PRESTOPUNDIT -- "must readings" says Nick Schutz

fraterslibertas.com has the 2003 blogosphere awards pretty much covered.

There's an interesting post on drug expiration dates from Truck and Barter, including this little nugget from the AMA:

PhRMA [Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America] notes that most innovator [non-generic] drug products that are close to expiration can be returned to the manufacturer for credit.

Who the heck knew?

The Worst of 2003 -- the Media Research Center is out with its awards for the worst reporting of the year .. with lots of fun quotes from the boneheads who dominate the major media. Idiotic stuff like this:

When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao’s Little Red Book on every official’s desk, omnipresent and unread. But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American....I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don’t have to make it....I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what bin Laden did to us.

-- the unmatchable Bill Moyers, still trying way too hard to cover for his ignoble role in the immorality of Lyndon Johnson administration.

Samuel Brittan -- should there be a Nobel Prize in Economics? Quotable:

The dispute about the value of the prize is still running. A former Swedish finance minister, Kjell Olof Feldt, who himself subsequently became head of the Riksbank, has advocated abolishing the economics prize. Some members of the present generation of the Nobel family have done the same. One is reminded of the disputes among the descendants of the composer Richard Wagner, who still claim the right to decide the future of the Festival Theatre he established in Bayreuth.

Indeed a few of the economics prize winners themselves expressed reservations, Friedrich Hayek, the free market political economist who won the prize jointly with the Swedish socialist Gunnar Myrdal in 1974, was grateful that the prize rescued him from a long period of personal depression and had relaunched his ideas - well before Margaret Thatcher started to publicise his name. Yet he admitted that if he had been consulted on whether to establish the prize he would "have decidedly advised against it." Myrdal rather less graciously wanted the prize abolished because it had been given to such reactionaries as Hayek (and afterwards Milton Friedman).

How does the matter look now? A glance at the correspondence columns for the FT will show that mainstream academic economics is far from being the only source of ideas on the subject. Business school theorists, contemporary historians, engineers with an interest in policy and opinionated businessmen all weigh in. It is the Nobel Prize which gives some kind of imprimatur to mainstream academic ideas, which combine an emphasis on individual utility maximisation and the role of markets, with advanced statistical techniques. It has not however in the least increased the willingness of policy makers to accept international free trade or reject the "lump of labour" fallacy - matters on which most academic theorists are agreed.

An insight indeed comes from comparing two very recent books on Hayek. The first by Alan Ebenstein is simply called Friedrich Hayek, a Biography(Palgrave 2001). The second is Bruce Caldwell's Hayek's Challenge, (University of Chicago Press, 2003.) While both books are sympathetic their interpretations are very different. Ebenstein follows Milton Friedman in treating Hayek as a distinguished political philosopher whose views on economic methods were antediluvian. He accepts Friedman's view of economics as science like any other and thus implicitly endorses the Nobel Prize.

Caldwell on the other hand steers as clear as he can of the political debate but shares Hayek's own scepticism about modern economics and its ability to make specific refutable predictions. (Hayek's Nobel Lecture was entitled The Pretence of Knowledge.) He asks whether there really has been steady cumulative progress as economic laws are discovered and improved empirical methods introduced. His own work on micro economics makes him extremely doubtful. And I would endorse this from the macro side. We know that an excess of purchasing power will lead to runaway inflation and that a deficiency will induce deflation and unemployment. We also know that a country cannot have an independent monetary policy if it is on a rigidly fixed exchange rate. But beyond such basics, forecasts are mainly ways of encapsulating what is already happening. The real drivers are so-called "shocks" which by definition are unpredictable.

Caldwell echoes Hayek in believing that the most that economists, like other social scientists, can hope to achieve is pattern predictions. Such consensus as exists among economists - for instance that demand curves slope downwards - is based much more on the way they have been brought up to think than any decisive empirical tests. If Caldwell is right then the Nobel Prize for economics was a mistake as the subject could not expect the kind of steady incremental progress achievable in the physical sciences - or for that matter in ancillary studies such as statistical theory. But having the Prize we are now stuck with it. To abolish would simply increase the influence of the kind of anti-economics which embraces for instance rent controls, minimum wages and arms promotion "for the sake of jobs". The best way forward would be to follow the tentative gropings of the Swedish Academy of the mid-1990s and extend the Prize to the social sciences in general and really mean it.

Physicists are using new methods for studying the Strong Force.

Banning religious symbols from public schools? Small potatoes in the French war against cultural diversity -- it goes back five centuries. More on the making of modern France and the triumph of social engineering with a boot and a gun:

As fellows of the Institute of Current World Affairs, of Hanover, N.H., we spent two years studying the French and trying to explain what makes the French tick. One of our main conclusions was that the French system functions according to values and assumptions alien to Canadians, who pride themselves on their multicultural, British-style democracy. Democracy à la française involves a huge central state whose purpose it is to determine the common good, and this calls for a lot of social engineering.

French social engineering began five centuries ago.

To understand what France was back then, it is more useful to compare it to today's Balkans — it was a patchwork of lesser and bigger duchies, each with their own language, culture and religion. In order to create a single French identity, French kings set out to erase these differences.

This process was brutal and slow, but successful. At the time of the French revolution, half of the French still didn't speak French. By 1900, most understood it and left their local language — Occitan, Breton, Alsacian, Corsican, or Basque — at home.

During this period, the French closed parishes, and forbade many religious orders. To this day, the French never appoint high civil servants to work in their home region, for the purpose of breaking down social ties and avoiding local power cliques. Now that's social engineering.

Part of the reason France waged total war on its own cultural differences was to overcome an essential trait of the French political culture: extremism. Just to give a sense of this: From 1789 to 1958, the French went through four democratic regimes, three monarchies, two empires and one fascist dictatorship, each ending in a coup, a war or a revolution.

The reason France didn't dissolve into a banana republic throughout this was that their very strong central state acted as an arbitrator of the common good in spite (some say, because) of the political instability. Whether they were Protestants, Breton or Corsicans, French citizens had to fall into line, and they did ..

(thanks to Richard Jensen of Conservativenet listserv)

Steyn's conservative case against gay marriage.

Mark Steyn looks at the year just passed. A taste:

Seven months ago, there was so much hooey in the papers about Iraq that I decided to see for myself and had a grand time motoring round the Sunni Triangle. Lovely place, friendly people, property very reasonable. Why were my impressions so different from the doom-mongers at CNN or the New York Times? Well, it seems most media types holed up at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad are still using their old Ba'athist minders as translators when they venture out. That would, at the very minimum, tend to give one a somewhat skewed perspective of the new Iraq.

But it only works because the fellows on the receiving end - the naysayers in the media and elsewhere - are so anxious to fall for it. One Saddamite pen-pusher at the museum could only peddle his non-existent sack of Baghdad to the world because, thanks to chaps like Jenkins, it was a seller's market.

And this:

Wolfowitz is a demonic figure to the anti-war types for little reason other than that his name begins with a big scary animal and ends Jewishly. But, if you want to know what he's really like, ask Ann Clwyd: "He was a very charming man, an intellectual," the Welsh firebrand told the Observer. Just so. I've been in his presence on a couple of occasions - he's very soft-spoken, thoughtful, not in the least bit lupine. He can reel off the names of gazillions of Iraqis he's been in touch with for years - Kurds, Shias, Sunnis.

Hastings mocks these contacts as "Iraqi stooges". But better a stooge than a vast anonymous tide of native extras, which is how Sir Max, whose Rolodex doesn't appear to be brimming with Ramadi and Mosul phone numbers, sees them. Where's the real "ignorance and conceit" here? No one who knows any Iraqis, as Ms Clwyd does, would compare Wolfowitz with the Soviets.

The real story of this past year is not Saddam, but something deeper, symbolised by the bizarre persistence of the "anti-war" movement even after the war was over. For a significant chunk of the British establishment and for most of the governing class on the Continent, if it's a choice between an America-led West or no West at all they'll take the latter. That's the trend to watch in the year ahead.

And here is 2003 as Steyn saw it, highlights and month by month. If you're new to Steyn -- or even if you're not -- don't miss it.

Nobel economist Vernon Smith has some very interesting ideas on what to do with Iraqs government-owned assetts -- such as it's oil reserves.

Bainbridge has a good one on mad cow disease and regulation (via the Carnival of Capitalists). Quotable:

There is no perfect solution here. The inherent inadequacies of regulation cannot justify ignoring demonstrated market failures, but both liberty and efficiency values counsel that we view any regulatory regime with a skeptical eye. A world-weary sigh is about the best option I can come up with. On food safety, as with many other issues, I trust neither markets nor regulators .. So what's for dinner? I'm going to go on eating beef, but I'm going to buy organically farmed and vegetarian fed beef whenever possible (even if I'm skeptical about the veracity of those labels).

UPDATE: Dan Drezner has more helpful thoughts on Mad Cows and Regulations.

Sean has the latest blogosphere Carnival of the Capitalists.

David Brooks does 300 words on Michael Oakeshott:

This is a good time of year to step back from daily events and commune with big thinkers, so I've been having a rather one-sided discussion about this whole Iraq business with Michael Oakeshott.

One of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, Oakeshott lived and died, in 1990, in England. As Andrew Sullivan, who did his dissertation on him, has pointed out, the easiest way to grasp Oakeshott is to know that he loved Montaigne and Shakespeare. He loved Montaigne for his skepticism and Shakespeare for his array of eccentric characters. Oakeshott seemed to measure a society by how well it nurtured idiosyncratic individuals, and he certainly qualified as one.

Oakeshott was epistemologically modest. The world is an intricate place, he believed, filled with dense patterns stretching back into time. We have to be aware of how little we know and how little we can know.

But the fog didn't make Oakeshott timid. He believed we should cope with the complex reality around us by adventuring out into the world, by playfully confronting the surprises and the unpredictability of it all. But we should always guard against the sin of intellectual pride, which leads to ideological thinking. Oakeshott's doctrine was that no doctrine could properly describe the world.

In his 1947 essay, "Rationalism and Politics," he distinguished between technical and practical knowledge. Technical knowledge is the sort that can be put into words and written down in books. If you pick up a cookbook, you can read about the ingredients and proportions and techniques for preparing a meal.

But an excellent cook brings some other body of knowledge to the task, which cannot be articulated. This knowledge comes from experience. It can't be taught but must be acquired through doing, by entering into the intrinsic pattern of the activity.

