Bryan Caplan quotes from a Bill Easterly interview on the limits of state planning vs. business hierarchy:

But what was missing - what Lenin did not get, and what all the subsequent planners who have been inspired by what appears to be corporate planning did not get - was that what corporations are really doing is searching for something that works. And when they find something that works, they try to reproduce it on a very large scale.

…what the planning mentality, as a whole, always misses is that you can't use planning to find what works. So if you build a whole system like foreign aid around planning, you're never going to find things that work. Because the planning is only a method for scaling up something that you have already found to work.

Businessman isn't happy with his search results in Google. So what does he do? Increase his visibility? Promote his service? Innovate and compete for customers? Nope! He calls for "search neutrality" in a NY Times Op-ed which I will not link to out of principle.
Do I need to point out how obvious an example this is of a business that can't compete seeking to tilt the playing field to its liking?
Do I need to point out that if search neutrality, however he defines it, was a valuable service, he could try offering it to people himself?
The fear that the internet - or any industry - will be dominated long term by one company is refuted by history, as recently blogged here.
To be explicit, proposals like the one made by the parasite in the Times are anti-market, pro-business, anti-competitive, slow innovation and make the industry they inhibit, in technical terms, "crappier."

A few years ago, my husband named this excrescence of a decade the “ought naughts”. As in, the naught years ought not to have happened. Here is the decade as I see it:

• Ralph Nader and George Bush convinced gullible Americans that Bush and Al Gore were, for all intents and purposes, the same person.
• From day one the Bush administration rolled back as many environmental regulations as it could.
• September 11, 2001.
• The Bush/Cheney response to 9/11. As much as I couldn’t stand him, I fully supported the President in the wake of 9/11. Until he took the good will of the entire country and most of the world and threw it out the window. What a fool.
• Iraq. Even if you still believe all of the lies (and lies, and lies, and more lies) that got us into Iraq, couldn’t we have at least depended on the Bush administration to carry out the war in the most efficient, effective way possible? Apparently not.
• Hurricane Katrina.
• Gays. Apparently gays are the worst thing that has happened to America. Bush and company used gay marriage as the wedge issue of the decade. In the 2004 Presidential election gay marriage was on the ballot in 11 states, for no other reason than to bring out the religious right in droves to give Bush a second term, um I mean to save our country from the scourge of gay marriage.
• Tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts while we were fighting two wars.
• Worldcom, Enron, AIG, Bernie Madoff, etc. Greedy bastards need sound regulation. I’m talking to you Goldman, Citi and B of A. Too big to fail eventually will. Plenty of bipartisan blame for the malfeasance of corporate America. The only difference between lobbying and a bribe is that one is legal.
• Ten years of almost no action in the US to reduce carbon emissions.
• And special thanks to Fox News, Karl Rove, and Sarah Palin and others for reducing political discourse to a largely disingenuous binary choice between what they think is right and everything else. Facts? Who needs ‘em. There are plenty of political hacks on the left as well but they don’t even come close to having as nefarious and far reaching impact as these bozos.

Is President Obama doing everything right? Not by a long shot. Is he doing his best to undo 10 years of ridiculous policy? IMHO, yes.

"I don't know what annoys me more: Janet Napolitano saying "the system worked" when what she means is "the system failed, but smart passengers proved that the system is unnecessary", or the moronic new rules the TSA is apparently putting into place in order to "prevent" future such occurances. The TSA's obsession with fighting the last war is so strong that I expect any day to see them building wooden forts at our nation's airports in order to keep the redcoats at bay."

Do not fear your corporate overlords!
Of the top 25 richest companies of 1999 globally, only 8 retain such status. Turnover happens. Goliaths get out maneuvered. The old corporate masters fade away, when we let them.

Why not Tell Americans What They're Really Paying for Their Food?

Photography is not a crime.

