Halloween and Its Candy Economy - Jeffrey A. Tucker - Mises Daily

Halloween and Its Candy Economy - Jeffrey A. Tucker - Mises Daily: "Because there is no taboo in place about trading one's proceeds, the kids also have a chance to participate in genuine market experiences.

For starters, they work hard on their costumes, under the very real expectation that those who hand out candy tend to be more generous to those with better costumes. Nor is the labor done there, for it clearly continues with the long walk around the neighborhood, with the prospect that each house visited will yield a gain of only one or two candies, at most."

"No child can fully control what he or she is given, so it is up to that child to make exchanges with others in order to obtain what he or she really wants, and to do so in a strategic manner so that overall wealth is enhanced."

"During the 30 minutes of active haggling, nine kids sat around the dining room table and participated in a hectic, yet orderly — if complex — interchange, bearing a good deal of resemblance to a Wall Street trading floor.

Some traders shot up and shouted prices, deals, proposals, results, changes in preferences, new resource discoveries. Other traders remained quiet and moved with great subtlety and surprise. The more strategic the plan, the more impressed the other kids were by it."

"It wasn't long before barter relationships, even those involving 3 or 4 simultaneous transactions, did not suffice.

What those around the table needed was some means to achieve indirect exchange. They needed to hit upon a good which everyone would desire to posses because of its more certain, onward marketability among all the other kids.

This entity did not need to be highly valued from the outset by everyone present. What the kids only needed to notice was that there was something which a sufficient number of their group tended to want more than any other competing candy on offer.

It was a short step from there to the dawning of a realization would occur to one or two kids. These would then try to acquire that particular candy, not to consume it themselves, but to use it to trade it for whatever other candy they really wanted to enjoy.

As more and more of the participants copied them, this one candy would come to play a role in more and more indirect exchanges. Child A would accept it from Child B for a less desired kind of candy and would instantly swap it again with Child C who happened to have the goodie he or she really preferred, but who hadn't wanted any of A's originally proffered treats.

This way, this one candy would come to posses a quality none of the others had. It would come to be money."

"Though this problem might seem an intractable one, as it happened, it only took a few minutes for everyone to discover what would become money for the evening: a micro-size Three Musketeers bar."

"all children left the table with smiles and happiness, each feeling as if he or she had gotten a great deal."

Mobile Shopping's Data Goldmine - Margarita Constantinides, Brian Gregg, and Brian Salsberg - Harvard Business Review

Mobile Shopping's Data Goldmine - Margarita Constantinides, Brian Gregg, and Brian Salsberg - Harvard Business Review: "Smartphone WiFi signals can be tracked to determine how long and where in the store customers shop. Wal-Mart, for example, has an app that senses when customers enter a store and suggests switching their phone to "store mode." In this mode, shoppers can interact with special QR signage located throughout stores to access useful product information. Wal-Mart, in turn, is able to track their in-store behavior. If sales of a certain item are slow, tracking can show whether customers are skipping the aisle entirely or looking at the product but not buying it so that store owners can make product placement or other adjustments."

"customers who use the Wal-Mart app make two additional visits to the store each month and spend 40% more than their app-free counterparts."

Common Objections to Capitalism - Art Carden - Mises Daily

Common Objections to Capitalism - Art Carden - Mises Daily: "infant mortality and maternal mortality are miniscule fractions of what they used to be, and life expectancy has increased radically. It was 24 at the height of the Roman Empire, 30 in Britain at the end of the 15th century, 45 in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, and it is pushing 80 today."

"capitalist progress does not consist of more silk stockings for the queen of England but of reasonable substitutes for them for poor workers in exchange for progressively less labor. Further, he argued that the key beneficiaries of changes in material standards of living would be the poor at the expense of the rich. Cheap electric lighting was an absolute boon for the very poor, while the very rich could have paid flunkies (or forced slaves, in some cases) to stand around holding torches."

A Penchant for Controlling Others - Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. - Mises Daily

A Penchant for Controlling Others - Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. - Mises Daily: "We all want freedom for ourselves, but many people have doubts about the way others might use their own freedom."

"Think of this the next time you are in a big city zooming around curves and between lanes along with thousands of others, doing top speeds. Here we have 4,000-pound hunks of steel barreling down the road without aids other than a dotted yellow line on the road. These are real-life death machines in which one wrong move could cause a 100-car pileup and mass death. We do it anyway.

What's remarkable is not that there are so many wrecks. The miracle is that it works at all and that, for the most part, people get to where they are going."

"It is in everyone's interest to get to where one is going in one piece and to do it efficiently."