Oakeshott cites a tale by Chuang-tzu about a wheelwright who tells a scholar that the stuff in books is but "the lees and scum of bygone men." When making a wheel, the man says, a craftsman has to feel his way to know how much pressure to put on his tools. "The right pace, neither slow nor fast, cannot get into the hand unless it comes from the heart."

Oakeshott was living in the hubristic age of social science, when governments were building monstrous housing tracts they thought would improve the lives of the poor. Long before others, he understood the fallacy of social engineering. He believed instead that government should be prudent, limited and neutral, so that individuals would have the freedom to be daring and creative.

We can't know how Oakeshott would have judged the decision to go to war in Iraq, but it is impossible not to see the warnings entailed in his writings. Be aware of what you do not know. Do not go charging off to remake a society when you don't understand its moral traditions, when you do not even understand yourself. Do not imagine that if you conquer a nation and impose something you call democracy that the results will be in any way predictable. Do not try to administer a country from behind a security bunker.

I try to reply to these warnings. I concede that government should be limited, prudent and conservative, but only when there is something decent to conserve. Saddam sent Iraqi society spinning off so violently, prudence became imprudent. The Middle East could not continue down its former course.

I remind Oakeshott that he was ambivalent about the American Revolution, and dubious about a people who had made a sharp break with the past in the name of inalienable rights and other abstractions. But ours is the one revolution that worked, and it did precisely because our founders were epistemologically modest too, and didn't pretend to know what is the good life, only that people should be free to figure it out for themselves.

Because of that legacy, we stink at social engineering. Our government couldn't even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq — thank goodness, too, because any "plan" hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality.

I tell Oakeshott that the Americans and Iraqis are now involved in an Oakeshottian enterprise. They are muddling through, devising shambolic, ad hoc solutions to fit the concrete realities, and that we'll learn through bumbling experience. In the building of free societies, every day feels like a mess, but every year is a step forward.

Let's play spot the economic fallacy -- generated, you guessed it, by a professor of economics:

Conventional economics teaches that gift giving is irrational. The satisfaction or "utility" a person derives from consumption is determined by their personal preferences. But no one understands your preferences as well as you do.

So when I give up $50 worth of utility to buy a present for you, the chances are high that you'll value it at less than $50. If so, there's been a mutual loss of utility. The transaction has been inefficient and "welfare reducing", thus making it irrational. As an economist would put it, "unless a gift that costs the giver p dollars exactly matches the way in which the recipient would have spent the p dollars, the gift is suboptimal".

This astonishing intellectual breakthrough was first formulated in 1993 by Joel Waldfogel, an economics professor now at the University of Pennsylvania, in his seminal paper, "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas" ... The guru Waldfogel has recently refined his calculations on Christmas's deadweight cost, using a new survey to estimate that, per dollar spent, people value their own purchases 18 per cent more than they value items they receive as gifts. (Being a rigorous scientist, the prof has carefully excluded any allowance for the "sentimental value" of gifts.)

Ok, you're right. There are multiple fallacies here. Call it a gift from our professor and the numskull economics coming out of the colleges.

But of course the law of unintended consequences in the field of ideas which has it that bad ideas -- and bad economics -- leads to good ideas -- and good economics. (Trust me on this one):

In the course of their inquiries, researchers have discovered that women are much more involved in gift giving than men. Their surveys suggest that women give Christmas gifts to more people than men (on average, 12.5 versus eight), start shopping for gifts earlier than men, devote more time to selecting the appropriate gift (2.4 hours per recipient versus 2.1 hours) and are more successful in finding a desirable gift (10 per cent of women's gifts were returned to the shop versus 16 per cent of men's).

Researchers have also stumbled on the revelation that the practice of shouting rounds of drinks arises from the pursuit of scale economies. It saves time and effort for one person to buy five drinks rather than for five people to buy their own.

Most of this enlightenment comes from a paper by Bradley Ruffle and Todd Kaplan, "Here's something you never asked for, didn't know existed and can't easily obtain: A search model of gift giving".

That snappy title is a plug for their theory, which says gift giving makes sense in cases where the giver's knowledge of where to find something the recipient wants is greater than the recipient's own knowledge. Or if the giver is in a position to get it cheaper.

So the rule is that the giver gives a gift only when her "search costs" for the gift are lower than those of the recipient.

This emphasis on the hassle involved in finding suitable presents helps explain why, even though it's regarded as poor form to give money, parents are more likely to resort to money as their children get older. The parents' search costs rise as they become less certain what their kids would like, whereas the kids' search costs fall as they become more independent. This theory also helps explain why people who go on trips return with presents. Their gifts tend to be things that are dearer or harder to find at home. Even so, it's hard to believe the theory accounts for more than a fraction of gifts.

They're Blogolicious! Bruce Bartlett on the best of blogoland:

There are thousands of blogs, but a few have risen to the top of the heap as must-reading for me every day .. As someone who writes mainly about economics, I naturally gravitate toward those with an economic bent. One of the more interesting is written by Brad DeLong, a liberal economist at the University of California at Berkeley www.j-bradford-delong.net . Although I disagree with almost all of his political commentary -- he served in the Clinton Treasury Department and hates George W. Bush with a passion -- he often makes interesting observations about obscure economic points.

DeLong has become something of a "left coast" version of Paul Krugman, the famously Bush-bashing Princeton economist and New York Times columnist. As such, his comments about the economy tend to be echoed on other websites and in the major media. Therefore, if one is interested in knowing what the liberal line is going to be on some current economic topic, Brad's website is a good place to look.

Another liberal blogger I read regularly is Max Sawicky, an economist with the union-backed Economic Policy Institute www.maxspeak.org. Max and I went to Rutgers together, which allows us to maintain a civil discourse despite being poles apart politically. I find Max interesting because he is unafraid to represent a far left, almost Marxist, viewpoint that is unfashionable even in the Howard Dean wing of the Democratic Party. But he is a good enough economist to be moved by the data, which is rare among ideologues.

Going over to the right side of the political spectrum, I enjoy a website maintained by my friend Don Luskin www.poorandstupid.com. He is the self-appointed watchdog of Paul Krugman. Every time Krugman publishes a column or appears on television, I can depend on Don to dissect it within hours, point out errors of fact, and note critical details left out and Krugman's undisclosed biases. For example, Luskin noted that when Krugman attacked the administration's policy toward Enron, he never disclosed that he had been a consultant to the scandal-plagued company, about which he even wrote a puff piece in Fortune Magazine.

Another economic blogger is Steve Antler, a professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago and the owner of a furniture manufacturing business www.econopundit.com. He combines real-world experience with technical economics. One thing Antler does that I find particularly interesting is that he subjects common economic claims about things like the relationship between economic growth and employment to rigorous econometric analysis. I turned him on to the Fair Model, a publicly available econometric model maintained by Yale economist Ray Fair fairmodel.econ.yale.edu, and Steve has made good use of it.

Two economists at George Mason University in Virginia, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, established a joint blog last year, in which both comment almost every day www.marginalrevolution.com. They don't limit themselves to topical subjects or even to economics and often discuss cultural matters, history, technology and lots of other things that I probably wouldn't otherwise have any reason to read about.

A more specialized economics blog is maintained by Stephen Bainbridge, a professor of law at UCLA www.professorbainbridge.com. He often illuminates fine points of corporate law that I find very helpful in a day when various corporate scandals seem to fill the paper daily. He also has a great love of fine wine, which he discusses frequently and knowledgably.

Two other law professors also publish blogs that often deal with current economic topics. One is by Glenn Reynolds of the University of Tennessee www.instapundit.com and the other is by Eugene Volokh, also of UCLA www.volokh.com. Reynolds is widely admired for his amazing productivity -- he seems to post interesting commentary on all manner of things 24-7. Volokh is not as prolific, but compensates by having many guest bloggers who add to his site's output.

I've known folks with economics degrees from "top" universities who are not far from being illiterates in the subject of economics -- their economics degree gave them lots of practice in some now forgotten 3rd rate math equations and very little else. What a shame. Thomas Sowell has more on the nearly useless economics education most college students are getting today:

.. those who are uninformed -- or, worse yet misinformed -- when it comes to economics include the intelligentsia, even when they have Ph.D.s in other fields.

Economics as a profession has some responsibility for this widespread lack of understanding. Highly sophisticated economic analysis can be found in courses on campuses where a majority of the students have no real understanding of something as elementary as supply and demand.

Even students taking introductory economics as their one and only course in the subject may get little that they can take with them out into the world as citizens and voters. Introductory economics is too often taught as if the students in it were all potential economists who had to be introduced to the standard graphs, equations and jargon that they will need in higher level courses or in the profession.

With all the time that is devoted to equipping these students with tools that they will never use again, some may leave an introductory economics course with little more understanding of real world economic issues than they would have had if they had never taken the course.

People who took economics years ago often write to me to say that they learned more from reading my book "Basic Economics" than they ever learned from taking a course -- or courses -- in the subject when they were students. Yet there is nothing in this book that any economist could not have told them.

The problem is that there are no real incentives for academic economists to write a book that simply explains economic issues in plain English and without the usual paraphernalia of the profession. The last book that did so was written by a non-academic economist half a century ago: "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt, who wrote a popular column for a living.

It was -- and is -- a fine book. The fact that it is still in print after 50 years, despite being small and outdated, shows not only its merits but also how little the other economists have written that can compete with it.

Incentives have a lot to do with this lack of competition. It will certainly not do an academic economist's career any good to write a book saying what every other economist already knows. Your colleagues might even wonder what was wrong with you.

Moreover, it is hard to throw off the habits of a lifetime and write a book on economics without a single graph, equation, or use of familiar jargon. I know. At one time, I doubted that it could be done.

(Note: This is part two of three. Part one is here. Part two is here)

Nevertheless, from time to time, as some ridiculous economic idea was proclaimed in the media or in politics, I would sit down and write something to explain what was wrong with that way of thinking. Over the years these fragmentary writings accumulated in my computer until -- after about a decade -- I realized that there was enough material to organize into a book.

That book became Basic Economics. Its second edition has just been published and it has also been translated into Japanese, Korean, and Polish, and is currently being translated into Swedish, so apparently people find it worth reading. Maybe there will be some more informed voters in the future.

A battle for the soul of the Republican Party is brewing over the issue of government spending. At the national level, Republicans have just pushed through the biggest government entitlement program in 40 years. In California, however, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has vowed to take the offensive against government spending. Sometime soon, Republicans need to choose between these two conflicting visions and define their beliefs about the size of government.

