Too Small To Bail Out

As Richard Fisher (President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas) notes in this podcast, the ultimate problem is "scale and scope," which the recent "reforms" of the banking sector have not addressed.  He also argues that investment and similar banks could best be protected from bailouts (or rather, the taxpayer can best be protected from then) is explicit language that such banks will not be favored with such largesse (language that they would be required to display on whatever paperwork, etc. they display before the public).  Of course the problem with such a proposal (as Russ Roberts notes) is that it obviously isn't self-governing.  It depends on people honoring it.

Interest

"Interest and ambition, honour and shame, friendship and enmity, gratitude and revenge, are the prime movers in all public transactions; and these passions are of a very stubborn and intractable nature." - David Hume, "Of Eloquence"

Monism

Here are some thoughts on the following monograph, Monism: Science, Religion, and the History of a Worldview by Todd H. Weir.

Much of German socialism (and thus socialism generally) was apparently quite in bed with the likes of Ernst Haeckel (who provided a very popularized totalizing secular worldview that rejected religious belief).  Not surprisingly this leads to many socialists who favored eugenics.  It also tends to explain much of the arrogance and hubris of socialists in the 19th century. 

The sort of all-encompassing efforts to explain all things also explains how Annie Besant can flip-flop from being an atheist to a theosophist yet remain a monist. 

Monism also reminds me of the views of the new atheists in a number of ways (and why Gould was so skeptical of the approach of Dawkins, etc.).  In particular the work of Sam Harris to create an objective secular ethics resembles the agenda of the monists. 

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