25 Feb 2011
Farm living could arm kids against asthma

This confirms something everybody who lives out here has known for a long time. Personally, I think the study probably underestimates the benefits to everyone, not just kids, of exposure to the natural world.

Kids who grow up on traditional farms are 30% to 50% less likely than other children to develop asthma, a new study shows. But it's not the fresh country air.

(link) [USA Today]

07:53 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

The Power of Free Association

A left libertarian analysis of unions and the labor movement.

The right of workers to band together to improve their bargaining position relative to employers is a straightforward implication of freedom of association, and the sort of voluntary association that results is the beating heart of the classical liberal vision of civil society. I unreservedly endorse what I'll call the "unionism of free association". My difficulty in coming out wholeheartedly for private-sector unions as they now exist is that they are, by and large, creatures of objectionable statutes which have badly warped the labour-capital power dynamic that would exist under the unionism of free association.

(link) [The Economist]

07:49 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link