Republicans in Washington have declared their views by spending as much as necessary to win the next election. To take away a campaign issue from Democrats, Republicans enacted a nearly half-trillion-dollar Medicare drug-benefit program. Overall, the new program, although it has a couple of good aspects, doesn't make sense for health care, let alone for fiscal policy.

It's true that 24 percent of seniors have no prescription drug coverage and 5 percent have annual out-of-pocket prescription costs of more than $4,000. However, the just-enacted legislation doesn't target these subgroups, instead giving a universal government-subsidized drug benefit to every senior in the country.

Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., one of the few GOP lawmakers to vote against the bill, observed, "While the need for some type of benefit is real, the need for a universal benefit is not." The Republican leadership, though, wanted to pass the bill at any cost.

Putting profligacy and politics above principle has been a disturbing trend under Republican rule in Washington, D.C. With Republicans controlling the legislative and executive branches, the federal budget has grown by 27 percent the past two years. "We Republicans seem to have forgotten who we are and why voters sent us here," Pence laments.

One Republican who so far hasn't forgotten why voters supported him is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Upon assuming the California governorship, Schwarzenegger barnstormed the state to rally public opinion for his plan to address the state's massive budget deficit. The new Republican governor labeled liberal legislators "overspending addicts" and, in great Hollywood style, tore up a huge credit-card prop declaring that "we want to take away the state's credit card from the politicians, and cut it in half, and throw it in the garbage can so they can never do that again."

Schwarzenegger initially proposed a tough cap that would have cut spending by 16 percent from the current expenditure level and adjusted future spending based on population and per-capita income growth. Although Schwarzenegger dropped the cap idea because of opposition from the Democratic majority in the Legislature, he did negotiate a deal to require that state spending not exceed state revenue and that there be no more borrowing in the future.

Perhaps more significant is Schwarzenegger's willingness to take on entrenched special interests. He shocked the education establishment by telling CNN that he's considering suspending Proposition 98, which guarantees education a big chunk of the budget. He proposes reductions in sacred-cow social programs and transportation projects. He also wants to cut university outreach programs that have been criticized as dressed up race-based preference programs.

Regardless of whether his proposals are eventually approved, Schwarzenegger is offering the Republican Party an alternative fiscal vision. For fiscally conservative Republicans, who make up the vast majority of the party, the prescription for long-term success may lie in Sacramento, not Washington.

-- Lance Izumi in the OC Register.

Theives with badges. California Insider on some of the government union workers who begin collecting pensions at the age of 50 at no less than 90% pay. Small wonder that we are now bankrupt.

LA County Sheriff Lee Baca was among those on hand Thursday to fete Gov. Schwarzenegger for unilaterally sending money to cities and counties to avert law enforcement layoffs threatened by the governor's recent rollback of the car tax. Coincidentally, an audit released yesterday of Baca's department showed that payroll costs increased by one-third and retirement costs tripled in the five-year period ending in 2002. The story is here, in the Daily News. An excerpt:

The audit, by Torrance-based Thompson, Cobb, Bazilo & Associates, found expenditures increased by $473 million during that period, from $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion, driven mainly by a 46 percent increase in salary and employee benefits, from $913 million to $1.3 billion.

The audit found retirement benefits jumped from $46 million to $143 million, employee benefits rose 184 percent, from $8 million to $22 million, overtime spiked 39 percent, from $67 million to $94 million and workers' compensation costs rose 82 percent, from $46 million to $84 million.

In 1996-97, the average retirement benefit cost was $3,559 per employee. That had jumped to $9,631 by 2001-02. Likewise, in 1996-97, an average of $13,346 was paid per workers' compensation claim. That soared to $21,260 per claim in 2001-02.

Truck and Barter:

Arnold Kling asks: Is trying to teach economics without math a misguided project?

As a math/stat major in college, I look at the question more broadly: To what extent could I teach anything using math?

Sure, I can pretend (with a glorious hubris) that everything I see in the real world can be represented by fully specified vectors of quantities, related by specific equations, giving stochastic or deterministic answers. I can pretend that distilling concepts into functions is the key to understanding theory, and that regression is the key to understanding history. But the truth is there's no a priori reason to expect any aspect of the real world to be simple enough (or simplifiable enough) for mathematical results to provide an accurate description (or an accurate abstract model) of reality.

Frankly, from my point of view, there is no "intrinsic" relation between math and anything ...

Read the rest.

A must read on the Supreme Court and the 1st Amendment. Quotable:

The court's decision is a constitutional crime that invites comparison with Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the ruling that upheld racial segregation on the theory that "separate" could be "equal." Like Plessy -- which was ultimately reversed -- this decision contradicts the express language of the Constitution and will someday collapse of its own absurdities. Until then, its supporters will flatter themselves that they are improving democracy when they are actually degrading it.

More Steyn. Quotable:

In California, Muslim community leaders have applauded the decision of the Catholic high school in San Juan Capistrano to change the name of its football team from the Crusaders to the less culturally insensitive Lions.

Meanwhile, 20 miles up the road in Irvine, the Muslim Football League’s New Year tournament will bring together some of the most exciting Muslim football teams in Orange County: the Intifada, the Mujahideen, the Saracens and the Sword of Allah.

That’s the spirit. I can’t wait for the California sporting calendar circa 2010: the San Diego Jihadi vs the Oakland Sensitives, the Malibu Hezbollah vs the Santa Monica Inoffensives, the Pasadena Sword of the Infidel Slayer vs the Bakersfield Self-Deprecators.

Like the unfortunate Mr Colin Rose, fired from his prison officer’s post at Blundeston jail for making an ‘inappropriate’ remark about Osama bin Laden that could easily have distressed large numbers of his Muslim jailbirds, we must all try harder to avoid giving offence. Especially at this time of year, when the streets are full of exclusionary imagery —snowmen, reindeer, Yuletide logs, all evoking the time when the crusading white men of northern Europe rode their reindeer into the streets of Damascus hurling blazing Yule logs at Muslims.

So I have made a New Year’s resolution — or, if you can’t say that any more, an Eid resolution — to be extra-super-sensitive as we look at the state of play at the close of 2003. First of all, I’m amazed that we can still win anything, given the palpable urge of the Western world’s elites to abase themselves in the name of multiculturalism. Their position is basically that of Bernd Brandes, the computer engineer eaten by the German cannibal: go ahead, devour me, but chop my penis off first so I can watch you sauté it. But if the deal is that for every Islamic regime we overthrow we have to rename ten California sports teams, I think I can live with it. Yay, go, Sword of Allah!

And this:

The extreme Left has made a terrible strategic mistake shacking up with the Islamists. In one sense, they’re not as incompatible as they might appear: Islamism may be religious in origin but in its political form it is simply this decade’s brand of oppressive statism, as communism was before it. But the only question now is how deeply this strategic error infects the less insane Left. On National Public Radio the other day, Howard Dean advanced the theory that the Saudis had tipped off Bush about 9/11 in advance. When the Democratic presidential front-runner is cheerfully wearing his tinfoil hat in public, it’s no wonder the other fellows are scrambling to sound just as loopy ...

The electoral vote adjustments arising from the 2000 census mean that, even if Bush held only the same states as he did three years ago, he’d win by a much bigger margin. But it won’t stop there. Right now, the competitive states — the battleground — are the Democratic turf. Add to that the number of big-time Congressional Democrats who’ve decided to throw in the towel and you’re looking at a solid Bush victory with some key Republican gains in the Senate. The only question is how badly the Democrats do, and that depends on whether they allow themselves to be led toward the wilder Chomskyan shores or can content themselves with the artful straddle adopted by Hillary Clinton. But the notion that this is a president in trouble at home or abroad is ridiculous. 2004 will be a Republican year. That’s a better bet than the Sword of Allah in the California Muslim Football League.

Now THIS is why we got ourselves a new governor!

The torch has been passed -- the English speaking worlds greatest writer -- MARK STEYN:

Like Susan Lucci at the Emmys, Howard Dean is getting better at putting a brave face on things. When Saddam Hussein fell from power, the Vermonter said churlishly, "I suppose that's a good thing." When Uday and Qusay bit the dust, the governor announced that "the ends do not justify the means." But on Sunday, Dr. Dean was doing his best to be fulsome, if you can be fulsome with clenched teeth. Nonetheless, he congratulated "our extraordinary military on an extraordinary victory and an extraordinary success." They gave Miss Lucci the Emmy eventually, and maybe by Labor Day next year, when the good doctor is thanking Don Rumsfeld for the souvenir vial of Osama's DNA he FedExed over, the voters will be feeling sorry enough to give Howard the prize, too. But this weekend that pileup of "extraordinaries" made the governor seem, well, ordinary.
It's odd that when something big happens, as on Sunday, the Democratic candidates seem irrelevant to the story, like asking a lacrosse expert what he thinks of the Super Bowl. They get interviewed and they trot out their lame clichés, about the need to "internationalize" Iraq, by which they mean not Tony Blair, John Howard, the Poles and Italians, but Kofi Annan, The Hague, the French, the Guinean foreign minister, all the folks who proved unwilling and unable to deal with Iraq before the liberation and who have given no indication of being likely to do any better after. The Democrats' indestructible retreat to this dreary line gives them the air of a gormless twit in a drawing-room comedy coming in through the French windows every 10 minutes and saying, "Anyone for tennis?" You can't help feeling that, on the big questions roiling around America's national security, the Dems don't really have speaking parts: if this was Broadway, they'd have been written out in New Haven.

There was a revealing moment on MSNBC the other night. Chris Matthews asked Dr. Dean whether Osama bin Laden should be tried in an American court or at The Hague. "I don't think it makes a lot of difference," said the governor airily. Mr. Matthews pressed once more. "It doesn't make a lot of difference to me," he said again. Some of us think what's left of Osama is already hard enough to scrape off the cave floor and put in a matchbox, never mind fly to the Netherlands. But, just for the sake of argument, his bloodiest crime was committed on American soil; American courts, unlike the international ones, would have the option of the death penalty. But Gov. Dean couldn't have been less interested. So how about Saddam? The Hague "suits me fine," he said, the very model of ennui. Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude.

So what does get the Dean juices going? A few days later, the governor was on CNN and Judy Woodruff asked him about his admission that he'd left the Episcopal Church and become a Congregationalist because "I had a big fight with a local Episcopal church over the bike path." I hasten to add that, in contrast to current Anglican controversies over gay marriage in British Columbia and gay bishops in New Hampshire, this does not appear to have been a gay bike path: its orientation was not an issue; it would seem to be a rare example of a non-gay controversy in the Anglican Communion. But nevertheless it provoked Howard into "a big fight." "I was fighting to have public access to the waterfront, and we were fighting very hard in the citizens group," he told Judy Woodruff. Fighting, fighting, fighting.

