How would Hayek explain Canada, Sweden and other welfare states that not devolved into dictatorships?

The Road to Serfdom seems to be another variant of Malthaus. A great thing for doomsayers to always be wrong about but never give up.

I think Obama is talking about more than social infanstructure. He is talking about law. We have laws in this country that help set-up businesses. You can sue someone for breach of contract and recover. Bill Gates mentions Rule of Law a lot in terms of Microsoft's success. Now I'm sure he did not like the DOJ's antitrust suit but he still acknowledges the importance of a functioning legal system and other parts of the government.

Perhaps this is my Litvak blood speaking, or the fact that I have mainly lived close to or in very large and diverse cities with multiple cultures that do not naturally get along well but need to live in close proximity; but I never got the notion of Rugged Individualism. Rugged Individualism always seems like a myth to me. Yes people come up with ideas for businesses but as someone said above, we are also a part of society. Humans by nature are social animals. We form groups (both familial and larger) to survive and thrive.

You can walk from one end to another in San Francisco. I've done it. Sometimes the hills are painful though. The city is only 7 x 7 square miles.

You are making a mistake that a lot of people do, including myself, and this is confusing today for tomorrow.

Understandably we do all need to live in the moment and I think the anxiety felt by many people is perfectly reasonable but there is still decades left to life for most people and things changed. There was an article a while ago in the New Republic about a woman with a Masters from Yale who was working as a waitress because of a recession. Her recession was in the early 1980s. She is now in charge of a respectable non-profit.

I imagine that most arts and humanities programs do not have much in terms of grant money. I received a small scholarship for my MFA program of about 7,000 dollars a year or 3500 per semester. A nice little deduction but not enough to cover the cost of the program. Even with everyone paying rather hefty tuitions, my MFA program was still run on a shoestring budget.

I have never seen one. As a New Yorker (who might or might not go back), I still tend to see San Francisco as a kinder and gentler version of New York.

It really is.

Though my New York* self is still having a hard time adopting to Californicus Flakius even though I've lived here for four years in August.

*We aren't rude. We are direct. Direct in a way that San Franciscans usually dislike.

I live in a gentrified part of the Western Addition or as someone I know calls the neighborhood, I live in the DMV Heights.

Neighborhoods like Stern Grove are what I like about San Francisco. You have these little villages that are in the middle of the city and no one visits them! One friend describes SF as the "incorporated villages of San Francisco"

I never liked Heeb. My own part in the Jew v. Jew debate is to be very turned off by the practioners of "Kitschy Judaism". I define "kitschy Judaism" as basically turning 5000 years of history, culture, and philosophy into a bunch on jokes. I love Jewish humor but there is more to Judaism than Adam Sandler, Woody Allen, Sarah Silverman, and the Borscht Belt.

Now that I live on the West Coast, I am told that "East Coast Reform" equals "West Coast Conservative" so things might be even more lax here. There might also be a generational gap. I notice that a lot of Jews who belong to the Millenial Generation are getting tattoos (Lena Dunham is the most obvious celeb example). A lot of them talk about "reclaiming". This strikes me as odd. How can you reclaim what was never ours to begin with? I'd rather they just say they want tattoos. I would take that argument as being more intellectually honest. Though I know my views on Jews and tattoos is not going to change the minds of anyone. If someone wants a tattoo, they are going to get one.

As for the comment section (and keep in mind that I know nothing about your politics or whether you are Jewish or not), I have a theory that Republican/Politically Conservative Jews have a feeling of being an embittered minority within a minority. It seems like every Presidential election brings about the same posts about whether Jews will stop voting Democratic this year. Every Presidential election reveals the answer to be no. If you are among the 20 percent of Jews who are partisan Republicans, this must be really frustrating. Also Orthodox Jews are becoming more common. I grew up in a very Jewish suburb. When I was around, the town was largely Reform/secular, now the town is much more Orthodox.

Kazzy,

I grew up in Nassau County on Long Island. Now I live in San Francisco.

