Bryan Caplan – who apparently as a teenager never noticed the list of credits at the front of any Marvel Comics book – admires (I almost said “marvels at”) the division of labor among writer, penciler, inker, colorist, letterer, and cover artist.

The April 30, 1907 NYT reports the following:

PHILADELPHIA - Miss Martha Korais, a Prussian girl, was killed here to-day by Franz Endrukat, who then mortally wounded himself.

Endrukat followed the girl to this country from Pomerania, Rhenish Prussia, where four years ago he attempted to kill her by beating her over the head with a hatchet because she would not marry him. He then cut his throat, and, after lying for four months in a hospital, was sentenced to one year and eight months' imprisonment.

Endrukat to-day met Miss Korais and followed here from the home of her employer to a near-by bakery, and again pressed his suit. The girl told him she would sooner die than marry him, whereupon he drew a pistol and sent to bullets into her head. He then turned the weapon on himself and sent a bullet into his head, falling unconscious across the body of the girl. Endrukat is 33 years of age, and his victim was 22.

Amazing. The term "crime of passion" has come to mean a crime commited in the heat of the moment and one that, implicitly, the offending party regrets. Yet the more sinister "crime of passion" would seem to be the kind Mr. Endrukat undertook.

Benn Steil, Director of International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, thoughtfully contemplates “The End of National Currency” in the May/June 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs. Here’s a taste:

In order to globalize safely, countries should abandon monetary nationalism and abolish unwanted currencies, the source of much of today's instability.

… As for the United States, it needs to perpetuate the sound money policies of former Federal Reserve Chairs Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan and return to long-term fiscal discipline. … It is the market that made the dollar into global money -- and what the market giveth, the market can taketh away. If … the dollar fails, the market may privatize money on its own.

Hear, hear. The essay – like the talk Steil gave at the Cato monetary conference in November – even favorably cites Hayek’s Monetary Nationalism and International Stability (1937).

I guess the CFR has become more market-friendly, if it can provide a home for Steil and visiting fellow Amity Schlaes.

From the April 28, 1907 NYT:

Some people don't believe all they hear, even when their conscience tells it to them.

A peck of trouble is easier to get into than a pint of happiness.

When a man boasts that he never did anything he is ashamed of, it may merely indicate that he is lacking in a sense of shame.

Our sins also have an uncomfortable habit of finding us in.

A lot of sympathy is wasted on the under dog and the old maid.

Of course the bachelor should be taxed, it's worth it.

Michael Hicks, an associate professor of economics at Air Force Institute of Technology, has a new book on Wal-Mart out this week from Cambria Press titled The Local Economic Impact of Wal-Mart. I have not read the book yet, but the table of contents looks interesting and quite balanced. I should be receiving a copy in the mail shortly and hope to post a review when I have an opportunity.

For those of you who have read Unleashing Capitalism, you'll remember Mike as an author of a chapter on civil litigation and a co-author of another chapter (with Bill Shughart) on business subsidies.

From the AP, Supreme Court eyes McCain-Feingold limits on ads.

The case before the court Wednesday involved advertisements that Wisconsin Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, was prevented from broadcasting during the 2004 campaign. The ads asked voters to contact the state's two senators, Democrats Russ Feingold (news, bio, voting record) and Herb Kohl, and urge them not to filibuster President Bush's judicial nominees.

Three interesting, perhaps telling, remarks:

Sam Alito (questioning defense): "What do you make of the fact that there are so many advocacy groups that say this is really impractical?"

Antonin Scalia: "This is the First Amendment," Scalia said. "We don't make people guess whether their speech is going to be allowed by Big Brother or not."

John Roberts: asked whether the burden should be "on the challenger to prove that they're allowed to speak, as opposed to the government to prove — to carry the burden that they can censor the speech?"

One of my undergraduate econometrics students from last fall, Paul Dorasil, won the undergraduate paper of the year award from the Department of Economics at UTA.

Last night we attended the annual awards meeting of the Dallas chapter of the National Association of Business Economists where a shortened version of Paul's paper investigating Texas Lotteries won first place amongst five finalists from eleven North Texas universities in the DABE's Arther A. Smith Outstanding Student Award. ( Longer (co-authored) working paper here)

Shameless plug: Paul has a blog called Writing in the Margins

The guest speaker at the DABE meeting was Carol Anderson-Guthrie of the Government Accountability Office. Her discussion focused on the long-term fiscal position of the United States and had two general conclusions:

1. The long-term fiscal stance of the Federal Government is much worse than advertised.
2. One way to have a reasoned debate about the problems and possible solutions is to tackle fiscal illiteracy amongst the U.S. population.

The majority of the PP presentation is available here. The unfunded liabilities of medicare, medicaid, and social security are absolutely staggering. GAO simulates that without significant reform the unfunded liabilities can be covered if federal taxes increase 250%. Ouch.

Now available from University of Chicago Press:

Hayek, F. A. The Pure Theory of Capital. Edited by Lawrence H. White. Foreword by Bruce Caldwell. Introduction by Lawrence H. White. 464 p., 34 line drawings, 1 table. 6 x 9 2007 Series: (CWFAH) The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek

Cloth $60.00spec ISBN: 978-0-226-32099-1 (ISBN-10: 0-226-32099-5)

A news item from Florida:

A controversial Central Florida senator wants to pass a law that would punish teens who show off their underwear.

If the "Pull Up Your Britches" bill somehow passes, students could be suspended up to 10 days for showing their underwear.

The bill's sponsor is state Sen. Gary Siplin of Orlando. He was convicted of grand theft for paying his office staff with state money while he worked on his re-election campaign.

Baggy pants look foolish, but there's no need for a law. (Indeed, baggy pants may help enforce existing laws--here's a story of a robber whose baggy pants made him stumble and get caught by police.) Is there no end for the nanny staters?

On a different topic, I think this paragraph helps explain why the networks devoted so much coverage to braying a$$ Imus's idiotic remarks:

CNN could have taken a page from that recipe in hopes of growing a program that averaged just 376,000 viewers last month, down from 510,000 in August, as MSNBC's increasingly popular rival Imus in the Morning crept closer with 354,000 viewers and Fox News' Fox & Friends continued to win the cable time slot with 692,000 viewers.

I didn't watch Imus and am not sorry he's gone; however, I also suspect the self-interest of competing networks led them to hype the story.

I think the best writing in newspapers is often found on the sports pages, but this line from Saturday's Columbus Dispatch by writer Jim Massie was a real groaner:

CINCINNATI --With two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning, the Reds looked more uncomfortable lost than a polar bear up to its white, furry haunches in a Sahara Desert sand dune."

I hope Jim was drinking when he came up with that one!