And that's our pugnacious little Democrat. On Osama bin Laden, he's Mister Insouciant. But he gets mad about bike paths. Destroy the World Trade Center and he's languid and laconic and blasé. Obstruct plans to convert the ravaged site into a memorial bike path and he'll hunt you down wherever you are.

Howard Dean catapulted himself from Vermont obscurity to national fame very ingeniously. His campaign was tonally brilliant. He was an angry peacenik, an aggressive defeatist, he got in-your-face about getting out of Iraq. The problem with pacifism as a political position is that it's too easy to seem wimpy, wussy, nancy-boyish, pantywaisty, milksopping, etc. In that sense, his fellow Democrat, Dennis Kucinich, has a pacifist mien: I'm not saying he's a pantywaist or milksop, but he comes over as a goofy nebbish, as the Zionist neocons would say. The main impact he's made on the Granite State electorate seems to be his lack of a girlfriend, which has prompted a New Hampshire Web site to try and find a date for him. Somehow one is not surprised to hear this. By contrast, when Howard Dean, shortish and stocky, comes out in his rolled-up shirtsleeves, he looks like Bruce Banner just before he turns into the Incredible Hulk, as if his head's about to explode out of his shirt collar. Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus, but Dr. Dean is Venusian in a very Martian way. He's full of anger.
But only for peripheral issues. Ask him serious questions about the president's key responsibilities--national security and foreign policy--and the passion drains away as it did with Chris Matthews. David Brooks, visiting Burlington in 1997 in search of what eventually became his thesis "Bobos in Paradise," concluded that the quintessential latté burg was "relatively apolitical." He's a smart guy but he was wrong. All the stuff he took as evidence of the lack of politics--pedestrianization, independent bookstores--is the politics. Because all the big ideas failed, culminating in 1989 in Eastern Europe with the comprehensive failure of the biggest idea of all, the left retreated to all the small ideas: in a phrase, bike paths. That's what Bill Clinton meant when he said the era of big government was over; instead, he'd be ushering in the era of lots and lots of itsy bits of small government that, when you tote 'em up, works out even more expensive than the era of big government. That's what Howard Dean represents--the passion of the Bike-Path Left.

Vermonters marked the end of the Dean era by electing a Republican governor and a Republican House. Even Vermont isn't as liberal as liberals assume. What's liberal is the idea of Vermont as it's understood across America: a bucolic playground of quaint dairy farms punctuated by the occasional boutique business that's managed to wiggle through the Dean approval process. A lot of those dairy barns are empty and belong to weekending flatlanders, the rest are adorned with angry "Take Back Vermont" signs, and the quintessential Green Mountain boutique business, Ben and Jerry's, wound up selling out to the European multinational Unilever. But these dreary details are irrelevant. To Democratic primary voters across the land, Vermont is a shining, rigorously zoned, mandatory-recycling city on a hill. And the only way up the hill is by the bike path.

Unlike Howlin' Howard and the Burlington Episcopalians, I'm agnostic on the merits of bike paths. But earlier this year, when the antiwar types held "Bridges to Peace" demonstrations on the spans across the Connecticut River between New Hampshire and Vermont, I couldn't help noticing they were very much a bike-path crowd. It was February and 20 below, so they didn't have their bikes with them, but they did have snowshoes and cross-country skis, for the activities that would occupy the rest of their weekends once they'd got a little light demonstrating out of the way. But, under their snowsuits, they were, metaphorically, wearing cycling shorts. They loved the '90s because you never heard a thing about macho stuff like war: it was all micro-politics, new regulations for this, new entitlements for that--education, environment, "social justice." For hard-core Democrats, the whole war thing is an unwelcome intrusion on what large numbers of people had assumed to be a permanent post-Martian politics. When you're at a Dean get-together, you realize they're not angry about the war, so much as having to talk about the war.

A little over an hour north of that Burlington bike path is Montreal, the visits to which (for kids' hockey fixtures and his appearances on a Canadian TV show) Dr. Dean cites, seriously, as his main foreign-policy experience. Montreal is home to North America's largest Iraqi émigré community and on Sunday night the streets were full of honking horns celebrating Saddam's downfall. You don't have to go far to see the world beyond the good doctor's bike-path parochialism, but it's farther than most Dems are willing to go.

Last weekend was confirmation, if you needed it, that this is not a time for micro-politics. Many independents and a critical sliver of Democrats understand that, and, in a time of war, they're not prepared to stick with the bike-path left. When you put the pedal to the full metal jacket, it's no contest.

Economist Reuven Brenner on steel tarrifs and Paul Krugman. Quotable:

it is still beyond me why Krugman was ever considered to be a decent economist: I never found anything in his writings. Am still waiting to hear someone identify one insight (have you found it?). I looked into it when Washington-based Institute for International Economics (on whose board Krugman was sitting at the time), asked me to review his book, The Return of Depression Economics. I called it 'Depressing Krugnorance,' and it was reprinted around the world. Parts of it are included in my Force of Finance book. Others appeared long ago in my "Making Sense out of Nonsense" in my Educating Economists book, some 12 years ago.

"Yes, we are safer now that Hussein is in custody. But we could and should be a lot safer still ... "

This folks is simply thievery. Quotable:

Once upon a time a Republican candidate for president named George W. Bush painted his Democratic opponent, Al Gore, as a reckless big spender whose fiscal policies would mean that "the era of big government being over is over."

Elect Gore, the Republican predicted, and before you know it the federal government would be as bloated and malodorous as a beached whale under a hot sun. "He is proposing the largest increase in federal spending . . . since the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson," Bush warned. "His promises throw the budget out of balance. He offers a big federal spending program to nearly every single voting bloc in America."

So where do things stand three years later? Federal spending is growing faster than at any time since LBJ, the budget is hundreds of billions of dollars out of balance, and the president appears to support new or expanded government programs for just about every voting bloc in America.

It all calls to mind a political joke that made the rounds in the late 1960s: They told me that if I voted for Goldwater, we'd have race riots in our cities and half a million troops in Southeast Asia. Well, I voted for Goldwater — and they turned out to be right!

But the fiscal debauchery of the Bush administration is no joke. Even before signing a huge expansion of Medicare into law this week, Bush was presiding over record-busting levels of federal spending. Brian Riedl, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation, points out in a new monograph that government outlays in 2003 — a staggering $2.15 trillion — came to more than $20,000 per household ...

To be sure, some new spending was necessitated by Sept. 11. But as Riedl notes, most of the Bush budget bloat has had nothing to do with the war on terror, homeland security, or military operations. Between 2001 and 2003, the federal budget exploded by $296 billion, of which $100 billion (34 percent) was for defense and $32 billion (11 percent) was for 9/11-related costs, including compensation for victims and reconstruction in New York. The remaining $164 billion — 55 percent — went for programs and projects unconnected to 9/11.

What is even more outrageous about this Republican immoderation is how much of it is devoted to pure pork — local projects that have no national significance or constitutional justification. As recently as five years ago, there were fewer than 2,000 pork projects, or "earmarks," in the federal budget. In 2003, there were more than 9,300, and the number will be even higher in 2004. The pork-packed omnibus appropriations bill now making its way through Congress, for example, contains hundreds of earmarks, including:

To accommodate the extra costs of the war, the president and Congress could have cut back on nonsessential spending. Instead they lavish more money on both. The entire spending spree, meanwhile, is being financed with borrowed funds, which is why the Congressional Budget Office forecasts a deficit of $401 billion this year, $480 billion in 2004, and nearly $1.5 trillion over the next five years. (And that doesn't include the new Medicare drug benefit, which will add tens of billions of dollars to annual federal outlays). Sooner or later, every penny of those deficits will have to be repaid — if not by us, then by our children.

What is even more outrageous about this Republican immoderation is how much of it is devoted to pure pork — local projects that have no national significance or constitutional justification. As recently as five years ago, there were fewer than 2,000 pork projects, or "earmarks," in the federal budget. In 2003, there were more than 9,300, and the number will be even higher in 2004. The pork-packed omnibus appropriations bill now making its way through Congress, for example, contains hundreds of earmarks, including:

$725,000 for the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia;

$1.8 million for the Women's World Cup tournament;

$325,000 for the construction of a swimming pool in Salinas, Calif.;

$220,000 for the New Mexico Retail Association in Albuquerque;

$270,000 for "sustainable olive production";

$400,000 for the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky.;

$2 million for the First Tee golf program in St. Augustine, Fla.;

$315,000 for Formosan Subterranean Termite research;

$270,000 for potato storage in Madison, Wisc.

Long, long ago, in what now seems like a galaxy far, far away, Republicans opposed this kind of fiscal gluttony. The GOP was the party of budgetary sobriety — the party that believed in local responsibility for local budgets and that didn't raid the federal treasury to buy off special interests. Back then, Republicans criticized Democratic profligacy. Now they seek to outdo it.

When Bill Clinton was president, Republicans in Congress fought hard to cut spending and balance the federal budget, with the result that government outlays during Clinton's first three years rose only 3.5 percent. But once there was a Republican in the White House, the GOP's fiscal discipline evaporated. Spending during Bush's first three years has skyrocketed nearly 16 percent, a record of fiscal irresponsibility we haven't seen since the Johnson administration.

-- Jeff Jacoby.

Schwarzenegger's budget deal is getting two thumbs down from National Review Online which labels his performance a BAD start.

Randy Barnett wins a victory for Federalism and limited government in the medical pot case before the 9th circuit court.

Thomas Sowell takes off the gloves and beats the crap out of the Supreme Court of the United States. Quotable:

At least the people who engaged in wild west shootouts or lynch mob violence spared us the pretence that they were upholding the Constitution. Whatever horrors these lawless and murderous people might inflict at particular times and places, they never had the power to undermine the very basis of the government of the United States.

How "supply side" economics knocked the legs out from under limited government Republicanism -- CATO's Ed Crane (pdf).

The CATO Institute is taking nominations for the $500,000 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. The nomination form can be found here. Why not give it to the U.S. GI who bagged Saddam Hussein in his rat hole?

California Insider takes a pointed look at the Schwarzenegger - legislature "compromise" budget fix. Quotable?

The reserve doesn't really change much; it simply allows the state to keep spending beyond what ongoing revenues will support for a bit longer before everything comes crashing down.