Wired.com explains why the billions handed out by the DOE to support clean-tech stifle innovation and hinder competition “by reducing the flow of private capital into ventures that are not anointed by the DOE.”
It has also actually led to layoffs:

Aptera Motors has struggled this year to raise money to fund production of the Aptera 2e, its innovative aerodynamic electric 3-wheeler, recently laying off 25 percent of its staff to focus on pursuing a DOE loan. According to a source close to the company, “all of the engineers are working on documentation for the DOE loan. Not on the vehicle itself.”

Personally I would rather that the winners of the clean tech development races win by superior design and innovation rather than by political favor.

One night after a long day of campaigning, when the haters had made my spirits reach a nadir, I looked into Todd's eyes, which were as blue as the stripes on Old Glory, and too representing truth and loyalty, and he looked back at me with a twinkle of determination which I hadn't seen since I told him my goal of having another baby in my fifties and naming it Tron, then did I know for sure that I could carry on, like he, and we, have done together all of these years on this long, Iron Dog race of a marriage that is at once grueling and celestial, onerous and majestic.

--Sarah Palin, as channeled by Ann Sensenbrenner, in Slate's Write Like Sarah Palin Contest.

The forced transfer of land from private homeowners and small businesses to a rich, connected, powerful developer in Brooklyn has received sanction from the NYS Supreme court.
This kind of eviction for the benefit of the rich developer and the parasitic tax collectors was endorsed by the SCOTUS under Kelo v. City of New London decided in 2005. The KELO decision created a popular backlash across the country, prompting legislation in many states to limit forced takings (not in NY), but the decision was also supported by some powerful interests, too, like the NY Times. Note that the Times editorial was penned from a building they were able to purchase earlier on the cheap due to eminent domain support as part the renewal of the greater Times Square area. Impartial observer, not so much. Imagine once we get fully state-subsidized media... Anyway, it's also worth noting that the planned development which robbed the Kelo's of their home isn't even progressing.
Either way, just to be clear - you may be forced from your home or business if the government deems it may reap greater tax revenue from your property after it is handed over to someone else.

"After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians began taking down their statues of Josef Stalin, the mass murderer who killed millions of people. Astonishingly, in America, the National D-Day Memorial is honoring Stalin by placing his bust on a pedestal at its museum in Bedford, Virginia."

Going "Rogue", according to Webster's:

Function: noun
Etymology: origin unknown
Date: 1561
1 : vagrant, tramp
2 : a dishonest or worthless person : scoundrel
3 : a mischievous person : scamp
4 : a horse inclined to shirk or misbehave
5 : an individual exhibiting a chance and usually inferior biological variation

In hindsight, the horrors of the socialist empires (Soviet Socialist, National Socialist) seem like the obvious, logical conclusions of the dreams of their leaders. Bryan Caplan shares one remarkable author (and some of his own thoughts) who was able to predict with uncanny accuracy the configuration of such planned societies before their emergence.

Meanwhile, yesterday, America’s paper of record published a long winded, typically opaque opinion by “theorist” rock-star Slavoj Zizek lamenting the situation of those central and eastern European countries who struggle with political change, development, and the crime of “anti-communism.” Arguing by association, implication, and innuendo, but never logic or history, he fills his writing with the passive voice and implies laughable moral equivalents (the censorship of McCarthyism and murderousness of Stalinism).

He eventually leads the reader to lament a man driven to suicide from a failed collective farming experiment in Bolivia, a man who lines earlier was noted for “enforcing” (Zizek’s own term) collectivization on Ukraine, leading to 10s of millions dead by “terror-famine” (Try reading The Harvest of Sorrow for a detailed account that will depress you for a season).

To break it down, he plays the reader for sympathy for a Soviet Eichmann , an ugly and morally dishonest enterprise, though one imagines he thinks himself clever for it.

The continued endorsement of such lines of thought – support for the myth that the socialist states were ever not murderous, the fantasy of socialism without coercion, smart sounding Marxist piffle – remains only possible for those who choose to ignore the history that is still so close, still alive in millions who lived through it, those who pretend that a society completely organized could be anything but coercive.

