Pepsi Throwback

Have you seen the "new" Pepsi Throwback? Basically, it's Pepsi from the '70s: In the old packaging but made with sugar.

It's...sublime. It doesn't leave a film in your mouth. It has a clean, refreshing taste. Swear to God, it actually bubbles nicer. The bubbles are sharper and more lively. I had this obsession a few years ago with trying to find soda that bubbled the way I remembered—and never could. (Returned a whole lot of fountain drinks as "flat".)

In the mid-'80s, the soda companies switched from sugar to high fructose corn syrup. One of the reasons given for this is that HFCS is "easier to transport". Curiously, the soda companies don't use HFCS anywhere else in the world. Just the US. In fact, one trick used by sugar soda fans is to buy sodas imported from Mexico (which I've heard CostCo has).

So if it's not transportation, why would soda companies use it? Well, the Federal Government subsidizes HFCS, making it slightly cheaper than sugar. The Federal Government also jacks up the price of sugar (to seven times the world price!), making sugar a lot more expensive.

It's probably too soon to blame HFCS for obesity, liver disease, diabetes and autism, but not to soon to blame it for screwing up the soda experience. And never to soon to blame the government for making it all economical.

We already eat quite a bit of corn: On the cob, loose, as chips and tortillas, corn bread, polenta, etc. To then HFCS in virtually every sweetened product on the market? Probably a bad idea.

Meanwhile, the Snapple Company is coming out with Dr. Pepper "Heritage"—the sugar-based version of Dr. Pepper.

And the corn folks are already in full blown PR mode. You've probably seen the HFCS commercials. And if you search for it on the web, the industry sites are there. The recent indications of mercury being found in it, probably doesn't help their image.

Having re-tasted the old sodas (and having drunk a lot of "gourmet" sodas over the years), I sure bet these guys don't want to go head-to-head with sugar.

Oh, by the way: Tomorrow is the last day for Pepsi (and Mountain Dew) Throwback. I'm gonna stock up.

In Which I Suspect The Free Market Of Not Being Entirely Free

Interesting anecdote from Reason on how Canadian health care treated one woman, or rather failed to treat her, along with a doctor who puts up a price list on his website about what things cost. I tracked the website down and noted an interesting thing.

Some of you know that my dad was in the hospital a month ago. As it turns out, they gave him angioplasty (through the femoral artery, yeow!). If you go to that site, you'll see angioplasty costs $12,500.

That's expensive, but not unmanageable. Presumably, one wouldn't need a lot of angioplasty. And catastrophic coverage well, wouldn't need to be all that huge to cover it.

Now, my dad's two days in the hospital cost $140,000.

Frankly, that seems unpossible to me. Who could possibly afford that? How can something exist in a market that nobody could afford?

I suspect there may be market distortions at work.

If one wanted to fix the health care market, one might start by locating the distortions and removing them.

Just a thought.

The Financial Crisis Explained?

"In short, on April 2, 2009, the President signed a communiqué that essentially turns over financial control of the country, and the planet, to a handful of central bankers, who, besides dictating policy covering everything from your retirement income to shareholder rights, will additionally have access to your health and education records."

--Bruce Wiseman, "Hitler's Bank Goes Global"

My dad sent me a link to this guy (of whom I've never heard) who lays out the banking crisis as a plan to unseat the U.S. dollar as the basic unit of international money. It's not a long read, and interesting as it maps how what might be considered typical banking and political shenanigans were exploited.

The quote above comes from the second article in the series and is of particular interest to me (and I'd think to anyone who values our Constitutional Republic). The President basically gave the keys to the country to a foreign bank. (And this is not a political issue; Bush would doubtless have done the same thing.)

Much like socialism, it's come to pass that having a group of ultra-powerful private bankers run a country's economy is just the norm for the world today. Politicians, of course, just want to spend money, not think about it, so they just let someone else do the thinking for them.