According to this article in Environmental Science and Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society:

E85 (85% ethanol fuel, 15% gasoline) may increase ozone-related mortality, hospitalization, and asthma by about 9% in Los Angeles and 4% in the United States as a whole relative to 100% gasoline. Ozone increases in Los Angeles and the northeast were partially offset by decreases in the southeast. E85 also increased peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN) in the U.S. but was estimated to cause little change in cancer risk. Due to its ozone effects, future E85 may be a greater overall public health risk than gasoline. However, because of the uncertainty in future emission regulations, it can be concluded with confidence only that E85 is unlikely to improve air quality over future gasoline vehicles. Unburned ethanol emissions from E85 may result in a global-scale source of acetaldehyde larger than that of direct emissions.

Klein and Stern respond to critics of their research on the political ideology and party affiliation of college faculty.

Congrats to DoLer Tim Shaughnessy who just received word that he's being promoted to Associate Professor and granted tenure. Congrats Tim!

There's a nice discussion from all angles of the research on "happiness" over at Cato Unbound edited by Will Wilkinson.

Tom Friedman had a column on African poverty in the April 20 NYT (somehow it slipped under the radar of the blogosphere--the Times Select firewall perhaps). Karol Boudreaux follows it up with a letter in today's NYT.

From Friedman:

Africa needs many things, but most of all it needs capitalists who can start and run legal companies. More Bill Gates, fewer foundations. People grow out of poverty when they create small businesses that employ their neighbors. Nothing else lasts.

Whenever you read about capital flowing into Africa, though, it tends to be from big lenders like the World Bank, which have very strict criteria and work on big projects, or from microfinanciers, giving out $50 to a woman to buy a sewing machine. Microfinance has a role, but many people don't want the pressure of being an entrepreneur. They want the stability and prosperity of a job created by capitalist risk-takers and innovators. See India.

In some ways what Africa needs most today is more "patient" capital to spur its would-be capitalists. Patient capital has all the discipline of venture capital - demanding a return, and therefore rigor in how it is deployed - but expecting a return that is more in the 5 to 10 percent range, rather than the 35 percent that venture capitalists look for, and with a longer payback period.

A good example of what happens when you combine patient capital, talent and innovation in Africa is the Kenyan company Advanced Bio-Extracts (ABE), headed by Patrick Henfrey. He and his partners put together a fascinating group of both white and black African farmers and scientists to build the first company in Africa to cultivate the green leafy plant artemisia, often called sweet wormwood, and transform it into pharmaceutical grade artemisinin - a botanical extract that is the key ingredient in the new generation of low-cost, effective malaria treatments commonly known as artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs). Malaria still kills nearly 1 million people in Africa every year, more than HIV-AIDS.

From Boudreaux (via Cafe Hayek):

Africa's leaders have the power to encourage patient capitalism (where returns are 5 to 10 percent and payback is over a longer period of time) by reducing barriers to businesses, by improving tenure security for both men and women, and by respecting indigenous institutions and customs.

Policies that push entrepreneurs into the informal sector, promote tenure insecurity, limit women's property rights and are based on central planning rather than decentralized experimentation will only stymie progress.

The March issue of the Harvard Law Review marks the 25th anniversary of Richard Posner's appointment to the US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. The issue (available in full-text online, here) contains a brief intro by Dean Kagan and short essays on thirteen of Judge Posner's judicial opinions, written by Harvard Law professors. Well worth a look.

Just a reminder: All of Judge Posner's opinions are collected online (and searchable!) at Project Posner.

The April 23, 1907 NYT reports on some strange events in upstate New York:

NIAGRA, N.Y. - The American falls went dry to-day in sections owing to the immense ice fields forced down from Lake Erie by a tremendous gale. Where the full sweep of water usually plunges over there were four separate falls, presenting a very peculiar sight.

A massive ice bridge has formed in the gorge.

Don't you know the global-warming alarmists of today would love to have some freak incident like this. Alas, all they in these parts this weekend were never-before-heard-of spring tornadoes in Texas.

An interesting story from Business Week:

The world's oldest continuously operating family business ended its impressive run last year. Japanese temple builder Kongo Gumi, in operation under the founders' descendants since 578, succumbed to excess debt and an unfavorable business climate in 2006.

How do you make a family business last for 14 centuries? Kongo Gumi's case suggests that it's a good idea to operate in a stable industry. Few industries could be less flighty than Buddhist temple construction. The belief system has survived for thousands of years and has many millions of adherents. With this firm foundation, Kongo had survived some tumultuous times, notably the 19th century Meiji restoration when it lost government subsidies and began building commercial buildings for the first time. But temple construction had until recently been a reliable mainstay, contributing 80% of Kongo Gumi's $67.6 million in 2004 revenues.

More here

From the April 19, 1907 NYT:

Thousands of Americans will give attention to Mr. Cortelyou's inquiry into the present barbarous method of conducting the customs examination of passengers' baggage, and if he should order sensible reforms their gratitude will be his reward.

The present method is senseless, outrageous, and indecent. It makes the Government seem to assume that every citizen of this Republic returning from abroad is a cheat and a liar. Lest some might forbear to lie intentionally arrangements are made to betray them into lying by inadvertence. The exacting of a declaration aboard the ship and the enforcing of a further examination on the dock constitute a method that would be most offensive against criminals or the public enemy. The resulting benefit to the revenues is insignificant, the annoyance to everybody is serious enough to constitute a public abuse.

We are glad that the Secretary of the Treasury is thinking about the matter.

From the April 19, 1907 NYT:

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - The House to-day passed the Young anti-cigarette bill making unlawful the selling of cigarettes or cigarette papers in Illinois. The bill now goes to the Senate.

From the April 19, 1907 NYT:

ST. PETERSBURG - To-morrow will witness a stormy debate in the Lower House of Parliament that has been in preparation for a fortnight past.

The Conservatives will introduce a motion that the House disapproves of Terrorism. A resolution of the Constitutional Democrats, the Poles, and the Mohammedans, expresses horror at the great wave of Terrorism, but says that it is an outgrowth of the absence of a constitutional regime. A resolution to be introduced by the members of the Group of Toil and the Social Democrats will set forth that Terrorism is necessary to break the grip of Despotism.

I'm passing along this note from Bob Chitester, the producer of the Free to Choose videos in the 80s and January's biography of Milton Friedman that aired on PBS. I saw a preview of this video at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Guatemala and highly recommend it. There's a trailer available on the website.

I'm writing to alert you to some very good news: the upcoming high definition, prime time broadcast of the most recent one hour documentary from Free to Choose Media on HDNet. The first broadcast will be Tuesday, April 24 at 10pm, with frequent repeats thereafter.

I think you will find that "The Ultimate Resource" is a stunningly beautiful and dramatic program that demonstrates in pictures and words the amazing things that can happen when ordinary people are given the tools of freedom to improve their lives. When this happens, according to the noted economist Julian Simon on whose ideas this new program is based, they profit not only themselves but the rest of us as well.