Kazzy,

I suppose I would have done stuff differently as well but I can't say what my record would look like if I was a high school senior in 2002, 2005, 2008, 2012, etc. Based on what my 1998 record was (read: all over the map), I can only guess that I would not get into my alma mater if applying today. There are too many perfect candidates. You never can completely tell but even back in 1998, I was a lucky long-shot who got in.

I applied to a lot of colleges because of my all over the map grades, good extracurriculurs, and SAT scores. This turned me into the waitlist king.

So yes, it is all part of the arms race and I went to a very academically competitive high school (professional suburbs of New York). It is probably even more arms race now.

Oh Tablet.

Normally, they are a very good on-line Jewish magazine* especially for non neo-cons like myself (and most Jews) but every now and then they have to publish an article like this and I sigh along with the neocons.

*Though I do get angry at the anti-Reform Judaism sentiment that often gets expressed in the comments. Says the proud Reform Jew.

Another problem is that college applications are a lot more competitive now.

I was admitted to a Tier I private liberal arts college in 1998 and graduated in 2002. I doubt that my high school record would get me admitted now. Most likely I'd be somewhere in the Tier 2 range. A lot of my cohort feel the same way.

Also it is impossible to determine what a marketable major is or is not. A person can major in comp lit, suffer for a few years, get an entry level advertising gig, and then really start to bloom, etc. Also I imagine many teachers come from Tier 2 schools. Should teachers study the subjects they teach?

I think this is a large part of our current educational-debt-employment problem, the fact that employers do not want to train anyone for anything.

I am all for having a mass educated class. However, I think it is a problem when employers use college graduation as a short hand for competence. I've certainly had jobs that said "BA required" but could have been done by a non-college graduate.

A return to apprenticeship for a lot of jobs including many business jobs like marketing and accounting would be a good thing. I don't see this happening though.

You can major in anything and go to law school. No extra courses necessary!

As opposed to my friends who decided to go into social work, therapy (psychological and phyiscal), etc. They needed to make up a lot of courses before grad school.

Also, my undergrad was Division III, so there were no athletic scholarships offered.

From what I remember, the hard part about Japanese universities is getting. Once you are admitted to the top universities, it is supposed to be smooth sailing and the old boys' network guarantees your career. This obviously happens a bit or a lot in the United States as well especially among certain schools known for creating fiercly devoted alumni but it might be more accute in Asia).

I would agree with your statement on the US system encouraging more work but that could also be part of the problem especially with the whole costs and student debt crisis. In many (or most) other countries, law and medicine are studied as undergrad subjects. This means that a person has more time in the field as a practioner to earn their income and less debt. They don't have undergrad debt plus law school or med school or business school debt piled on top.

There are some benefits to allowing law school to be a bit like grad school. I was allowed to kick around in art for most of my 20s and then head to law school when I realized my theatre career was probably not going to bloom. But in terms of debt and getting a late start into careers, it is not so good.

Okay, this is a hobby horse of mine.

There are a lot more people who make their livings paying piano than one dozen. People still enjoy going to concerts and a dozen concert pianists could not fill the need for all the live performances.

As a former theatre person, I can also tell you that the vast majority of my artisitc friends understand the career prospects. Don't get me wrong, we all think or thought it would be very nice to make a living doing our art but I don't think most of us expected to. People create art or write or perform because they need to, it is in their blood.

The point and purpose of university is to create a well-educated person. There is such a thing as stuyding a subject out of love and passion, not for cost-benefit analysis on post-graduation employment prospects. The world does not need to be filled with STEM people only.

My comment below was meant to be a reply to you.

How do we outpace our foreign counterparts? Keep in mind that I was a arts and humanities student at a small, liberal arts college, not a large research university. We had science majors but no engineers, no business faculty (unless you count economics), etc. Also no graduate students. The school is a name recognized and considered elite (both in terms of being associated with the old WASP aristocracy and now for toughness in admission.academic). However, it is not a research university. Professors are largely at the school to teach. All of my classes were 15-30 students. Sometimes less. Basically, I am far away from the world of research and engineers.

Most foreign countries do not have the sheer number of universities that the U.S. does. I am not even sure what our closest competitor does. Latin American countries seem to go for universities that make Ohio State look tiny. Some Mexican universities have hundreds of thousands of students. I'd venture to say that it is hard to produce real learning in those environments.

