Ironies Lost On Shallow Thinkers
A partial list
See how many of these you understand.
To get less “hate speech” and less hateful speech and less bad speech we need very strong protections for “hate speech” and all speech otherwise.
Special benefits and privileges for under-privileged groups can and often do greatly harm those intended beneficiaries. Two specific examples:
Minimum wages set above zero results in a wage of zero or at least significantly less than the total wage the employee would have gotten before the minimum wage was implemented.
Rent control to limit the cost of housing strongly tends to increase the cost of housing for the targeted beneficiary (both in availability as well as total cost).
Increasing criminal punishment including longer prison sentences and more harsh penalties otherwise can in many cases have virtually no affect on criminality and can in fact cause more crime.
Making it harder to fire employees makes it harder to hire employees resulting in higher rates of unemployment.
Increasing the penalty severity and/or the enforcement of penalties for any prohibited behavior (drugs, prostitution, gambling, etc.) results in worse versions (from the point of view of the prohibitor) of the prohibited behavior.
Barriers to imports (tariffs and quotas) are barriers to exports that result in reductions to both.
Investment concentrations are much more likely to make the (relatively) poor rich than are investment diversifications, but investment concentrations are much more likely to keep you poor (if poor already), make you poor (if rich already), and make you poorer in general than investment diversifications.
Speed indeed kills. However, the fastest method of travel for a given distance is generally the safest method of travel.
Almost always average cost is minimized after marginal cost; thus, stopping once the next unit takes more effort (is more costly) than the last unit falsely appears to minimize cost overall. As an example, adding one more input (e.g., a worker) to a production process, even though that worker’s addition results in less additional output than did the addition of the previous worker, can still (almost always does) result in a lower total cost per unit produced. This means the output is being more efficiently produced even though the last input (worker) was less helpful than the prior one added. In other words colloquially, adding a weaker link can strengthen the chain overall.