"The Ultimate Resource" was shot on location by a Free to Choose Media Team headed by Kathy Anderson with Jim Taylor and Barbara Potter. Tom Skinner and I shared the role of Executive Producer. The program documents the success of private schools in Ghana, the impact of the awarding of property rights to rural farmers in Peru, the amazing effect of microfinance on the poor of Bangladesh, and the amazing impact of free markets and entrepreneurship in Estonia and China.

The program features James Tooley, Muhammad Yunus, Hernando de Soto and Johan Norberg. You will want to see each of them in action on location in this beautifully produced film. I believe that this is a superb example of how Free to Choose Media is going about its mission of "using easily understood and entertaining popular media to reach inquisitive minds regarding the value and interrelationship of personal, economic and political freedom sustained by the rule of law."

For more information and for a video preview, go to www.freetochoosemedia.org For more information about HDNet, go to: www.hd.net

Sincerely,

Bob Chitester
President
Free to Choose Media

My advice: privatize the World Bank, and let the new shareholders fire Wolfowitz. Details in my column at Free Market News Network.

Several folks with Berry connections have notable recent achievements:

My former student John Coleman has been accepted to Harvard Business School.

2006 graduate Sam Bulow landed a job with Princeton's investment company.

December graduate Nancy Vogh is the inaugural winner of the J. Wilson Mixon Jr. (where have I heard that name before?) Outstanding Senior in Economics Award. Nancy's headed for Clemson's doctoral program in economics.

Current student Erin Wendt has been selected a Richards Scholar; the program provides students with a generous stipend for an academic activity outside of the normal curriculum. Erin plans to intern and/or do fieldwork with an NGO specializing in African economic development. (Bleg--I'd appreciate readers' suggestions for contacts/experiences that would help Erin design a fieldwork program in Africa.)

Our new hire Melissa Yeoh is now Dr. Yeoh; she successfully defended her dissertation earlier today.

Kudos to all--it's quality folks like you that make Berry a great place to teach.

Thanks to everyone for your e-mails about the marathon. I had three goals going in:

(1) Requalify for Boston with a 3:20.
(2) Beat my bib number (6252)
(3) Have fun!

I ran a 3:29:20 so I failed to requalify, but I did beat my bib number coming in 5363 out of 20038, and I also had lots of fun. The fans in Boston are simply the best (a special nod to the gals at Wellesley College!). As Meatloaf said, two out of three ain't bad. Oh yea, the weather wasn't nearly as bad as the media made it sound. We had light rain in the beginning and only occasional gusts of wind and it got better throughout the day.

Split times (unofficial) are below the fold for you running geeks.

Read More »

In a ten year old dispute, Brentwood Academy and the Tennessee Secondary State Athletic Association are gonna tangle in the Supreme Court......for the second time! AP story here.

WASHINGTON - A long-running dispute over recruiting high school athletes has reached the Supreme Court, where justices are being asked to decide whether a Tennessee school's free-speech rights outweigh rules limiting contacts with student athletes.

The case involves Brentwood Academy, a wealthy private school south of Nashville, and the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association, which governs high school sports in the state.

Brentwood Academy sent a letter inviting 12 eighth-graders to attend spring football practice in 1997. The students' parents already had signed contracts and paid deposits to attend the high school.

The athletic association said the letter violated rules against recruiting high school players, and it hit the school with a $3,000 fine and four years' probation. School officials unsuccessfully appealed twice before suing.

Arguments scheduled for Wednesday will be the second the Supreme Court has heard in the Brentwood Academy case. In 2001, the court ruled 5-4 in favor of Brentwood, saying the athletic association acted in a quasi-governmental capacity and could be sued.

That could make for some awkward awards banquets. Which there'd be plenty of for Brentwood, with sixteen state championships the past decade!!!

The April 17, 1907 NYT reports the following:

Max Spitzner, who won the National gymnastic championship in several events in the contests at the Madison Square Garden last year, to-day lost his left arm.

It was torn away by machinery in a camera factory in which he was employed. Spitzner was the champion gymnast of Connecticut.

Reader Jerry Whitmarsh took me to task for passing along the CNW Marketing Research study on energy costs of various cars without due statements of concern over the methodology. He kindly provided me with this site. The criticisms seem to fall into three categories.

First, the energy cost imputed for production and recycling are too large: 'NW's figures, for example, show that the Civic Hybrid can cost nearly $165,000 more over its lifetime, "dust to dust," than the standard Civic, which is a difficult figure to swallow, even considering the extra development, materials, and disposal of the Hybrid variant. Honda's Integrated Motor Assist (IMA) system is a mild hybrid system and many engineers have admired its elegant and simple design and function, considering the efficiency gains.'
Second, CNW understates the expected life of hybrids: 'For instance, according to the study the average Prius is expected to go 109,000 miles over its lifetime, while a Hummer H1 would go 379,000 miles. CNW says about hybrids: "…these are generally secondary vehicles in a household OR they are driven in restricted or short range environments such as college campuses or retirement neighborhoods." '
Third, CNW does not distribute the research and development costs over enough units: 'One other area of the study that some critics have found to be misleading is that CNW only included the so-called design and development cost of models sold so far, not on the potential volume of that technology in the long run.'

Similarly, an earlier study relating to CO2 emissions rather than energy use reports that hybrids score better on average than gasoline-engine cars.

ADDENDUM: sorry for earlier formatting problems.

Courtesy of my google news feed.

1. Virginia has passed new eminent domain legislation that on first glance seems to have real teeth:

The new law, among other things, requires that the process known as eminent domain be used only to take properties for public uses, not for resale to developers. And it specifies that the property itself must be blighted and not merely in a blighted area, as was previously allowed.

The legislation also raises the bar on what is considered blight, from "dilapidated or deteriorated" to "beyond repair" or "unfit for human occupancy or use."

Norfolk has long used these powers to either conserve areas - which makes them candidates for programs such as renovation grants - or perform wholesale redevelopment, in which entire blocks are razed and rebuilt from the ground up.

The Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority has two redevelopment areas and 11 conservation areas for which it may need to acquire more land.

"This new legislation affects all of that," said the agency's Jim Gehman, adding that it "eliminates the idea of redevelopment areas. We have to focus on individual houses. It changes the definition of blight and makes it much harder to get a property declared blighted."

2. In NJ, the NFIB assures that eminent domain is not a dead issue in that state.

3. In Brooklyn, NY, more futile resistance to the mammoth Atlantic Yards project.

4. New Mexico has passed (I think on April 6) what looks to be a weak law. Bill text here. Last year Gov. Richardson vetoed a much stronger bill. A rough guide to how weak the enacted bill is to last year's vetoed bill: this year's is 28 pages compared to last year's 1/2 page. Lots of exemptions and enumerated powers are to blame.

Have a great day!

Here's a bad combination--more than half the population received government transfers while tax liability is concentrated.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Slightly over half of all Americans – 52.6 percent – now receive significant income from government programs, according to an analysis by Gary Shilling, an economist in Springfield, N.J. That's up from 49.4 percent in 2000 and far above the 28.3 percent of Americans in 1950. If the trend continues, the percentage could rise within ten years to pass 55 percent, where it stood in 1980 on the eve of President's Reagan's move to scale back the size of government.