The question of whether or not the President's actions are legal and binding is a separate one, and the crucial one for all of us: Wiseman issues a call to action for everyone to make sure their representatives know that what the President signs is essentially a treaty and needs to be ratified by Congress.

Anyone have Glenn Beck's number?

Inappropriate Advertising

Far from being intrusive, I've actually found that I enjoy Google Mail's targeted ads. (And yeah, I know they're evil. A company who's first motto is "don't be evil" virtually had to turn out that way, didn't it?)

I've written about the spam, for example, and it's sort of interesting trying to figure out what the targets in this so-called targeted advertising is. But now Gmail has presented this ad for the Baader-Meinhoff movie with the tag, "The revolution is reborn!" Er, maybe it was "reignited". (I don't know what caused Gmail to put that ad up, but it changed and I can't get it back now.)

Wait, what? Nooooo. I hope the point of that movie was that revolutionaries were dumb thugs using political ideology as an excuse for bad behavior.

I mean, even if you're an ideological fellow traveler, I would hope this movie served more as an embarrassment than a rallying cry.

"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." -V.I. Lenin

I tend to agree of late that the very term "Capitalism" is Marx's socialist framing of what is, in essence, freedom, and that we're poorer for using the term to describe free markets.

By the way, it was Marx who infected economics—by all rights a hard science with immutable laws—with politics and turned it into the morass it is today.

Jerky jerk-face.

Manic Monday Apocalypso: The Wages (and Prices) Of Sin

The beauty of the Apocalypse is that it comes in so many flavors, to appeal to so many people. Ya gotcher Rapture, your Ragnarok, your Mayan 2012, and of course such modern classics as nuclear holocaust, zombie-or-zombie-like contagion, overpopulation or just good old famine. Something for everyone to enjoy.

But, of course, the end of the world is more likely to come in a more banal way, or at least always has in the past. Which brings us to Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls, a book written 30 years ago, in the wake of Nixon's (et al.) disastrous experiments with wage and price controls.

Schuettinger and Butler show us the decline of great civilizations that followed those civilization's "elite" tampering with the free market. From Hammurabi and the Pharaohs to the Soviets and Weimar, the drives are similar and the results always the same.

Despite this, these "experiments" are repeated over and over again. Keep that in mind next time you talk to someone calling himself a "progressive".

Seems like the only truly progressive idea is that man should be free to govern his own affairs.

Wherein The Boy And I Have "The Talk"

No, not the Birds and the Bees talk. That's what the Internet is for.

I've been musing about the difference between free markets and Capitalism. I'm very for free markets: People + stuff = trade. That's pretty much how things work, and the closer we keep to that, the better off things seem to be. I don't see the struggle we're undergoing now as "Communism versus Capitalism" but "Slavery versus Freedom".

Capitalism arises as organically from free markets as free markets do from people + stuff. Naturally some people are going to want to trade money for more money. And just as naturally, some people are going to end up just trading money for money. This leads to people saying "Hey, those guys aren't doing anything but making money offa us!"

This, in turn, leads to upsetting or compromising the free market, even revolution.

Well, I was trying out this logic on The Boy, and he would have none of it. He pointed out that problem wasn't Capitalism, but envy. Or ignorance. And I pointed out that Capitalism had always failed, ultimately leading to less free markets. And he pointed out that the State was always involved in the failure.

And so I said that if the system always failed, how was that different from Communism?

Well, The Boy wasn't having any of it. He was quite deftly arguing his point, puncturing my arguments and standing his ground. But I didn't let on that I basically agreed with him.

An hour or so later, he emerged from his man-cave and said that he'd always thought I knew everything and had all the answers magically. Now, of course, I've done everything I can to discourage that notion, gently, and he's been coming 'round to my less-than-divine status for years, but I'm not sure it fully dawned on him until that night.

It's a very good thing.

He did reassure me I was still magical, though, just in a different way.

sniff ... I promised myself I wouldn't cry...