"We generally trust our capacity to manage ourselves but we do not trust the capacity of others to manage themselves. And we surely don't believe that society can generally function well under conditions of freedom"

Terrorism Isn't an 'Existential Threat' | Cato Institute

Terrorism Isn't an 'Existential Threat' | Cato Institute: "the Human Security Report Project explain, “the overwhelming majority of terrorist campaigns fail to achieve their strategic objectives.” And, despite media sensationalism, fatalities from terrorism have actually declined by some 40 percent in recent years.

Terrorists bank on overreaction. As Osama bin Laden put it in 2004, “All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses.”"

“no state has ever given another state — even a close ally, much less a terrorist group — a nuclear weapon (or chemical, biological, or radiological one either).”

"The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo had roughly a billion dollars devoted to developing chemical and biological weapons, the most sophisticated such program in the history of terrorism. But when it released sarin gas on the Tokyo subway in 1995, it only managed to kill 12 people."

The Poor - Kel Kelly - Mises Daily

The Poor - Kel Kelly - Mises Daily: "If you were to compare these American poor to the poor in Bolivia, Honduras, Cambodia, or India (or even to many of the poor in Mexico, Romania, Thailand, and Russia), you would see a stark difference. The poor in these countries often literally live in open-air huts with large leaves for roofs and stacked bricks that serve as a shared stove for multiple families. For the poor of the third-world countries, there is, for the most part, no money, no exchange of goods — just basic survival by subsistence farming or by hunting or fishing for food. To these people, American street sweepers and factory workers live a life of luxury."

How hypocritical do we look to the real poor of the world when we complain about the condition of the U.S. poor and ignore them?!?

"In noncapitalist countries today (and in the days before capitalism first appeared) poverty really means that no work is available; there is no means by which to improve one's state of being, or even to maintain it."

"Though the poor in this country have continuously seen their standard of living rise by capitalism, anticapitalists continually point to the poor as evidence of a need for wealth redistribution (i.e., less capitalism), just because the poor earn less than do the rich. But there will always be a bottom 10 percent or 20 percent of the population in income in any society no matter how wealthy we all become."

"few people remain at subsistence level. There are ways out of poverty for most."

"the ratio of "incomes" — the primary measurement used by government — of the top fifth to the bottom fifth of income earners is 15 to 1, but the ratio of their consumption is 4 to 1"

"ACORN sued the state of California in 1995 for exemption from state labor laws, in order to avoid having to pay the minimum wage to its own employees. The organization argued before the court that "the more that ACORN must pay each individual outreach worker — either because of minimum wage or overtime requirements — the fewer outreach workers it will be able to hire." "

"The average poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work each year. This is equivalent to 16 hours of work per week. If the average poor family was able to increase the hours worked to 2,000 hours each year (i.e., one adult family member working a full 40 hour week), nearly 75 percent of poor children would be lifted out of poverty."

Imprisonment is not the answer | Wide White

Imprisonment is not the answer | Wide White: "the law can only do so much to prevent tragedy, and this is not a case where changing the law, especially with new prison sentences, will help."

"While crime prevention is certainly a role of the justice system, we can’t expect the justice system to prevent all crimes from occurring."

"When considering imprisonment as a punishment for a crime, we have to ask ourselves three questions. First, will imprisonment teach this person a lesson that they could not otherwise learn outside of prison? Second, do the crimes committed by this person warrant separating them from the rest of society for a period of time? Third, is imprisonment necessary to keep this person from causing anymore problems for society than they already have? I’m not convinced that negligence warrants a prison sentence under these guidelines."

Group of tourists stranded on slab of ice in Canadian Arctic | Fox News

Group of tourists stranded on slab of ice in Canadian Arctic | Fox News: "a 30-mile long slab of ice broke away from Baffin Island "

Wow!

Houston program run by former prostitute treats women as victims instead of criminals | Fox News

Houston program run by former prostitute treats women as victims instead of criminals | Fox News: "Houston, Dallas and several other Texas cities began changing how they treated prostitutes after the state Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that girls 14 and under could not be prosecuted for prostitution. The ruling has been a game changer, for juveniles and adults.

Dallas and Houston are among the cities nationwide that have set up special courts to deal with child prostitutes by putting them in recovery programs. Many, they found, had been victims of sexual or physical abuse. Some were born to mothers who were drug addicts and prostitutes themselves. Others were sold to a pimp, sometimes in exchange for a box of cigarettes.

In Houston, the court, called GIRLS or Growing Independence and Restoring Lives, was loosely modeled after other specialty courts, such as the drug court that has successfully reformed 80 percent of the nearly 400 people who have graduated since it started in 2003, including Griffin."