Meanwhile, Ari Fleischer writes in today's WSJ (sub req) that the top 1% of income earners pay 37% of total income taxes, the top 10% of income earners pay 71% of total income taxes, and the top 40% of income earners pay 99% of total income taxes.

There's a famous quote--not Batiat's "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." but similar--about having a majority of people voting to receive benefits from a taxpaying minority. The quote escapes me--I've opened comments if any reader can think of it--but it seems prescient.

UPDATE: Here's the quote, albeit not quite as I remembered it:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

It's attributed to Sir Alex Fraser Tytler, but, as explained here, there is some dispute about the author. HT to Jon and Mark for offline comments.

Kurt Vonnegut passed away last week. I am no Vonnegut expert, although I've read some of the novels and found much of it disturbingly delicious and deliciously confounding. DOL readers are probably familiar with the short story, "Harrison Bergeron" (text here), which I first read as an undergrad in Eric Schansberg's poverty and inequality class at Texas A&M. An futuristic dystopia, the story rivals Anthem and 1984 in its overtly favorable comparison of liberalism (respect for the individual) over radical egalitarianism (reverence for the collective) as political philosophies.

The opening paragraph sets the tone:

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

How was this equality achieved? Hilariously, by the use of mental and physical handicapping equipment that people were forced to wear. In the first scene, we go to the living room of George and Hazel Bergeron (parents of the protagonist) to witness the mundane existence of a perfectly average couple. George is naturally smarter and stronger than average, so the Handicapper-General has fitted George with a 47-pound bag of bird shot to hang around his neck, plus an ear implant set to blare thought-disrupting noises at the moment George thinks above average thoughts. The more profound the thought, the louder the burst.

This is the kind of world into which Vonnegut brings us. In this world, there is no individuality, no excellence, no merit. None of the things that libertarians believe to be inherent rights and predicates to prosperity. The ethical backwardness shown to us in this world, and the story's tragic and dreadful conclusion, suggest a negative commentary on egalitarianism. Hence the story is seen as a libertarian favorite, even among libertarians critical of Vonnegut more broadly (like this Cato blog entry).

A few observations that make me think the story is more than its appearance:

1. Of what use is the story to libertarians?

a. Expresses a logical-conclusion critique of egalitarianism. It's not just folly (weighing down better than average ballerinas) but a trampling of individual rights that is anathema (seizing one's thoughts) to the classical liberalism ideals that gird the American founding.
b. Highlights utilitarian costs of central planning. Much of the technology in the story (set in 2081) is 19th century technology. In the wake of the story's climax, the Handicapper General executes the offenders with.....a shotgun (HT Schansberg for that one).
c. For the hard core: constitutions fail to restrain the state from infringing on rights.
d. There are doubtless others that do not occur to me at the moment.

But the point of my post is that "Harrison Bergeron" is more than it seems, especially with regard to the libertarian theme. A few more observations on this.

2. In other aspects the technology is remarkable and subtle. For example, with the ear buzzing implants the state can literally read minds, in real time, and almost in anticipation of the individual's thoughts. The state can also apparently control the weather, having taken "springtime" out of the month of April. (That sure beats our capitalist society's control over the climate!) Vonnegut doesn't mention the technology required to accomplish this degree of control. It's left to back story in this incredibly lean tale. But it's there.

3. I've always wondered why Vonnegut framed the setting, story, characters and dialogue in such blatant terms. It is a plain, almost in-your-face story, as though Vonnegut donned himself with creative weights to use language "as good as anybody else" could. By comparison, I've found his other works (Hocus Pocus, e.g.) to be cryptic, though perhaps no darker. Extending this point of comparison to Rand, her style in Anthem is more poetically subtle than in her other novels.

4. Vonnegut's protagonist/hero is no libertarian. Unlike Anthem's protagonist, who dreamed of becoming a scholar, Harrison Bergeron wants to be emperor. When he breaks out of prison, he violently storms into the television studio (maximum exposure) with the following:

“I am the Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook. “Even as I stand here –” he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened – I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!”

In a peek of how he might rule, Harrison bribes the musicians to play their best, promising royal favors

“Play your best,” he told them, “and I’ll make you barons and dukes and earls.”

The secondary characters also have aspirations, though not of the individualist sort. Harrison's mother, for example, says she wants to be Handicapper General.

“I think I’d make a good Handicapper General.”

“Good as anybody else,” said George.

“Who knows better’n I do what normal is?” said Hazel.

These characters aren't independent achievers, they're meddling tyrants.

In all I have always found Vonnegut to be a dazzler, his tales a seeming refuge for readers with various types of self-deception in tow but with deep counter currents. In Vonnegut the profound is wrapped in the mundane. It's genius. But I don't think it's at all libertarian.

As a service to other instructors, I pass along this technique for grading exams. Thanks to Doug for the pointer.

Co-blogger Bob seems to be doing fairly well slogging through the Boston Marathon's awful conditions. At the 30k mark, he's on a 3:15 pace, less than 5 minutes off his qualifying time. Updates are here. (NB--if my link doesn't pull up Bob's progress just enter his bib number (6252).)

UPDATE: Bob hit the 35k mark 25 seconds off the 3:20 pace required for him to qualify for next year's race. Looks like he'll have a close call. Stay tuned.

UPDATE 2: Bob finished in 3:29.

The April 15, 1907 NYT reports on abolishing barbers' tips in Paris:

By a decision of the Syndical Chamber of the Master Hairdressers of Paris and of the Department of the Seine, in compliance with the wishes of the barbers' employees regarding the suppression of tips, these will be abolished on and after April 1, 1907, and the following will be in vogue:

Hair cut..........1 fr
Shave............50 cen.
Beard trim......50 cen.
Shampoo........1 fr 50 cen.

Patrons are requested to abstain from April 1, 1907, onward from giving pourboires to the employes, as the latter's salaries will thereafter be paid entirely by the employers.

Were the barbers taking a pay cut but ensuring a more steady income? Did the prices of the barber services increase by, say, 15% (or whatever the standard tip was at the time)? One wonders about the quality of service, especially the shave, after tips were abandoned.

Perhaps it was an April Fools joke?

From the April 14, 1907 NYT:

There is no rest for the wicked - or the gas meter.

The man who puts up a good front often does it to compensate for his lack of backing.

One-half the world, suffering from the pangs of hunger, doesn't know how the other half suffers from indigestion.

"The trouble with taking one drink is that it gets miserable in a man's stomach," says a bibulous friend of mine, "and you know how misery loves company."

The April 14, 1907 NYT has a rather long story concerning the distribution of money in the New York theater industry. The estimate is that nearly $7.5 million is spent each year on dramatic and comedic theater in New York, with theater owners and house managers taking $4 million, producers take about $1 m, and actors and actresses take about $1.5 million. This leaves about $1 million to be distributed to advertising, insurance, sets and props, and the author (more on this below).