I am not sure how ranking works in most foreign countries. I know that every country has their elite universities. Canada has McGill and Toronto, The UK has OxBridge, Japan has Tokyo, Waseda, Keio, and Osaka. But I don't know how the rest of their universities rank. The U.S. seems more clear in terms of Ivy, Comparable to Ivy (Stanford, Notre Dame, Chicago, MIT, CalTech) Small Liberal Arts elite (Wesleyan, Amherst, Oberlin, Kenyon, Grinnel, etc), Public Ivies (the UCs especially Cal, Michigan-Ann Arbor), and so on. The U.S. probably has more elite colleges and universities than some nations have universities.

Though now people are talking about whether the Ivys or comparable schools are worth it because of the cost. A lot of people say go to community college and then a state school close to home if you can to save on expense. My general reaction is contrarian to this. I think if someone gets into a Harvard, an MIT, an Emory or Duke, a Colby, etc., they should go. Those schools do offer excellent educations and yes the name matters on a resume for better or for worse.

Though everyone likes to point out the manager they know who only hires kids from big public schools because "those kids worked their way through college" while a private school grad had "mommy and daddy pay for school".

Interesting.

Completely tangental but my non-American friends think that our educational system is complete madness. As far as I can tell, private university education is a rarity in many countries outside the U.S. or often considered inferior. The exceptions I can think of being Japan (Waseda, Keio) and France (the grandes ecoles).

I wonder whether Canada or the United Kingdom even have private universities.

One of my European friends thought that schools like Harvard and my undergrad (smal, liberal arts college in the Northeast) were for-profit because they were private. I blew his mind a bit by saying they were private and had large endowments but were still officially non-profit/501(c)(3) institutions. He seemed to think that Harvard and Yale were for-profit in the same way that the University of Phoenix is for-profit.

I know of couples who stay married for these reasons and also maintaining a lifestyle.

We had a family friend who used to be a local broker for a branch of one of the big investment companies. This was in an upper-middle class professional suburb. He used to say that lots of couples would come in after their kids left the nest and say they wanted to split up and asked him to do the math about lifestyle and splitting assets. His response was to many of the couples is that divorcing would probably lead to needing to step down in their lifestyle/comfort level.

So not quite the same as getting married* but somewhat close.

*That being said, I have a morbid fascination with the wedding announcements in the New York Times. They always read like a mingling of the SAT scores, Rhodes Scholarships, Fullbright Fellowships, etc. I often wonder if the first date read more like a job interview.

I did not know that Kenneth Baranagh and Helena Bonham Carter were ever an item.

I also never made it to Order of the Pheonix movie. I've read all the books but have a bit of a dissenting view on Harry Potter. I can see why they are good and successful but am a bit perplexed by the mega-success that they have received. They are still much better than the other books that are mega-successful that perplex me Hunger Games (not as original as everyone claims), Twlight (nuff said), and 50 Shades of Grey (even more nuff said).

Part of this could be an occupational hazard from my grad school days (Theatre directing with a lot of classes on dramatic literature thrown in. My undergrad course load was also heavily literature and theatre history based), I tend towards work and more active reading than escapism and tend to get annoyed at things that most people seem to not notice or ignore. My musician friends have made similar comments about concerts. In terms of the classic C.S. Lewis essay an Experiment in Criticism, I am firmly in what he calls a literary reader.)

Harry Potter was cute enough but I got quickly annoyed at the repeated jokes about musicians not being able to dress normally. The whole "What house are you in?" aspect of the fandom perplexes me as well especially people who claim to be all about House Slytherin. I always want to state to House Slytherin fanatics, "You realize that they are a barely disguised analogy for the Nazis, right? And J.K. Rowling is basically telling kids that Nazism and caring about blood purity are very bad things." I imagine this will not go over well.

That being said, the movies are not bad. They were well cast and I'm impressed that they picked kids who really were able to grow into their roles and were generally good to great actors.

Well there was also Much Ado About Nothing.

What was the time frame between Dead Again and their divorce?

Dead Again is not a zombie movie. It is a crazy sorta film noir, reincarnation romantic melodrama.