Bear Flag Leaguers take three of the top spots in Wizbang's 2003 Weblog Awards. Xlrq's motorcycle crash pays off big with a come-from-behind win in the "large mammal" category.

Saddam vs. America Citizen Smash tells his personal story. Let's all raise a toast this holiday season to such men as Lt. Smash.

A computer programmer for Chicago Rawhide of Elgin, Ill. confirms Archimedes' solution to his -- until now -- long lost tiling puzzle treatise.

SoCalLawBlog has a handy California Budget Deal roundup of Blogosphere Reactions.

Weintraub on the budget "deal":

Giving away the store. The more times I read the bill, the more I’m left scratching my head at how little Gov. Schwarzenegger seems to have extracted from Democrats in exchange for a huge concession: his decision to drop any plans for writing a spending cap into the state constitution. Once he dropped that demand, he should have been able to run the table on the rest of the negotiations to establish a real balanced budget requirement, a bullet-proof reserve for economic downturns and a solid process for making mid-year corrections to stop a deficit from growing out of control. These are all sensible, good-government ideas to which the Democrats should not have even objected. But Schwarzenegger seems to have let them pick away at the details until they reached the point that they were barely more than symbolic gestures. As several senators said Friday, this measure probably doesn’t do any harm. But it doesn’t do a whole lot of good, either.

Check out Weintraub's examples explaining why it doesn't do much good.

Whatever happened to a spending limit?

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger promised he would clean house in the state government, but Thursday he got his clock cleaned on the budget deal he worked out with Democratic leaders in the Legislature. There are two major parts to the deal .. The second part would .. "become operative," in the preliminary wording of the constitutional amendment being considered, only if the bond is passed by voters. This part mandates a balanced budget: "This measure would prohibit the Legislature from sending to the governor for consideration, and the governor from signing into law, a budget bill for the 2004-05 fiscal year or any subsequent fiscal year, that ... exceeds the estimate of General Fund revenues ... for that fiscal year."

But this does not restrain spending by even $1. "The litmus test is this," Assemblyman John Campbell, R-Irvine and a member of the Assembly budget committee, told us: "Had this been in effect in 1998, would this have prevented [Gov. Gray] Davis and his cronies from doing what they did? No." In those years, temporary increases in revenue from the dot-com boom led to a wild spending spree that could not be sustained during the bust years ...

"It's really a bunch of nothing," Sen. Tom McClintock, R-Simi Valley, told us. "There's no limit on spending. I don't see how this does anything as a practical matter to produce a balanced budget."

This version of a balanced budget allows too much latitude for increased spending in good years and does not strike at the core of the state's budget problems. As Mr. Campbell pointed out, the talk for several months was that a bond measure would be advanced only if it was tied to a hard spending limit to make sure a $38 billion budget deficit fiasco doesn't occur again.

All eyes are on Gov. Schwarzenegger in this regard: Will he cut deals that start to address the core problems, or deals that only swipe at the margins? This deal, as proposed, is one that brushes the margins.

The balanced budget amendment also includes a "Budget Stabilization Account" beginning in 2006, a sort of reserve fund, with half of the fund yearly going toward retiring the debt from this measure. But the account could be raided with a two-thirds vote of the Legislature (or even just a majority, according to one version of the legislation being advanced late yesterday). Sen. McClintock pointed out that current law already requires a "prudent" budget reserve that can be used with a two-thirds vote of the Legislature. So the new account isn't substantially different from the old reserve, and even could be weaker.

Basically, this isn't a spending limitation or even much of a balanced-budget requirement, but a way to get the $15 billion bond on the ballot. It imposes no real discipline on the Legislature .. It also would set a bad example by showing that the Legislature can float deficit bonds at will, with no spending limit in place.

It looks like Schwarzenegger got rolled.

Madsen Pirie gives this brief of his case for saying Hayek is a conservative. Quotable:

There is the conservative disposition, which likes to keep familiar things as they are. Michael Oakeshott expressed this brilliantly in Rationalism in Politics. Hayek was not like that at all; he wanted to improve things, not keep them the same.

Alongside this temperament, there is also the political tradition of conservatism. This represents a resistance to taking society in any preconceived direction, and especially towards any earthly paradise. Those of this school try to keep society spontaneous, and oppose any attempts to impose 'visions' upon it. Hayek said that conservatives had no goal, whereas his goal was for a free society. I suggested that conservatives have not only tried to retain the spontaneity of society, but also to restore it when it had been compromised. In seeking to preserve freedom, to extend it and restore it, Hayek fitted quite comfortably within that political tradition.

The 300-page Supreme Court decision legislative package which now regulates political speech -- some reactions:

John Eastman, Chapman law school -- there is now "more protection for pornography on the Internet than we give to core political speech 60 days before an election."

Roger Pilon, Cato Institute -- "What's the point of having a court if it won't protect the Constitution? This is a majority that thinks like a legislature."

UPDATE: The Spoons Experience reports that the Supreme Court has drafted, signed and enacted new legislation remaking the 10th Amendment, which now reads as follows.

Amendment X The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people Courts.

And the 9th Amendment has been eliminated altogether in this newest action by the court.

UPDATE 2: Spoons has more. Quotable:

most people don't fully appreciate the magnitude of what just happened ... With today's decision, our Nine Robed Rulers have given their approval to Congress's efforts to make it a felony to criticize them under certain circumstances. Think about that for just a second. We now live in a country in which someday soon, a man could be sent to federal prison for years for saying, at the wrong time and place, that Hillary Clinton is a bad Senator, or that George Bush shouldn't be reelected ...

UPDATE #3: Hey, gang, let's all get together and commit a crime -- violating the Supreme Court's new anti-free speech law. Matthew Hoy has the details on a blogosphere conspiracy to commit political speech during an election. (Is this posting and Hoy's suggestion a RICO crime? We report, the arbitrary police powers that rule our land decide).

SoCalLawBlog has a roundup of blogosphere reactions to The Supremes summary execution of our right to free speech in the very arena it was invented to protect -- political speech. We in America are ruled by nine unelected philosopher kings -- the rule of law pretty much has nothing to do with these sort of policy questions the court believes overrule the Constitution. What else needs be said.

Bloomberg on the outrageous Republican spending orgy:

President George W. Bush is presiding over the biggest growth in U.S. government spending since 1990, as a Republican-led Congress provides money for programs [such as] a dried plant exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden.

Federal spending rose 7.3 percent to $2.2 trillion in fiscal 2003 and 7.9 percent the year before, the most since George H. W. Bush was in the White House. Congress will vote this week on a $328 billion bill to fund such projects as an $18 billion loan guarantee for an Alaska gas terminal that may benefit ConocoPhillips Co. and Exxon Mobil Corp ...

``The big boom you're having right now might not be sustainable if the deficit continues to be large,'' said Steven Hess, an analyst with Moody's Investors Service.

The U.S. government's credit rating may be in jeopardy in the next decade unless lawmakers limit spending and reduce the deficit, Hess said. Merrill Lynch & Co. and HSBC Holdings Plc economists say White House projections are too low. They forecast the fiscal 2004 shortfall may be at least $600 billion.

Bush II's spending orgy seems to follow a well-practiced re-election strategy perfected by Republican presidents:

Reagan won a second term in 1984 with 58.8 percent of the vote after government spending increased by more than 8 percent a year in his first three years in office. Richard Nixon also won a second term after spending rose by higher percentages each year of his first term, reaching 9.8 percent in 1972 when he won with 60.3 percent of the vote.

Here's more on how the Republicans are burning money like a bonghead burns up weed:

Bush also is pushing for an energy bill, intended to reduce U.S. dependence on the resources of other nations, that stalled in the Senate last month. The funding for that bill has grown in Congress to $31 billion, almost quadruple the amount Bush requested.

``The deficit is manageable, but no one in Congress or the White House is doing anything to manage it,'' said Bixby, of the Concord Coalition.

Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican who heads the Commerce Committee, said the Medicare bill, which Bush signed today, will cause the 38-year-old program ``to go broke,'' and the energy bill is ``just one pork-barrel project larded on to another.''

Lawmakers secured about $24 billion in taxpayer money for "hometown projects" in the fiscal 2004 budget, according to Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington group. That's a record, equal to the combined budgets of the Justice Department, Small Business Administration and National Science Foundation.

Bush has criticized lawmakers for funding hometown projects, such as $400,000 for the New York Botanical Garden's virtual herbarium, a collection of dried plants. Still, Bush has never vetoed a spending bill. The rising cost of such projects shows Congress lacks the will to cut spending, said David Williams, vice president of policy at Citizens Against Government Waste ...

``The math is really unforgiving: you either address entitlements or raise taxes,'' [professor Glenn Hubbard] said.

Make no mistake folks, Republicans can keep pretend as long as they want, but the fact remains -- there is no free lunch. The Republican tax increases are coming -- and they will be truly enormous HUGE. Like nothing Bush I every hit us with.

And here is a little political bone to chew -- how many don't think that all it would take woud to end the administration of Bush II is a [non-crazy] Ross Perot on the ballot? If someone like Sen John McCain got pissed off enough and ran for President as an independent it would be lights out for George Bush II, just as it was for George Bush I.

We have caused global warming -- for going on 10,000 years . And it's a damn good thing we did, scientists report. A new ice age would have engulfed the planet 4,000 years ago if it wasn't for man's intervention on the environment. And the climate today would be deadly cold.

Another reality check for watermellon scientists and the huge political class seeking to empower itself with watermellon science.

Is it The Onion or is it The Fed?

The committee continues to believe that an accommodative stance of monetary policy, coupled with robust underlying growth in productivity, is providing important ongoing support to economic activity. The evidence accumulated over the intermeeting period confirms that output is expanding briskly, and the labor market appears to be improving modestly. Increases in core consumer prices are muted and expected to remain low.

The committee perceives that the upside and downside risks to the attainment of sustainable growth for the next few quarters are roughly equal. The probability of an unwelcome fall in inflation has diminished in recent months and now appears almost equal to that of a rise in inflation. However, with inflation quite low and resource use slack, the committee believes that policy accommodation can be maintained for a considerable period.

We report, you laugh yourself silly.

The still falling dollar has nowhere to go but down. And gold and silver reach highs not seen in years.

Let me say this very slowly, so that even journalists and economists can understand.

THE DOLLAR IS WORTH LESS AND LESS

More dollars with less value. In other words INFLATION.