The story indicates something about "star" value in 1907:

The actors and actresses require at least $1,500,000, including with them not only the stage management, but every "super" who gets half a dollar for walking on and off, up to the "star," who may run to $500, even in some cases $1,000 a week - and get it.

EH.net indicates nominal per-capita income was about $390 in 1907. If an actor had a 40 week work schedule, the actor would have a nominal income approximately 50 times greater than the average Joe. The "star" getting $1000 per week would have an income roughly 100 times the per-capita average. This would be comparable to today's average Major League Baseball player: Average MLB salary is approximately $4m and per-capita income is close to $40,000. Coincidence?

The NYT article goes on to point out that France has legislation requiring 10% of the theater industry's gross revenue goes to the authors (who are alive) but in the U.S. authors fend for themselves and receive a little less than 5% of theater revenues overall. However, there is considerable variance in the amount of money each author receives (just like today). The article points out that there "must be an author for each play but not necessarily an author on the payroll." This would create the incentive for managers to use the "classics" because they wouldn't have to pay the author or his/her estate.

Alas, much like today, "these praiseworthy ancients do not fill the bill for a public as eager after novelty as ours. The demand is for novelty in form if not always in substance, for new turns to old dramatic tricks, and if originality can strike hands with what is uppermost in men's and women's minds and within the conventions, the reward is golden indeed."

This seems very much like today's movie industry in which it seems very few original ideas are produced. Instead we are provided with deep movies that retell the Taming of the Shrew or the like.

However, much like the authors (at least authors like me) and musicians of today, most authors in 1907 didn't get paid much:

In a year's dramatic business there are a great many of him [authors] to share this possible fund. Sometimes it is shared with the manager. It is bitten into by agents. It disappears in fool contracts; it withers under small receipts. Now and again it blossoms for him into grand totals.

The article goes on to point out that there are several playwrights who are making considerable royalties from the blockbusters of their day, such as "Shenandoah," "The Lion and the Mouse," and "Arizona". These authors, the story claims, were receiving up to $100,000 per year in royalties.

The theater industry of 1907 seemed to have a Tournament-like reward system, just like the movie, television, music, and theater(?) industry of today. Today, authors, directors, actors, and musicians struggle for years for the chance to "hit it big" some day. Authors and actors of yesterday evidently did the same. The tournament structure might be encourage the greatest diversity of creativity and, ultimately, the most well received creative endeavors - be they theater, television, movies, or music. Same today as it was then.

Weather Advisory - 2007 Boston Marathon:

FORECAST:
The most up-to-date weather forecast calls for a predicted Spring storm on Monday, including heavy rains (potentially 3 to 5 inches), with the start temperatures in the mid to upper 30's. Wind will likely be East (in the face of the participants for most of the race) in the 20 to 25 mile per hour range, with gusts to as much as 50 miles per hour. This will produce a wind chill index of 25 to 30-degrees Fahrenheit.

Tomorrow I'm off to run Monday's Boston Marathon. Alas, it looks like a Nor'easter will bring heavy rain, high headwinds, and temps in the high 30s/low 40s. So much for a good time (in either sense)!

My bib number is 6252 (out of 22,500). If you want to follow along, the website will post 5k splits in (almost) real time. The race begins at 10 a.m. and is broadcast by the Versus tv network.

From this CNN story, Ozzy's forthcoming new album has an unprecedented twist:

NEW YORK (Billboard) -- Ozzy Osbourne's first new studio album in almost six years is also the first he has ever recorded sober.

"I thought I'd never write again without any stimulation," the recovering drugs aficionado told Billboard. "But you know what? Instead of picking of the bottle I just got honest and said, 'I don't want life to go (to pieces).' "

Tobias Wolff's 2003 novel, Old School, has become one of my enduring favorites. In a relevant scene, Ernest Hemingway has just judged the school boy protagonist's short story as the best of the 1961 class, and writes with advice about writing:

Advice... Don't take advice, I never did. And don't get swell-headed. Writers are just like everyone else, only worse. Did he [the school boy] rewrite the story forty times? He could throw away some stuff, I've thrown away enough in my time. The kid knows what he's writing about and that's good, now he should go out and know some other things to write about.

But I don't mean wars, not the way you probably think I mean. You don't go to war as a tourist. War'll get you killed and dead men don't write books. Same with hunting. Same with the sauce. Take Joyce. A rummy. Chained to his desk. Liked to read his work out loud, pretty tenor voice. Blind as a bat. You know what his wife told me? Said he ought to go lion hunting, that it would be good for his work and I should take him lion hunting. Can you imagine that? James Joyce lion hunting, with those eyes? Maybe I should have, come to think of it.

Watch the sauce. The sauce kills more writers than war, just takes longer. If you're going up against the giant killer, you'd better be damned sure you can win. Some of us can, some can't. Scott never had a chance, poor soft [-----]. Mouth like a girl's. Between the rum and that pretty mouth and that wife of his he never had a chance. But he didn't write drunk, not like Bill Faulkner. With Bill
Faulkner you can tell, right in the middle of a sentence, where the mash kicked in. Called me a coward once. A coward. I had to have Buck Lanham set him straight.

The amazing fictional tirade goes on, but for now Hemingway via Wolff has made his point. BTW, the censored [----] is in the novel and becomes a sticking point between characters.

Side note: Ozzy was once banned from my hometown, San Antonio, for giving in to micturating on the Alamo. I wonder what Papa would do if the Ozz called him a coward....

Remember how horrible the 2005 hurricane season was? And, since none of you stopped driving your SUVs, the 2006 season was supposed to be worse. So, FEMA stockpiled tons of food to be ready. Of course, there were maybe two hurricanes during 2006, and now all that FEMA food has spoiled.

In late August 2006, I was listening to NPR report on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina while also warning of the coming Hurricane Ernesto. I guess the editors of NPR didn't realize that they wouldn't be successful in drumming up fear of the '06 season when we were only in the E's while the year before we were already in the K's.

If you're looking for something to do early next week, check out the FairTax rallies. If any DOL readers happen to be in the Shreveport area, you can join Doug and I Tuesday evening and hear us discuss it on Tom Pace's radio show Monday starting at 4pm. For those unfamiliar with the FairTax, learn more here.

Hope APEE went well. My fiancee joined the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil last saturday, so I had to skip. I also sponsored one of my former students who joined as well.

The two biggest ideas pushed early in the Bill Clinton's administration were centrally planned health care and National Performance Review ("let's make government run like a business with no profit motive!"). Already in her presidential run, Hillary Clinton has promised universal health care (confusing health care with insurance coverage, cost sharing with cost reduction). Today HRC advocates coming in and cleaning up government.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Clinton said the government needed to become more consumer-friendly, cost-efficient and transparent in the way it does business. "We have to bring the government into the 21st century," she said. "We expect to be able to go to an ATM machine, stick a card in and get money, but we can't figure out how to get medical records from the Department of Defense over to the VA. It makes no sense."

