Buckley and Friedman: 1968

Historical linguistic interest ahoy!

I stumbled across this video this afternoon, and it is definitely worth watching for at least two reasons.

1: William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman discussing and debating the negative income tax is illuminating in a lot of ways. Even if the commercial breaks (which the interlocutors are apparently not appraised of) seem to occur at the most interesting points.

2: This might be the earliest example of “classical liberal” being used to describe essentially a right leaning libertarian (as opposed to simply conservative) person, Friedman in this case, in 1968. So, again, stop using classical liberal to describe leftists, please. It is entirely incorrect.

In other news, I’ve been a bit quiet lately, partially because work has been busy and exhausting, and partially because I’ve been going blind at a fairly rapid pace. I just had a cataract obscured lens removed from one eye in the past week and replaced. Still getting used to how the new eye works with the old… after being extremely nearsighted my whole life, with much better than 20/20 vision up close, having one eye that only sees distance but sees it extremely well is strange. My remaining eye is not so bad on the cataract front so I am putting that off for a bit while it can still read without assistance. The downside is that I am really noticing how cloudy it is now that the other is perfectly clear. Well, that and I don’t know how to arrange old man reading glasses for the one eye and not on the other in a way that works… experiments to come. Maybe I will get a monocle.

With all that, I tried to take the holidays off for the most part, away from work and the larger world in general.

So I hope you all had a good holiday season. I have some more stuff coming, an essay on praise and propriety slopes, an essay on screwing up like 5 blacksmithing and woodworking projects in a row, and one or two other things I have been noodling on.

Talk with you soon.