It's a world economy -- always has been. And the economic fantasies of all the thousands of academic economists who use closed national economic models can't change this fact. Politicians feed off the idiocies of academic economists because it gives them coverage for politically expedient short-term policies with harmful long-term consequences. What excuses do journalists have?

And let me say it again. With record breaking productivity growth we should be benefitting from all kinds of benevolent deflation -- our dollars should be buying more and more goods which cost less and less to produce. Only massive nominal INFLATION can prevent this from happening -- and that is exactly what we have.

In 2003 the U.S. government spent a massive $20,000 per household. Is it just me, or does anyone else sense that the U.S. government has morphed into the functional equivalent of a criminal organization? The newspaper today reported that the Congress is spending over $7 billion on earmarks give-aways to industrial park corporations and other such pork in the latest cash-for-votes appropriations package. I can't think of this in any other way than as armed theft from my wife and I and our children -- money taken by force from my family and given to some politically connected friends of the criminal conspiracy called the U.S. Congress. And I'm not sure the U.S. government in all of its infinite wisdom is protecting me any better than would John Gotti.

A Nation mag lefty takes a looks at John Gray's latest rantings against liberal civilization -- in a book titled Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern. Last we saw of him, Gray had embraced the eco-nuttiness of James Lovelock, author of the intellectually disreputable "Gaia hypothesis". Over the past few years Gray has produced increasingly suspect intellectual goods -- as he's moved into the pop market and out of the world of serious ideas. No one every said that Gray was the best or the brightest, but within his area of competence (political philosophy / history of idea) he made a quite useful contribution to the literature -- even if he often made overly strong and often simply incorrect pronouncements on technical matters outside of his area of competence (e.g. on the topic of functional explanation).

His latest book actually sounds interesting -- Gray thinks outside the conventional theoretical box, which allows him to see things (and say things) that the standard issue PC mind-prison doesn't allow for. This makes his work not only provocative, it also forces one to do some thinking of ones own. The problem is that much of Gray's popular work is slap-dash and poorly reasoned -- it's not only unbound by conventional thinking, it's unbound by careful thinking -- or common sense. Often it's maddenly .. how to put it .. dumb. And it sometimes falsely reports intellectual history, i.e. it sometimes gets the literature wrong. Which simply drives me crazy. So Gray's pop work suffers serious defects. And not merely trivial defects. Often the problems are serious enough that his work threatens to descend into laugh zone of howler claims and intellectual incoherence. Some examples from our Nation lefty:

Gray views the nature of global conflict today in terms of "population growth, shrinking energy supplies and irreversible climate change"; "ethnic and religious enmities and the collapse or corrosion of the state in many parts of the world"; the emergence of "political organizations, irregular militias and fundamentalist networks" made all the more ominous given the dissemination of highly lethal weapons. Taken together, Gray contends, these developments spell almost certain disaster.

Actually, you can drop the "almost." There is a strikingly deterministic and fatalistic streak in Gray. Scattered throughout the book are formulations like: "The population of European Russia will be more than decimated"; "geopolitical upheaval is unavoidable"; "there is nothing to be done about this"; "a consequence of the universal fact of entropy." Sound familiar? The tone of ironclad inevitability is one of the carry-overs from Straw Dogs. As Adair Turner recently pointed out in the English journal Prospect, Gray's rigid determinism is more than a bit ironic given his ruthless critique of positivism for its insistence that the growth of scientific knowledge would inevitably lead to a utopian future- - one of Gray's central themes in Al Qaeda.

But this tension pales in comparison with a much more fundamental problem in Gray's project. For all of his insights into our geopolitical situation and his monitions about the perilous path we're on, when one reads the two books in tandem, the effect is one of moral numbness. If one follows the argument of Straw Dogs (as we can only assume Gray does), what difference does it make whether the human species avoids its collision course with doom? If we should look forward to a time "when humans have ceased to matter," as Gray exhorts us to do in Straw Dogs, what's the point of even considering the proposals he offers in Al Qaeda for fashioning a less calamitous future? How can the apocalyptic antihumanism of Straw Dogs be squared with the claim, in the concluding chapter of Al Qaeda, that "we need to think afresh about how regimes and ways of life that will always be different can come to coexist in peace"?

UPDATE: And oh my does Gray get slammed for this book on Amazon. Yeow.

Thomas Sowell has a new book out -- Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One.

Bruce Barlett on George W. Bush -- the New Nixon. Quotable:

It is a fact of life that perception is often more important than reality. This is especially so in politics, where people can be dogged by impressions even when they are completely untrue ...

I believe that President Bush is in danger of creating a perception about himself that may prove .. hard to eradicate if it is allowed to continue. That is the view that he is "Nixonian," having an approach toward politics and policy paralleling that of Richard Nixon. It is characterized by a willingness to subordinate everything to one's re-election -- to say and do anything to advance this goal, with no concern whatsoever for the long-term consequences.

I first discussed this equivalence back in August, after hearing Rush Limbaugh mention it and reading a July 7 column by William Safire in The New York Times. Since then, a number of commentators have noticed a similarity between the two presidents ..

[On Nov. 25] Limbaugh talked again about how Bush revives memories of Nixon. "This administration reminds me of Nixon," he told his radio audience. "He's following Richard Nixon's footsteps on domestic policy" by pumping up federal spending for any group whose votes can be bought. Limbaugh warned that Bush was endangering his support among conservatives who want limited, constitutional government, not new Medicare entitlements and other expansions of the state into our lives and pocketbooks.

Veteran Associated Press reporter Tom Raum wrote that Bush is "retracing the steps of Richard Nixon three decades ago" on Nov. 29. On Dec. 2, Wall Street Journal columnist Alan Murray said, "Presidents Nixon and Bush may turn out to be bookends to the conservative era, with their big-government drift." The former took office at the end of a liberal era when voters were not yet ready for conservative policies, while the latter took office at the end of a conservative era when they have grown tired of efforts to limit government expansion, Murray wrote.

Lastly, Newsweek reported in its Dec. 8 issue that it was now "conventional wisdom" that Bush is following the Nixon model: "Medicare bill passes, economy surges. Thanksgiving stunt a PR coup. Like Nixon in '72?"

This is very dangerous for President Bush. Nixon is one of the few presidents in history reviled almost equally by left and right ... With so many on the right comparing Bush to Nixon, it is only a matter of time before those on the left pick up on it and start making the comparison themselves. With the left's control of the media, it could soon be echoed far and wide. This will not be good for Bush's re-election or ability to govern. He can nip it by expending some political capital on an issue of principle.

Bush and the Republicans are pro political corruption, not "pro market" -- and even The New Republic's Jonathan Chait gets it:

The way you tell the difference between a free-marketer and a servant of business is how he behaves when the interests of the two diverge. And all the evidence, including the Medicare and energy bills, points to the conclusion that Bush is happy to throw free-market conservatism out the window when business interests so desire.

Consider, for instance, the $180 billion farm bill signed by Bush in 2002. The notion that taxpayers should subsidize farmers rather than, say, butchers or t- shirt salesmen represents the most archaic and unjustifiable kind of government intervention. But farmers have lots of clout in Washington, in part because they're relatively affluent (farm households earn more on average than non-farm households) but mainly due to the disproportionate representation of rural states in the Senate and electoral college. In the course of showering federal largesse upon farmers a year ago, some senators tried to mitigate their shame slightly by limiting payments to $275,000 per farmer. Republicans removed this modest measure ...

A cornerstone of Bush's domestic policy is his aptitude for economic giveaways that are supported by neither liberals nor true conservatives--indeed, that are supported only by those who profit from them monetarily or politically. Take the energy bill, which lavished subsidies upon favored industries ...

Last year, the Associated Press conducted a remarkable study showing how federal spending patterns had changed since the GOP took over Congress in 1995. Republicans did not shrink federal spending, it found, they merely transferred it, from poorer Democratic districts to wealthier Republican ones. This, the A.P. reported, "translates into more business loans and farm subsidies, and fewer public housing grants and food stamps." In 1995, Democratic districts received an average of $35 million more in federal largesse than Republican districts, which seems roughly fair given that Democratic districts have more people in need of government aid. By 2001, the gap had not only reversed, it had increased nearly twentyfold, with GOP districts receiving an average of $612 million more than Democratic ones.

GMU economist Peter Boettke gives Bruce Caldwell's Hayek's Challenge Five Stars on Amazon, calling the book "nothing short of a brilliant" and "the best book in economics for 2003".

ASS TALK WATCH: "But the deepest insight of Niall's piece is the thought that circumstances in part forced Bush's hand. After the bursting of the Rubin Bubble, and worldwide deflation, a tougher fiscal stance might have led to a catastrophic global depression." -- Andrew Sullivan, talking out of his backside with all the pretention of someone who believes that his purely amateur economic speculations have all the cognitive standing of a simple statement of physical fact.

Is it 1971 all over again? Bruce Bartlett has the scoop. Quotable:

there are those who still believe that OPEC caused the inflation of the 1970s, through some sort of "cost-push" mechanism. In truth, OPEC was responding to inflation, rather than causing it. The root cause was the creation of too many dollars by the Federal Reserve. This came about because Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon cajoled the Fed into running an inflationary monetary policy in order to keep interest rates artificially low. They also removed many of the institutional constraints that prevented previous presidents from doing the same thing.

In short, the Fed, not OPEC, caused the stagflation of the 1970s. A recent paper by University of Michigan economists Robert Barsky and Lutz Kilian confirms this analysis. Writing in the prestigious NBER Macroeconomics Annual (2001), they conclude: "The Great Stagflation of the 1970s could have been avoided had the Fed not permitted major monetary expansions in the early 1970s. ... The stagflation observed in the 1970s is unlikely to have been caused by supply disturbances such as oil shocks."

Although the signs are nascent, they indicate that inflation is starting to show its ugly head again, the result of an extremely easy Fed policy over the last three years. Sensitive commodity prices like gold are up, the dollar is down, and OPEC is again complaining about lost purchasing power. It's like déjà vu all over again.

It's a Carnival -- of Capitalists blogging to beat the band in COTC #10.

The OC Register's Steve Greenhut explains why George Bush is a disaster for an America retaining any meagre semblance of the Founder's vision of limited government. Quotable:

By almost any measure, George W. Bush has abandoned limited-government conservatism ...

the president, even though I believe him to be a decent man, is busy expanding government power at a pace that would have been unthinkable even under Bill Clinton's horrible administration ... We need to be hardheaded and evaluate this president in the same way we evaluated Clinton, Jimmy Carter and other presidents ...