Meanwhile John Edwards spends a day as a health care worker.

Not a lot of new ideas.

I've just returned from hearing Madeleine Albright deliver Berry's Shatto Lecture; the event is part of this week's inauguration of Berry's new president. (Side note: Fed Chair William McChesney Martin is one of Berry's past presidents.)

I have a mixed review of Albright's talk. One the positive hand, she criticized Europe's lack of support for bringing an end to the Iraq mess and (in response to a student question) she rightly characterized the thuggish regime of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe as corrupt.

On the negative hand, Albright criticized the U.S. for being the second worst donor, in percent of GDP, of foreign aid among developed countries. That figure is, in one sense, correct (source here--scroll down to Chart 1 (p.14)), but it refers only to official or governmental development assistance. Since only 20% of foreign aid is governmental (same link as before; scroll down to Table 1), the U.S.'s aid to other countries is 5 times the amount of official development assistance. Of course, the argument for aid presupposes that foreign aid is actually useful in alleviating poverty--the evidence supporting this assumption is weak at best.

George Will points out some of the peculiar math involved with improving the environment by driving hybrids. He cites work by CNW Marketing Research, which estimates "dust-to-dust" costs of operating various vehicles. Some summary info from their site:

Budget class cars (Aveo, Echo, Accent, and Rio) average $0.821 spent on energy per mile operated during the average car's lifetime. Economy cars (Corolla, Cavalier, et al.) come in at $0.802. Skipping a couple of categories, Full-size pickups (Ford F Series, Silverado, Ram, et al.) cost $2.496 per mile for energy.

Hybrids average $3.180 per mile, with the highest-cost one being the Prius. This compares to $2.756 for the Town Car and $1.873 for Premium mid-range cars (LaCrosse, Magnum, Maxima, et al.) Prius's per-mile energy cost is almost identical to the Land Cruiser's ($3.249 for Prius vs. $3.184 for the Land Cruiser). Even the old land yachts do better (Crown Vic: $1.418).

Of course, you can spend more. Among the Ultra-luxury cars, the Bentley runs $10.555. Even in this class, though, bargains can be found: the Ferrari costs a mere $3.962, not that much more than a Prius, and Aston Martin is a penny-pinching $3.028.

The 28th Annual John E. Sullivan Lecture
Friday, April 13, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Columbus Museum of Art Auditorium
480 E. Broad Street, Columbus, Ohio

Professor Randy Barnett
Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory, Georgetown University Law Center

The People or the State?: Chisholm v. Georgia and Popular Sovereignty”

Click here to register online.

Professor Barnett will be delivering the lecture, “The People or the State?: Chisholm v. Georgia and Popular Sovereignty,” on Friday, April 13, 2007, at the Columbus Museum of Art Auditorium, 480 E. Broad Street, Columbus, Ohio. The lecture will run from 2:30 – 4:30 pm and a reception will follow at the Museum.

As a legal practitioner, Professor Barnett has appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit to argue the medical cannabis case of Gonzales v. Raich, and he coauthored an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the case of Lawrence v. Texas. Professor Barnett has published more than 80 articles and reviews and seven books. His book, Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty, was awarded the Lysander Spooner Book Award for the best book on liberty for 2004. Professor Barnett also has appeared on television and radio programs such as the CBS evening news, The News Hour on PBS, Talk of the Nation on NPR, and the Ricki Lake Show.

This year’s lecture is co-sponsored by the Capital University Law Review and The George H. Moor Chair at Capital University.

For more information, contact: Jessica Poprocki, Director of Communications & Special Projects, at (614) 236-6377, or vie e-mail at jpoprocki@law.capital.edu

Sri Lanka’s business news portal, Lanka Business Online, has a remarkably perceptive columnist who goes by the moniker Fuss-Budget. His latest column, “How Sri Lanka is trying to manipulate inflation numbers,” discusses the political pressures – both in Sri Lanka and in developed countries like the US -- to “adjust” price indexes to get more favorable inflation reports. In the midst of it appears this lovely lesson from Argentina’s experience:

Argentina is a typical badly managed Latin American country with high inflation …

One brainwave of the current Kirshner government was to restrict meat exports to prevent beef prices from going up and put price controls. Farmers then switched from beef to soybean production and now beef prices are even higher and there are less export earnings as well. …

The government in Argentina has been complaining just like ours and any other money printing state in monetary history, that their index overstates inflation.
In February 2007 inflation in Argentina was uncomfortably high. President Kirshner's answer? Replace Graciela Bevacqua, the lady who was in charge of price indices at Indec, Argentina's national statistics office!

ADDENDUM: Here is a Bloomberg news story that backs Fuss-Budget's account of Argentinian events.

The April 12, 1907 NYT reports on opening day in professional baseball:

The largest crowd that ever witnessed an athletic event in this city saw New York win the opening game of the American League season here to-day by the score of 3 to 2. There were 12,902 paid admissions...

The Yankees in 2007 will have something like 60,000 paid admissions for their opening day.

Opening day attendance is therefore up approximately five-fold. And while nominal ticket prices [for the Yankees] have increased from $0.50 to somewhere around $50, in real terms this is also about a five-fold increase: from about $10 to about $50.

Just back from the APEE meeting in Cancun with fellow DoLers, Frank, Josh, Ed and Mike D. (Where were the rest of you guys!?)

A big congratulations to former DoL blogger and fellow FSU graduate G. Dirk Mateer for winning $10000 in APEE's Economics Communicators Contest!!! (The other finalists were Howard Baetjer and Ken Schoolland, winning $5000 and $2500 respectively).

Also FSU grad Russ Sobel was awarded APEE's Distinguished Scholar Award. Well deserved Russ!

Humility prevents me from mentioning another FSU grad who won the Best Educational Note Award for his paper on "Teaching Economics Principles with Comics."

Special note to Pete Boettke: That's 3 awards for FSU grads and 0 for GMU grads. :-)

Kudos to MR's Alex Tabarrok for the following comments:

We shouldn't get rid of the AMT we should expand it. The AMT is a flat tax, it's broad-based (few loopholes), it doesn't allow for deduction of state and local taxes (which only increases the incentive of states and localities to raise taxes) and it's simple. The AMT should be reformed along the edges e.g. by indexing it to inflation (after more people are covered!) but overall it's a much better tax than the current income tax.

I've expressed similar thoughts here and here. I wonder if--a la Mankiw's Pigou Club--we can start the AMT club.

From CNN:

TALLAHASSEE, Florida (CNN) -- Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told CNN Wednesday he supports public funding for some abortions, a position he advocated as mayor and one that will likely put the GOP presidential candidate at odds with social conservatives in his party.