Such a simple but potent symbol of the systemic failure of communist model: the Wall. Fallen, 20 years ago today.
The great physical manifestation of the metaphorical Iron Curtain, the wall accomplished a task unheard of in a free society - forcing people to stay. That communist regimes needed guns, concrete and barbed wire just to keep their system from dying from emigration is a simple irrefutable argument for the terribleness of their systems.
Celebrate your freedom today!

The Berlin Wall that came down 20 years ago this month was an apt symbol of communism. It represented a historically unprecedented effort to prevent people from "voting with their feet" and leaving a society they rejected. The wall was only the most visible segment of a vast system of obstacles and fortifications: the Iron Curtain, which stretched for thousands of miles along the border of the "Socialist Commonwealth."

- Paul Hollander The 20th Anniversary of the Fall of European Communism continues to be under-reported and under-celebrated.

Note to Senior White House Adviser Valerie Jarrett: you don't get to speak truth to power anymore. You're in power. You work for the most powerful man on the planet. You're the "man" in "when the man says jump you ask how high."

This is speaking truth to power.

Eliot Spitzer explains how the White House defense of the status quo will give Republicans powerful ammunition in the 2010 elections.

At bottom, her individualism owed much more to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith (though Rand, typically, denied any influence, saying only that Nietzsche “beat me to all my ideas.” But “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” never sold a quarter of a million copies a year.

The vast majority of cars bought through (Your) Cash for Clunkers would have been bought anyway, which means (your) $3B contribution works out to roughly $24,000 per extra car sold.
Note: this calculation does not account for all the value lost by the forced destruction of turned in cars, their engines and parts.
Additional note: some of the vehicles clunkers were traded in for include Hummers.
And this gets called a “successful program.”

Open Letter to the Democratic National Committee

Dear Bozo:


Yesterday I got a call from a professional fundraiser asking me to open my wallet and make a donation to the DNC. In the past I have gladly done just that. I have given money to the DNC, the fundraising arms of both the House and Senate Democrats, Democratic candidates for President, and even money to Democratic candidates for Congress in districts where I don’t even live. And I have traveled to Pennsylvania, Ohio and southern Virginia to knock on doors for Democratic Presidential nominees.

But yesterday I refused to heed the clarion call for donations to help save the country from whatever the Republicans have in mind. And you know why? Because no amount of “grassroots” money from citizens will ever be enough to get the duly elected Democrats in Congress to pay attention to something other than their own egos and their allegiance to the corporate money that keeps them in office. How does my $25 or $250 or even $2,500 stack up against the pile of money that big business funnels into the political system? If you get my personal check will Senator Dodd pick up the phone when I call to tell him that he is handing big banks everything they want while passing along all the risk to me? If I take a couple days of salary and send it to the DNC will Senator Baucus let me write health care legislation instead of his seven former staffers who now work for health industry lobbyists?

And don’t even get me started on the ethics-challenged Congressman Rangel keeping his committee chair.

Maybe, just once, Democrats could lend meaningful support to a Democratic President, the leader of their party. But it seems like too many Democrats in Congress want to relive the glory days of 1994 when they assisted the Republicans in neutering another Democratic President.

I am not saying you will never get money from me again, after all I do think that Democratic crooks are a better option than Republican crooks. But for now I’d like to see Democrats begin to pay back the Americans who delivered them majorities in both houses of Congress.

Love, Thomas
[crossposted at MyPorch]

“The year 1989 was one of the best in European history. Indeed, I am hard pushed to think of a better one."

- Timothy Garton Ash explores new books on the subject in the NY Review of Books.
Michael C. Moynihan does something similar in Reason.

"While attracting surprisingly little attention, the Obama administration supported the effort of largely Muslim nations in the U.N. Human Rights Council to recognize exceptions to free speech for any "negative racial and religious stereotyping…
In the resolution, the administration aligned itself with Egypt, which has long been criticized for prosecuting artists, activists and journalists for insulting Islam. For example, Egypt recently banned a journal that published respected poet Helmi Salem merely because one of his poems compared God to a villager who feeds ducks and milks cows."

