The Ash Twins Blog

“Pivot” by Amoeba

Gavin Kennedy of Edinburgh offered a helpful critique of our October 2005 Daily Texan column:

Adam Smith was not ‘led to capitalism’, a phenomenon that appeared several decades after he died in 1790. Even the word ‘capitalism’ was not invented until 1854 (Oxford English Dictionary, Vol.ii: Thackeray); the word ‘capitalist’ was first used in 1792 (A. Young; W. Goldwin, 1793). Smith died in 1790.

Second, capitalism was not ‘devised’, though it has certainly been ‘successful’. This is the most important aspect of the market economy (which Smith wrote about and analysed using his inductive reasoning and not from axiomatic first principles): nobody devised it, created it intentionally, organised it, or managed it. Markets were never dependent on the ‘inventiveness’ of mankind; they evolved without plan or precepts, and still do.

The Wall Street Journal reports that J.P. Morgan has agreed to purchase Washington Mutual.

Federal regulators have been heavily involved in orchestrating the transaction, which comes as WaMu grapples with its bad mortgage loans. Regulators were hoping to fend off a collapse of WaMu, which, with more than $300 billion in assets, would mark by far the largest banking failure in U.S. history.

The exact structure of J.P. Morgan’s acquisition of WaMu’s deposits wasn’t immediately known, except that the New York bank, which has long coveted WaMu as a way to secure a footprint on the West Coast, will assume most of the thrift’s deposits and branches, as well as some other operations.

I hadn’t heard of this until today:

The Tulsa race riot, also known as the 1921 race riot, The night that Tulsa died, the Tulsa Race War, or the Greenwood riot, was a massacre during a large-scale civil disorder confined mainly to the racially segregated Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA on May 31, 1921. During the 16 hours of rioting, over 800 people were admitted to local hospitals with injuries, an estimated 10,000 were left homeless, 35 city blocks composed of 1,256 residences were destroyed by fire, and $1.8 million (nearly $21 million in 2007 dollars) in property damage. Officially, thirty-nine people were reported killed in the riot, of whom ten were white. The actual number of black citizens killed by white local militiamen and volunteers as a result of the riot was estimated in the Red Cross report at around 300; making the Tulsa race riot the worst in US history (footnotes and hyperlinks omitted).