"Ultimately, it's a constitutional right, and therefore if it's a constitutional right, ultimately, even if you do it on a state by state basis, you have to make sure people are protected," Giuliani said in an interview with CNN's Dana Bash in Florida's capital city.

A video clip of the then-mayoral candidate issuing a similar declaration in 1989 in a speech to the "Women's Coalition" appeared recently on the Internet.

"There must be public funding for abortions for poor women," Giuliani says in the speech that is posted on the video sharing site YouTube. "We cannot deny any woman the right to make her own decisions about abortion."

When asked directly Wednesday if he still supported the use of public funding for abortions, Giuliani said "Yes."

"If it would deprive someone of a constitutional right," he explained, "If that's the status of the law, yes."

Rudy doesn't seem to know the difference between positive rights and negative rights. If he thinks a constitutional right to abortion means that they must be taxpayer subsidized, then he should be for taxpayers providing me with a printing press or tv network to exercise my First Amendment rights. I wouldn't have voted for him in any case, but Rudy has now made it clear that he is incapable of fulfilling the presidential oath to protect and defend the constitution.

Robert Samuelson relates this bit of satire:

Cassandra Devine knows how to solve the coming "entitlements'' crisis, preordained when the 77 million baby boomers begin hitting 65 in 2011: Pay retirees to kill themselves, a program she calls "transitioning.'' Volunteers could receive a lavish vacation beforehand ("a farewell honeymoon''), courtesy of the government, and their heirs would be spared the estate tax. If only 20 percent of boomers select suicide before the age of 70, she says, "Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid will be solvent. End of crisis.''

OK, Devine is a 29-year-old fictional blogger in Christopher Buckley's satirical novel "Boomsday.'' Infuriated at the injustices awaiting her generation, she becomes an instant media celebrity with a gift for incendiary rhetoric. "Someone my age will have to spend their entire life paying unfair taxes, just so the Boomers can hit the golf course at sixty-two and drink gin and tonics until they're ninety,'' she tells one TV reporter.

Her plan, once in cyberspace, incites spontaneous uprisings. In Florida, "several hundred people in their twenties stormed the gates of a retirement community. ... Residents were assaulted as they played golf.''

And this does not even acknowledge the inevitable racial overtones that will accompany the rise of a real Cassandra Devine.

Joe Antos suggests that, surprisingly, Part D might point to a way to moderate the pressure on Medicare:

When Congress created Part D, the delivery of prescription benefits was left to private insurance plans which must compete for a share of the market. Competition puts pressure on the plans to negotiate hard for low drug prices, to encourage the use of more cost-effective pharmaceuticals, and to offer affordable premiums.

Despite initial skepticism from political opponents, the competition strategy has succeeded beyond all expectation. The average Medicare beneficiary has more than 50 different Part D plan choices. More importantly, seniors and taxpayers are saving money. Premiums averaged just $24 a month in 2006, one-third lower than experts had predicted.

Thanks to a licensing agreement between Major League Baseball and Eternal Image, a Michigan company that designs and manufactures caskets and urns, superfans have a new way to prove their undying fealty to their favorite teams. Since opening day of the baseball season, caskets and urns decorated in team colors and emblazoned with official logos have been available at funeral homes in cities near eight teams. …

Each urn will sit atop a base shaped like home plate and come stamped with a message saying, "Major League Baseball officially recognizes (deceased's name) as a lifelong fan of (team name)."

Story here. You can see the MLB products on the Eternal Image website here.

ADDENDUM: Co-blogger Frank S. was on top of this story back in October. Consider the above an update.

Apparently this device has been around for a couple of years, but reading about it this morning was news to me (I guess I haven’t been hanging around in the right bars, and I let my subscription to Wired lapse). It’s the broadband-enabled jukebox, able to play any of hundreds of thousands of requested songs within a few minutes. Just think:

Now you can dial up some obscure Frank Zappa song from 1982 that nobody else in the room has ever heard before except you.

Another cool feature: the bar owner can program the jukebox so that it won’t play the wrong music, e.g. the Village People’s “YMCA” in a country-western bar. Or vice-versa.

The April 11, 1907 NYT reports on opening day in Major League Baseball. Much like this season, many teams are faced with the "odd" occurrence of snow on the ground in April. Take Detroit:

Detroit has Gloomy Outlook

Gloomy are the baseball fans whose appetites have been whetted since Hugh Jennigs became Manager of the team. It has snowed off an on for three days, and this morning broke with two inches of the white mantle on earth. Some moderation gave hopes but the weather man gives little hope. Secretary Navin says the game will be played if the snow isn't too deep, but the outlook is a cold, uncomfortable day. The advance sale equalled the park's capacity. The team is on edge and has shown well.

Comedian and libertarian-ish neo-conservative Dennis Miller now has a talk radio show. Check your local listings; here in St. Louis it runs 10am - 1pm. To give you the flavor of the show, today's guests are Christopher Horner (Competitive Enterprise Institute), John McEnroe, Irshad Manji ("The Trouble with Islam Today"), and Gloria Allred.

Miller's enthusiasm for the Iraq war may be as delusional as Dwight Schrute's enthusiasm for superheroes (note Milleresque zany pop-culture reference!) but he's always perceptive, and he's always good for a chuckle. Bonus: the show uses cool bumper music (e.g. Dick Dale's "Misirlou"; John Barry's James Bond themes).

My favorite line from Miller's interview in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch this morning:

Al Gore -- At some point, he'll come riding over the hill like he's the cavalry. But it won't take long for everyone to figure out he's not Forrest Tucker. He's Larry Storch, and he's got his hat on sideways.

So, I'm a little sick of the whole "we hate Duke!" movement in the U.S. Fact is, the big D is a WHOLE lot more open to alternative viewpoints, and real education, than we get credit for. The fact that most faculty are unwilling to take public positions, or to pretend to represent the university, on matters of pending litigation does not make us complicit in the activities of a clinically insane legal system. But it seems that Duke has become a lightning rod for anger about universities and their intellectual insularity and ideological monochromaticity.

It was nice, therefore, to see this report come out from the Pope Center in Raleigh.

Excerpt below the fold....But the entire report is worth reading. The author, Russ Nieli, did a remarkable job in setting the context of the decline, and partial rise, of intellectual pursuit in American universities. A terrific piece of work.

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From a letter to the editor in the April 10, 1907 NYT:

During the Presidential campaign of 1896 Gov. Altgeld in his Music Hall speech at Chicago said: "Prices will continue to go down, down, never to rise again as long as the gold standard exists."

I made the statement to a friend that "Mr. Altgeld is mistaken, and that the tide will begin to turn in 1898, and by 1900 everybody will see it, and by 1903 an era of high prices will be attained, and that the building business will be good after that time, and remain good until the next panic, which is due to occur in 1913; that this will occur whether McKinley or Bryan is elected President."

The crest of the wave was passed more than a year ago but the volume of business does not yet indicate it.