I wish the President would listen to Paul Volcker.

"Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee seemed to abandon hope of bringing any real change to the Patriot Act. A lopsided and depressingly bipartisan majority approved legislation that would reauthorize a series of expanded surveillance powers set to expire at the end of the year. Several senators had proposed that reauthorization be wedded to safeguards designed to protect the privacy of innocent Americans from indiscriminate data dragnets--but behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the Obama administration ensured that even the most modest of these were stripped from the final bill now being sent to the full Senate."

And yes, that’s a CATO research fellow writing in The Nation.

I wish the President would listen to Eliot Spitzer.

Follow-ups to this post: here and here.

I finally got around to reading the much promoted “How American Health Care Killed my Father” in The Atlantic. It lives up to the hype. It’s an excellent, informative and engaging read. You’ve probably seen it linked to or promoted elsewhere already, but if you’ve avoided it like I did, it’s worth reading. Here.

Are Americans Faking Religiosity?

Depending on which poll you consult, between 33 percent and 43 percent of Americans claim to attend church weekly. Using the low end of that range, we get a figure of around a hundred million people. Even cursory crack research, however, reveals that this can not be true, for the simple reason that there are not enough seats in all churches in America to hold nearly as many people.

[A liberal estimate of] the total number of available seats in churches across America is 59,045,600. That is just little over a half of what would be necessary to accommodate all the people who claim to go to church weekly. A large number of Americans are lying to the polls.

Neighborhood News (for me):

"New York's highest court is set to hear arguments Wednesday in a case that will decide whether the state government can lawfully seize private property for a development company.

The case pits the New York State Urban Development Corp., a government agency, against nearly a dozen land owners who say the state constitution bars the government from stripping the rights of private parties to benefit a developer that aims to build a new arena for the New Jersey Nets basketball team. The developer, Forest City Ratner Cos., is currently one of the owners of the Nets."

Yes, it's still an open question in New York and many states on whether you can be forced from your home so your land and property can be turned over to someone with more money.

Well, I can hear the right wing already screaming about the leftist slant of the Nobel committee. Just like they did when Al Gore won, and Jimmy Carter won. To paraphrase Stephen Colbert, maybe peace has a liberal bias. And I think there is some dismay that Obama won without having a substantive body of work to justify getting the prize.

Obama may not be a conventional pick, but there may be some very good reasons for the Nobel committee's choice. One that comes to mind is the down payment Obama has made in restablishing the USA as an agent of positive change and moral leadership around the world. And he has done it with a great deal of grace and humility. One could argue that just about anyone left of Genghis Kahn could have done this in the wake of Cheney-Bush. There are those who have claimed that Obama is nothing but pretty words and clever rhetoric. I don't believe that is true, I think he is much more than that, but the US and the world needs someone with Obama's ability to inspire us and get us to think about loftier goals.

Another good reason for Obama to get the prize is that he is a living manifestation of the future. The combination of his global outlook, education, and experiences make him the ideal leader to begin building bridges between countries, continents, and creeds. All those things that the Palin-ites were so worried about, those things that supposedly made Obama less American, actually look good to many around the world and indeed to Americans who believe that being a good global citizen is something to be proud of.

And, although I am not sure if this played any role in the committee's choice, there is something to be said about Obama's ability to confront the racial stalemate in the US and the world and help nudge race relations forward into the 21st century.

Whether the issues are domestic or international, or about race, class, religion or economics, he is unafraid to wade into dangerous political waters, find common ground, and just as importantly is unafraid to call things as he sees them. He is not afraid to recognize US failings, but he is also not afraid to let the rest of the world know when they aren't living up to their promises. So he told the US, so he told Europe, so he told the Middle East, so he told Africa. And finally, this may be the Nobel committe's way reminding Obama how much the world is counting on him.

[Crossposted on MyPorch.]