Many more thanks
A big thank you to Don Luskin for introducing me on Poor & Stupid and adding me to his blogroll. Many thanks also to Brad and Quincy for continued behind-the-scenes support.
At my alma mater, SUNY Purchase, I was fortunate to have Dr. Sanford Ikeda as an economics professor. He's a devotee of the Austrian School, and in fact studied under Israel Kirzner as part of receiving his doctorate at NYU. Dr. Ikeda introduced me to Friedrich Hayek (and other things like the Foundation for Economic Education) and especially stressed the knowledge problem.
I haven't investigated how many have said this, but I'm doubtfully the first. Blogs are helping alleviate the knowledge problem by reducing the opportunity cost of acquiring new information (or refining your existing information). Of course they're not perfect, but as Jefferson said, "Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." On the other hand, until blogs, it was very difficult to combat any "error of opinion" so prevalent in mainstream media. Internet forums and the original Usenet newsgroups did help some, but with their naturally higher signal-to-noise ratio, I never found them as effective as blogs in spreading information.
It was sometime during the summer of 2003 when I started reading blogs. I don't recall exactly what I was searching for, but I came across Andrew Sullivan's blog, then Econopundit. Econopundit linked me to Luskin, and the "Sowell" link took me to Townhall.com. Then I picked up more and more, like Belmont Club, Country Store, Michelle Malkin and Powerline.
I consider myself a conservative with strong libertarian tendencies. I don't say the mainstream media is "too liberal"; I just think it's too dominated by propagandists like the New York Times, L.A. Times, CNN, Paul Krugman, Chris Matthews and Ted Rall. By no means does that make me an automatic Fox News fan -- my TV news preference is News 12 Westchester, a cable-only news channel for my county. However, at least we have Fox News to see another perspective. The MSM showed themselves to be really futzed up by harping on Abu Ghraib and ignoring Nick Berg.
At my alma mater, SUNY Purchase, I was fortunate to have Dr. Sanford Ikeda as an economics professor. He's a devotee of the Austrian School, and in fact studied under Israel Kirzner as part of receiving his doctorate at NYU. Dr. Ikeda introduced me to Friedrich Hayek (and other things like the Foundation for Economic Education) and especially stressed the knowledge problem.
I haven't investigated how many have said this, but I'm doubtfully the first. Blogs are helping alleviate the knowledge problem by reducing the opportunity cost of acquiring new information (or refining your existing information). Of course they're not perfect, but as Jefferson said, "Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." On the other hand, until blogs, it was very difficult to combat any "error of opinion" so prevalent in mainstream media. Internet forums and the original Usenet newsgroups did help some, but with their naturally higher signal-to-noise ratio, I never found them as effective as blogs in spreading information.
It was sometime during the summer of 2003 when I started reading blogs. I don't recall exactly what I was searching for, but I came across Andrew Sullivan's blog, then Econopundit. Econopundit linked me to Luskin, and the "Sowell" link took me to Townhall.com. Then I picked up more and more, like Belmont Club, Country Store, Michelle Malkin and Powerline.
I consider myself a conservative with strong libertarian tendencies. I don't say the mainstream media is "too liberal"; I just think it's too dominated by propagandists like the New York Times, L.A. Times, CNN, Paul Krugman, Chris Matthews and Ted Rall. By no means does that make me an automatic Fox News fan -- my TV news preference is News 12 Westchester, a cable-only news channel for my county. However, at least we have Fox News to see another perspective. The MSM showed themselves to be really futzed up by harping on Abu Ghraib and ignoring Nick Berg.
posted by Perry Eidelbus at
3:55 PM
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