Government must be limited. Growth in government is not good, because government is based on coercion. Individuals do a better job spending their own hard- earned money than government, which lavishes its ill-gotten gains on special interest groups and constituencies that whine the loudest ...

Compared to this ideal, President Bush is a disaster. Even compared to other modern conservative politicians, he has been a huge disappointment. Compared to this ideal, President Bush is a disaster. Even compared to other modern conservative politicians, he has been a huge disappointment. In fairness, the president has [done some things right]. But mostly it has been one sellout after another ..

This president has not vetoed a single bill, which means he has signed into law every big-spending project that has come down the pike. Federal spending, even on non-military matters, has soared ...

under President Ronald Reagan, non-defense discretionary spending fell by 13.5 percent but increased by nearly 21 percent under Bush II. How is that for a contrast? ...

It's time for those who had supported the president to make their criticisms heard.

Also, don't miss Doug Bandow's "The Conservative Case Against George W. Bush" -- the cover story of this month's American Conservative.

Now THIS is really interesting. Quotable:

I've had a suspicion for a while that despite the astonishing success of the first generation of computer scientists like Shannon, Turing, von Neumann, and Wiener, somehow they didn't get a few important starting points quite right, and some things in the foundations of computer science are fundamentally askew. In a way I have no right to say this and it would be more appropriate to say it once I've actually got something to take its place, so let me just emphasize that this is speculative. But where might things have gone wrong?

The leaders of the first generation were influenced by the metaphor of the electrical communications devices that where in use in their lifetimes, all of which centered on the sending of signals down wires. This started, oddly enough, with predecessors of the fax machine, continuing in a much bigger way to the telegraph, which turned into the telephone, and then proceeded with devices that carry digital signals that were only machine readable. Similarly, radio and television signals were designed to be relayed to a single wire even if part of their passage was wireless. All of us are guided by our metaphors, and our metaphors are created by the world around us, so it's understandable that signals on wires would become the central metaphor of their day.

If you model information theory on signals going down a wire, you simplify your task in that you only have one point being measured or modified at a time at each end. It's easier to talk about a single point in some ways, and in particular it's easier to come up with mathematical techniques to perform analytic tricks. At the same time, though, you pay by adding complexity at another level, since the only way to give meaning to a single point value in space is time. You end up with information structures spread out over time, which leads to a particular set of ideas about coding schemes in which the sender and receiver have agreed on a temporal syntactical layer in advance.

If you go back to the original information theorists, everything was about wire communication. We see this, for example, in Shannon's work. The astonishing bridge that he created between information and thermodynamics was framed in terms of information on a wire between a sender and a receiver.

This might not have been the best starting point. It's certainly not a wrong starting point, since there's technically nothing incorrect about it, but it might not have been the most convenient or cognitively appropriate starting point for human beings who wished to go on to build things. The world as our nervous systems know it is not based on single point measurements, but on surfaces. Put another way, our environment has not necessarily agreed with our bodies in advance on temporal syntax. Our body is a surface that contacts the world on a surface. For instance, our retina sees multiple points of light at once.

We're so used to thinking about computers in the same light as was available at the inception of computer science that it's hard to imagine an alternative, but an alternative is available to us all the time in our own bodies. Indeed the branches of computer science that incorporated interactions with the physical world, such as robotics, probably wasted decades trying to pretend that reality could be treated as if it were housed in a syntax that could be conveniently encoded on a wire. Traditional robots converted the data from their sensors into a temporal stream of bits. Then the robot builders would attempt to find the algorithms that matched the inherent protocol of these bits. Progress was very, very slow. The latest better robots tend to come from people like Ron Fearing and his physiologist cohort Bob Full at Berkeley who describe their work as "biomimetic". They are building champion robots that in some cases could have been built decades ago were it not for the obsession with protocol-centric computer science. A biomimetic robot and its world meet on surfaces instead of at the end of a wire. Biomimetic robots even treat the pliability of their own building materials as an aspect of computation. That is, they are made internally of even more surfaces.

And this:

I think the idea that von Neumann and others were misled by technological metaphors gets things the wrong way around. It is clear from von Neumann's speculations in the First Draft on EDVAC that he was utilizing the then state of the art computational neurobiology — McColloch and Pitts’ (1943) results on Turing equivalence for computation in the brain — as grounds for the digital design of the electronic computer. In other words, it was theoretical work in neural computation that influenced the technology, not the other way around. While much has been made of the differences between synchronous serial computation and asynchronous neural computation, the really essential point of similarity is the nonlinearity of both neural processing and the switching elements Shannon explored, which laid the foundation for McColloch and Pitt's application of computational theory to the brain.

The logical positivists are often condemned for their botched effort to understanding science, language, and knowledge etc. But rarely do folks look take a good close look at their related theorizing about society, which is heavily influenced by 19th century fashions in Marxism, socialism and post-Kantian social philosophy. Take for example the writings of Hans Reichenbach ... .

Seminar on Hayek-L -- Dec. 8 - Dec. 19

Ken Hoover will conduct an e-seminar on the Hayek-L email list between Monday, Dec. 8 and Friday, Dec. 19 discussing his new book Economics as Ideology; Keynes, Laski, Hayek, and the Creation of Contemporary Politics (subscription information found below).

Order the book from Amazon

Economics as Ideology -- Table of Contents:

Preface: Left, Center, and Right in the 20th Century
Of Identities, Ideas, and Ideologies
The Pre-War World: Seeds of Struggle
World War I: Unresolved Conflicts
The Twenties: Government and the Market in Combat
The Thirties: Duel of Allegiances
World War II: Destruction and Deliverance
The Post-War World: Denouement
The Second Half-Century: From Ideas to Ideologies
Developmental Turning Points and the Formation of Ideology
The Oppositional Bind of Ideology
Identity, Ideology, and Politics

From the publisher:

"Economics as Ideology: Keynes, Laski, Hayek and the Creation of Contemporary
Politics explores the lives and thought of three powerful theorists who shaped
the foundations of the center, left, and right of the political spectrum in the
20th century. Noted scholar Kenneth R. Hoover examines how each thinker
developed their ideas, looks at why and how their views evolved into ideologies,
and draws connections between these ideologies and our contemporary political
situation.

Similar in age, colleagues in academic life, and participants in the century's
defining political events, the story of Keynes, Laski, and Hayek is also the
story of how we in the west came to define politics as the choice between
government and the market, between regulation and freedom, and between the
classes and the masses."

About Ken Hoover:

Kenneth R. Hoover is professor of political science at Western Washington University. His previous books include The Elements of Social Scientific Thinking, Ideology and Political Life, and The Power of Identity: Politics in a New Key. "

Ken Hoover's email address is:

Ken.Hoover - at - wwu.edu

His web page is at:

http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~khoover/

Advanced reviews:

"An important book and a fascinating, absorbing read." —G. C. Harcourt, Jesus College, Cambridge University

"The idea is simply splendid. It does make supreme sense to construct a history
of theories of political economy in the 20th century around Keynes, Laski, and
Hayek and the three do, in fact, succeed one another in 'hegemony' as the century unfolds. Inasmuch as Keynes and Hayek were interlocutors and rivals and
duelists their relationship bears considerable drama and the fact that Hayek
appears to have had the last laugh makes for high irony. It is a major
achievement of this volume that Hoover never loses sight of the intellectual
stakes in these debates." — James Scott, Yale University

"Economics as Ideology is a most engrossing book. It tells an important tale of
the development of economic thinking through the stories of three giants of
political economic thought. Lives intersected at the nexus of theory and
practice told in a compelling, even dramatic, narrative makes for better reading
than a novel. I kept wanting to know how it was going to turn out--even though I
knew the general contours from the start. The book offers important background
for understanding economic thinking as it has evolved. It will be greatly
prized." — Sanford F. Schram, author of Praxis for the Poor: Piven and Cloward
and the Future of Social Science in Social Welfare

"I enormously enjoyed reading Economics as Ideology. The tradition of parallel
and interacting biography is small but distinguished. Hoover adds a further
dimension with his examination of the role of opposition, and his investigation
of the link between social situation, individual circumstances, and thinking." —
Rodney Barker, London School of Economics

"This is a very credible work of prodigious scholarship, with frequent keen
analyses and insights, and written in a lively, attractive style." — Kenneth
Dolbeare, editor of American Political Thought

Related papers:

"IDEOLOGIZING INSTITUTIONS: Laski, Hayek, Keynes, and the Creation of Contemporary Politics" by Kenneth Hoover, Journal of Political Ideologies, February, 1999, 4 (1), 87-115.

To SUBSCRIBE to Hayek-L, send the message:

SUBSCRIBE Hayek-L

to: LISTSERV@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU

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The Hayek-L archives are at:

http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/hayek-l.html

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Greg Ransom
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gbremail - at - cox.net

Alan Kling explains why it's been a bad month for (true) liberals. Quotable:

I used to evaluate candidates for President by their taste in economists, on the theory that getting free markets right is at least half the battle. In 1992, Bill Clinton was taking advice from one of my favorite economists, Alan Blinder. So I voted for Clinton. Meanwhile, my wife evaluated the 1992 race on the basis of the candidates' taste in women. On the one hand, she saw Barbara Bush. On the other, she saw Hillary Clinton and Gennifer Flowers. My wife voted for Bush ...

Academics fight for the freedom to hate America -- at taxpayer expense.

JOB GROWTH -- some leading indicators and what they mean.

Whalen on Schwarzenegger vs. the Democrats. Quotable:

For those of you keeping score, here's where Schwarzenegger stands after three weeks on the job. On Day One, he signed an executive order overturning the tripling of the state's car tax. On Day 17, he signed a bill repealing the measure granting drivers' licenses to illegal aliens. By the close of business, on Day 19, he may have his budget fix and spending cap. Schwarzenegger promised to deliver those three items in his first 100 days as governor. He's about to pull it off in one-fifth the time.

Economist Peter Boettke's important collection of essays titled Calculation and Coordination: Essays on socialism and transitional political economy is available online in PDF format -- just click the link. The book includes Peter's essay "Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom revisited: government failure in the argument against Socialism." This is the good stuff, folks.

In the past few years, federal courts have proclaimed a right to sodomy (not in the Constitution), a right to partial-birth abortion (not in the Constitution), a right not to have a Democratic governor recalled (not in the Constitution), a right not to gaze upon the Ten Commandments in an Alabama courthouse (not in the Constitution), a ban on the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance (not in the Constitution), and a ban on voluntary student prayers at high-school football games (not in the Constitution).