These conclusions are not guessed, but are scientifically arrived at. No flurry in Wall Street can bring on a commercial depression until the conditions are ripe for it. If all the stocks and bonds and all the speculators who deal in them were blotted out it could not affect the volume of business appreciably. The cause of the ebb and flow of the tide of business lies wholly in the labor question proper. The volume of money, or its kind in use, has practically nothing to do with it.

JOSEPH EASTMAN

The Penny Pyramid Project: Picture of completed version: 289,318 pennies.

It's from April 2006 but still cool.

Funny and interesting comments at digg.com

Newsweek has a remarkable series of articles on global warming. The articles try to identify gainers as well as losers, and they paint a much less gloomy picture than most of the mainstream media. This article by Richard S. Lindzen probably should be read as the theme article. (Links to other articles are at this site.) Its opening sentences:

Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true.

What of it? Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators—and many scientists—seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes.

On Saturday it snowed in Arlington, TX. Granted, it didn't snow enough to stick to the roads or the grass, but it snowed enough so that our two year old recognized the precipitation as snow. How crazy is that?

Around the Southeast it was rather cold over the past weekend, and I am sure many were like me: either wondering where the global warming was when we needed it or thanking our stars for global warming (otherwise the cold would have been that much worse). For our good friends north of, say, Nashville, I hear your chuckles, but one reason I stick close to home (at least in terms of latitude) is the cold - more specifically the relative lack thereof.

Notwithstanding the past weekend's freakish weather, the statists qua global warming advocates will not be dissuaded. One hypothesis, which if true would be the end of the endless stream of "protocols," is that contemporaneous weather patterns are reflective of a "100 year cycle." With about as much scientific method as most (non-scientist) advocates of global warming put forth, I mention this story from the April 9, 1907 NYT:

Ballston [New York], April 8 - This vicinity to-day...had a snowstorm which almost assumed the proportions of a blizzard. More than eight inches of snow have fallen.

Can we draw robust inference from one observation? No more than those on the other side of the debate. However, I enjoy anecdotes that our problems are not necessarily new problems.

In a recollection of his involvement the early days of supply-side economics, Bruce Bartlett in the New York Times characterizes the mainstream view the supply-siders were up against as follows:

It’s important to remember that at the time supply-side economics came into being, Keynesian economics dominated macroeconomic thinking and economic policy in Washington. Among the beliefs held by the Keynesians of that era were these: budget deficits stimulate economic growth; the means by which the government raises revenue is essentially irrelevant economically; government spending and tax cuts affect the economy in exactly the same way through their impact on aggregate spending; personal savings is bad for economic growth; monetary policy is impotent; and inflation is caused by low unemployment, among other things.

In a comment on Mark Thoma’s blog, Paul Krugman claims that Bartlett’s Keynesianism is a straw man:

Wow. You see, I was a grad student at MIT - the great Keynesian stronghold - in the 1970s, and this bears no resemblance to what was being taught.

Really? Not even to undergraduates? Just a few blocks up Massachusetts Avenue, I was a freshman taking Economics 10 at Harvard in 1973-74. The course was led by Otto Eckstein; my section was taught by Chip Case; our textbook was Lipsey and Steiner. Based on my experience, I find Bartlett's characterization of the Keynesian macroeconomics of time quite accurate.

"Budget deficits stimulate economic growth": We didn’t hear much about growth, but we were certainly taught that deficits raise the level of income, via the balanced-budget multiplier.

"The means by which the government raises revenue is essentially irrelevant economically": Well, in the macro half of the course, yes.

"Government spending and tax cuts affect the economy in exactly the same way through their impact on aggregate spending": Yes.

"Personal savings is bad for economic growth": Certainly bad for the level of income, due to the paradox of thrift.

"Monetary policy is impotent; and inflation is caused by low unemployment, among other things." Yep. We were never taught MV=Py. We actually did hear that the bad anchovy harvest was a cause of inflation. I recall that an Ec 10 teaching assistant named Roger Brinner wrote an article about the causes of inflation for the Harvard Independent (an undergrad newspaper) in which he made not one mention of the word "money", much less any reference to growth in the supply of money. I remember it well because I wrote a reply for the Independent which became my first published writing on economics.

The April 7, 1907 NYT reports on French scientists who are trying to market tobacco that has been purged of nicotine ostensibly for health reasons:

The Government, which has a monopoly of the manufacture and sale of tobacco, put on the market this week a variety of caporal, a common form of pipe and cigarette tobacco, which had been freed of nicotine.

This step was taken as a result of experiments on rabbits. An infusion of ordinary caporal tobacco was injected into the veins of a rabbit, which died five weeks later. A post mortem examination showed that the aorta was covered with large spots due to arteriosclerosis. Another rabbit was subjected to a similar test with nicotineless caporal. This rabbit lived two months and was then put to death. The aorta was found perfectly healthy.

An extended version of the discussion of the pin industry, with more references. My DoL colleague Dr. W. Mixon suggested more background was needed.

And we are always happy to please, at DoL.

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Most recent reports about the money-raising success of candidates are all about the horse race. Few have suggested the fairly obvious point that McCain-Feingold has not been effective. This editorial gets it pretty much right:

But corruption has, if anything, surged. Confidence in government remains low. Nasty, attack-ad politics are as prevalent as ever. And, of course, corporations, unions and billionaires quickly found a new vehicle for their soft-money influence-peddling – the so-called “527” groups.

The predictions that arguably did come to pass did so for reasons having little to do with McCain-Feingold. Does anyone really think that grass-roots groups are thriving because of the law and not because of the unprecedented networking power offered by the Internet? Does anyone really think the fact that 28 Republican incumbents (but no Democratic incumbents) lost their House and Senate races last year was because of the law and not because of the GOP's vast, poll-confirmed plunge in popularity?

The failure of McCain-Feingold, however, does not mean that all attempts at campaign reform are futile. Instead, it's time for a new approach – one that has transparency as its primary goal, not unworkable and at times legally dubious attempts to restrict political speech and campaign spending.

It's better that the greens feel good than that they do good for the poor. According to this article in Foreign Affairs:

The World Bank has estimated that in 2001, 2.7 billion people in the world were living on the equivalent of less than $2 a day; to them, even marginal increases in the cost of staple grains could be devastating. Filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires over 450 pounds of corn -- which contains enough calories to feed one person for a year. By putting pressure on global supplies of edible crops, the surge in ethanol production will translate into higher prices for both processed and staple foods around the world. Biofuels have tied oil and food prices together in ways that could profoundly upset the relationships between food producers, consumers, and nations in the years ahead, with potentially devastating implications for both global poverty and food security.

My attempt to unravel the mystery of the QQ coin virtual currency --which the Chinese government takes seriously enough to crack down on -- is now up on Free Market News Network.

In the January 2007 issue of Public Choice I have a paper investigating anti-scalping laws and their potential impact on ticket window prices. I come up with the counter-intuitive result that allowing ticket scalping might actually reduce ticket prices (at the window). I do no