the trading environment depends on the degree of trade freedom, which are mostly shaped by the governing political policies.

Because trade appears as a mundane activity, its manifold benefits seem as hardly sentiently appreciated by the public. In short, the benefits of trade are frequently underappreciated.

And when trade is framed as an aggregate, i.e. substituted with statistics and accounting figures, trade becomes subject to waffling political talking points, and importantly, loses its human touch. Trade, then, becomes subject to acrimonious disputes, many of which results to perverse laws that curtails trade--and prosperity.

The following video, from LearnLiberty.org, presents Professor Art Carden who discusses the basics of free trade from the perspective of the LAW OF COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE (also known as the law of comparative costs) and how free trade leads to prosperity.

Comparative advantage deals with achieving efficiency out of relative opportunity costs or according to wikipedia,

In economics, the law of comparative advantage refers to the ability of a party (an individual, a firm, or a country) to produce a particular good or service at a lower opportunity cost than another party. It is the ability to produce a product with the highest relative efficiency given all the other products that could be produced.

Video: Repairing The Nation’s Balance Sheets By Limiting Growth of Government Spending

Cato’s Dan Mitchell has a nice video showing examples of the actual experiences of different nations in restraining government spending which has resulted to a reduction in budget deficits and likewise augmented their respective economic growths.

Says Mr. Mitchell,

These success stories from Canada, Ireland, Slovakia, and New Zealand share one common characteristic. By freezing or sharply constraining the growth of government outlays, nations were able to rapidly shrinking the economic burden of government, as measured by comparing the size of the budget to overall economic output.

Video: 10 Core Principles of Classical Liberalism

Dr. Nigel Ashford of Senior Program Officer at the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) at George Mason University, explains the 10 core principles of the classical liberal & libertarian view of society and the proper role of government (via learnliberty.org):

1) Liberty as the primary political value
2) Individualism
3) Skepticism about power
4) Rule of Law
5) Civil Society
6) Spontaneous Order
7) Free Markets
8) Toleration
9) Peace
10) Limited Government

Update: Read in the following link Ralph Raico's magnificent article on "Austrian economics and Classical Liberalism"

Here is the intro:

Classical liberalism — which we shall call here simply liberalism — is based on the conception of civil society as, by and large, self-regulating when its members are free to act within very wide bounds of their individual rights. Among these the right to private property, including freedom of contract and free disposition of one's own labor, is given a very high priority. Historically, liberalism has manifested a hostility to state action, which, it insists, should be reduced to a minimum (Raico 1992, 1994).

Austrian economics is the name given to the school, or strand, of economic theory that began with Carl Menger (Kirzner 1987; Hayek 1968), and it has often been linked — both by adherents and opponents — to the liberal doctrine. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the connections that exist, or have been held to exist, between Austrian economics and liberalism.

A Video on Tax Cuts: Myths Versus Reality

Expiring tax cuts will be the next agenda of the incoming gridlocked US Congress.

And in this instructive video, Cato's Dan Mitchell debunks the propaganda used by the White House to justify higher tax rates on investors, entrepreneurs and the so-called wealthy class.

While this may be considered a domestic issue for Americans, this has geopolitical and international economic ramifications. For instance higher taxes rates may exacerbate capital outflows already impelled by the current monetary policies such as the QE 2.0.

Besides, Filipinos can learn about the fundamental ills of excessive government spending, the negative effects of taxation and the smoke and mirror propaganda employed by the 'powers that be' and their political cohorts, just to able sell the programs, that would unjustly inhibit property rights and curtail civil liberty, for the benefit of politicians.

Watch the video below.

Matt Ridley: When Ideas Have Sex

Great stuff from Matt Ridley, watch it....

Rahn Curve: Defining The Optimum Level Of Societal Benefits From Government Spending

There is a limit to everything. And this applies to government spending as well.

Cato's Daniel Mitchell, in another great educational video, explores to identify the optimum state point of government spending [up to what level of government spending benefits a society?] via the Rahn Curve.