These bizarre rulings illustrate the notion of the Constitution as a "living document," one which rejects timeless moral principles so as to better reflect the storylines in this week's episode of "Ally McBeal." You may like or dislike the end result of these rulings, but – as subtly alluded to above – none of these rulings come from anything written in the Constitution.

In response to the court's sodomy ruling last term, conservatives are talking about passing a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. It's really touching how conservatives keep trying to figure out what constitutional mechanisms are available to force the courts to acknowledge the existence of the Constitution. But what is the point of a constitutional amendment when judges won't read the Constitution we already have? What will the amendment say? "OK, no fooling around – we really mean it this time!"

While conservatives keep pretending we live in a democracy, liberals are operating on the rule of the jungle. The idea of the rule of law is that if your daughter is raped and murdered, you won't go out and kill the guy who did it. In return for your forbearance, you get to vote for the rulers who will see that justice is done. But liberals cheat. They won't let us vote on an increasingly large number of issues by defining the entire universe – abortion, gay marriage, high-school convocations – as a "constitutional" issue.

In what weird parallel universe would Americans vote for abortion on demand, affirmative action, forced busing, licensing of gun owners and a ban on the death penalty? Whatever dangers lurk in a self-governing democracy, the American people have never, ever passed a law that led to the murder of 30 million unborn children.

Judges are not our dictators. The only reason the nation defers to rulings of the Supreme Court is because of the very Constitution the justices choose to ignore. At what point has the court made itself so ridiculous that we ignore it? What if the Supreme Court finds a constitutional right to cannibalism? How about fascism? Does the nation respond by passing a constitutional amendment clearly articulating that there is no right to cannibalism or fascism in the Constitution?

Is there nothing five justices on the Supreme Court could proclaim that would finally lead a president to say: I refuse to pretend this is a legitimate ruling. Either the answer is no, and we are already living under a judicial dictatorship, or the answer is yes, and – as Churchill said – we're just bickering over the price.

It would be nice to return to our federalist system of government with three equal branches of government and 50 states, but one branch refuses to live within that system ...

-- Ann Coulter

Jean-Francois Revel:

The principal function of anti-Americanism has always been, and still is, to discredit liberalism [i.e., capitalism and free trade] by discrediting its supreme incarnation.

Read the review of his new book Anti-Americanism.

Hanson on Decter on Rumsfeld. Quotable:

As Decter points out, our current policy linking terrorism — which, after all, is merely a method, not an enemy per se — to real governments reflects Rumsfeld’s carefully acquired past understanding of how such killers work. As early as 1987, he was warning in public speeches that the United States could not stop terrorist attacks against its citizens "until it redefines the process as warfare by hostile governments rather than isolated acts." To anyone curious about who is the driving force behind the idea of taking the war to regimes that abet terrorism while at the same time hunting down the miscreants themselves, the answer is Rumsfeld.

Hugh Hewitt has archives! And he's just been named official sommelier of California by governor Schwarzenegger. Unbelievable! Hewitt has some interesting things to say about Schwarzenegger, the Demo candidates, and the power of conservative radio:

The [LA] Times seems bitter that Arnold is using radio to communicate, writing that the "friendly hosts have become essential communication arms of [Arnold's] government.". Slowly it is dawning on some of the state's elites that the radio world presents an alternative means of communicating with millions of Golden State voters. The newspapers are the dinosaurs; the radio shows have become fast paced and mobile. The newspapers pile up unread. The radio shows provide instant impact with large audiences.

Howard Dean and the rest of the Democratic wannabees should take note of Arnold's understanding: Radio shows combine large audiences of potential voters with an opportunity to communicate directly with them. The Dems cower from the prospect of mixing it up with the center-right hosts, but there is only gain to be had if they know what they are doing. (Dean probably has to stay away from radio given his tendency to fly off the handle. Radio doesn't help the unstable.)

Roger Garrison on Hayek and the "Austrian" theory of the trade cycle:

In these recent remarks by Samuel Brittan, Hayek's rendition of the Austrian theory of the business cycle is dismissed because it entails a "relative contraction" of consumption during the boom. We should note,though, that Mises rendition is different from Hayek's in this regard: He repeatedly refers to the "malinvestment and overconsumption" that characterizes the boom. Also, as early as 1934, Richard Strigl took, in effect, the Mises view over the Hayek view on this issue. And Machlup found Strigl's account superior to Hayek's, as Richard Ebeling has recently noted.

From the the Mises email list.

Inflation -- it may be in our future -- but recent scare stories about coming inflation are ungrounded in either theory or fact argues economist Alan Reynolds.

Donna Arduin -- Schwarzenegger's director of Finance -- explains how the governor plans to make California solvent again.

Right Wing News has the Best Blog of the Year award posted -- and a host of other blogosphere awards. Bear Flag Leaguer Citizen Smash made the list of top bloggers. No surprise there. Congratulations Mr. Smash.

Democrat Tammy Bruce speaking from experience as a college campus lecturer:

.. the intellectual and personal harassment conservative students and faculty face is beginning to mirror to oppression of Jewish students and academics in 1930’s Germany

What led her to say that? Well -- among other things -- this:

My speaking experience at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island was classic. The College Republicans there, led by Jason Mattera, Jedediah Jones, and Monique Stuart had awakened the campus to real political and intellectual diversity with the publication of their conservative newspaper, The Hawk’s Right Eye. Prior to inviting me to campus, the club had been called a “hate group” by members of the administration, funds for their newspaper had been frozen, graffiti on the campus compared them to the Hitler Youth (of course) and at least one member has had to deal with threats to her personal safety.

All in all, not unusual experiences for campus conservatives. There was the typical harassment by the campus police against students trying to promote my speech. In a coordinated effort to stop promotion of the event, two young men who were chalking a speech announcement on a walkway were stopped and interrogated by campus police. In a clever move, after being told by the police that they had orders to stop any activity of the College Republicans, the young men said they were with the Gay Pride group on campus. Only then were they allowed to continue.

David Berstein -- how Canadians lost their right to FREEDOM OF SPEECH.

Debra Saunders on the disgusting GOP spending spree. Quotable:

In his State of the Union address, [George] Bush promised a budget "that increases discretionary spending by 4 percent next year -- about as much as an average family's income is expected to grow." But as The Washington Post reported last month, federal discretionary spending grew by 12.5 percent in the last fiscal year. In two years, the government grew by more than 27 percent.

Or as [John] McCain put it, "We're spending like a family going into bankruptcy." ...

"It's like any other evil; it either is reversed or eliminated, or it grows," McCain said. "It's evil to take taxpayers' hard-earned dollars and spend them on frivolous things."

Quotable Doug Bandow:

Republicans no longer believe in limited constitutional government; their primary role in Washington is to enact Democratic programs veiled in conservative rhetoric. Americans might as well vote Democratic: then, at least, they would benefit from truth in advertising.

Ain't it the truth, sad to say.

How Appealing has 20 questions for Judge Richard Posner.

Good advice about SPYWARE and how to fight it. The Bear Flag League has joined the fight, and a posting by Right on the Left Beach sent me there.

UPDATE: Xrlq has links to sites explaining everything you ever needed to know about spyware.

Do we already have a FLAT TAX?. Bruce Bartlett blogs the story:

According to a new Tufts University paper, the U.S. tax system is getting very close to flat. The Bush tax cuts have reduced the progressivity of the federal income tax, although it remains progressive. However, other parts of the tax system, such as excise taxes and payroll taxes, are regressive. Combining all of them together yields a tax system in which every income class pays approximately the same share of its income in taxes ..

Thirty five years of REASON and 35 Heroes of Freedom. Including:

Friedrich Hayek. He mapped the road to serfdom during World War II and paid a steep price -- decades-long professional isolation -- for daring to suggest that social democracy had something in common with collectivist tyrannies of the right and left. The economist-cum-philosopher lived to see his arguments vindicated by the failure of the Third Way and even took home a Nobel Prize in 1974. Building on the work of that other great Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, and combining a respect for inherited wisdom with an understanding that freedom is fundamentally disruptive, Hayek showed that the uncoordinated actions of individuals generate wonders -- market prices, language, scientific progress -- that the deliberate designs of central planners never could.

BUSH BLINKS -- international trade war averted as Bush moves to repeal his tarriff on STEEL.

David Boaz -- Bush betrays Ronald Reagan and Reagan Republicans:

In 2000 George W. Bush campaigned across the country telling voters: "My opponent trusts government. I trust you."

Little wonder that some of his supporters are now wondering which candidate won that election.

Federal spending has increased by 23.7 percent since Bush took office. Education has been further federalized in the No Child Left Behind Act. Bush pulled out all the stops to get Republicans in Congress to create the biggest new entitlement program -- prescription drug coverage under Medicare -- in 40 years.

He pushed an energy bill that my colleague Jerry Taylor described as "three parts corporate welfare and one part cynical politics . . . a smorgasbord of handouts and subsidies for virtually every energy lobby in Washington."

It's a far cry from the less-government, "leave us alone" conservatism of Ronald Reagan.

Conservatives used to believe that the U.S. Constitution set up a government of strictly limited powers.

It was supposed to protect us from foreign threats and deliver the mail, leaving other matters to the states or to the private sector -- individuals, families, churches, charities and businesses.

That's what lots of voters assumed they would get with Bush. In his first presidential debate with Al Gore, Bush contrasted his own vision of tax reduction with that of his opponent, who would "increase the size of government dramatically." Gore, Bush declared, would "empower Washington," but "my passion and my vision is to empower Americans to be able to make decisions for themselves in their own lives."

Bush was tapping into popular sentiment.

In fact, you could say that what most voters wanted in 2000 was neither Bush nor Gore but smaller government. A Los Angeles Times poll in September 2000 found that Americans preferred "smaller government with fewer services" to "larger government with many services" by 59 to 26 percent.

But that's not what voters got. Leave aside defense spending and even entitlements spending: In Bush's first three years, nondefense discretionary spending -- which fell by 13.5 percent under Ronald Reagan -- has soared by 20.8 percent. His more libertarian-minded voters are taken aback to discover that "compassionate conservatism" turned out to mean social conservatism -- a stepped-up drug war, restrictions on medical research, antigay policies, federal subsidies for marriage and religion -- and big-spending liberalism justified as "compassion."

When they're given a chance to vote, Americans don't like big government.

Last November 45 percent of the voters in the most liberal state in the Union, Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts, voted to abolish the state income tax.

In January, Oregon's liberal electorate rejected a proposed tax increase, 55 percent to 45 percent.