The Math Of Political Ideologies

As a geek, I tend to get excited over the possibility of applying logic, math and science to the mooshy topics of politics. We've talked about "test-driven" government (borrowing from programming), where any change to policy would have to be run through a series of rigorous tests to determine effect and unintended consequences.

But chatting with a friend today I began to realize that you can express the two main warring ideologies in politics with mathematical formulas. And it's kind of interesting. At least to a geek like me.

Let X = resources available
Let Y = cost of resource
Let Z = number of people
Let $= cost per person of resource

X × Y ÷ Z = $

This is a simple way of looking at a situation where resources are limited and are to be divided evenly among a group of people. Note this works both ways: For distributing resources and for distributing the cost of a resource.

This is, more or less is how collectivists and statists view problems. "If only," they think, "I—or some suitably clever person who shares my values—were in charge of collecting the money and distributing the service, then we could make sure everything was fair and equitable and just."

They fret because Y seems to go up all the time, as does Z, while X dwindles or doesn't seem to grow fast enough to cover some ultimate disaster. The whole "overpopulation" scenario is based on Z increasing exponentially while X flattens or decreases. This becomes the justification for a centralized planning system. To avert crisis.

But, of course, the system tends to reinforce itself: X dwindles while Y skyrockets. Z tends to flatten but can't keep up (down?) with the issues created by X and Y.

And you can tell when someone is really married to this mindset, because they can't see the problem any other way. (They'll even see the surrounding issues as relatively simple variables: if only everyone adhered to the orthodoxy in terms of diet, exercise, home size, whatever, all our problems—the ones they've very often created to justify their takeover of whatever—would be solved. This is actually true for them, because their ultimate problem seems to be that people are just too numerous and unruly.)

To someone with an appreciation for the complexity of human interaction, X can go up wildly, Y can drop crazily and Z going up is a good thing—because only people have the power to change X and Y in unforeseen ways.

In a larger sense, in Communism (including Socialism, which I think is pretty apparently a stepping stone), X is just a short-hand for wealth. A lot of people seem to operate under an even simpler formula:

X ÷ Z = $

Divide total wealth by the number of people and that gives you how much wealth everyone should have.

You can see the mentality, too: There's a fixed amount of gold, therefore why shouldn't we all share it equally? As if all the wealth in the world were just lying on the ground and—and this is not far off from what is actually said—disparity only occurs because some guys took away our wealth and made it their wealth.

Wealth is theft, in other words. Now, virtually everyone who utters this sentiment has some form of wealth. So you can safely assume that they mean your wealth is theft. They might be talking about someone else now, someone richer, but they'll get around to you.

But let's backtrack a bit: Is there a fixed amount of gold? (This goes back to my original X.) For that matter, is there any gold until someone pans for it/digs it up/picks it up off the ground, even? And then refines it?

Even real estate, which is considered to be fixed and finite, has to be explored, tamed or cultivated or exploited in some fashion before it becomes wealth. Finite? Even in this day of mapped out terra, there's building up—and almost completely undone: building down, building on the sea, building under the sea, given an anti-grav tech you could build in the sky. And that's just this planet.

Science-fiction, now, just like skyscrapers were sci-fi not too long ago.

It's all potential wealth, just waiting for someone clever enough, industrious enough, persistent enough to exploit it. And all wealth is created and must be maintained.

But in some philosophies, wealth, once created becomes everyone's. In practice, what happens at that point is that wealth ceases to be created. Worse, the wealth that already exists is left to rot.

This is often clucked about as selfishness and greed, which it can be. But the wild variable not considered is that wealth is also highly subjective, and any system which purports to distribute wealthy "fairly" must first evaluate that wealth. The Y in that first equation—the cost (or value) of the resource—is not uniform from person-to-person.

In other words, before you create anything in one of these "fair" systems, you have to confront the fact that an arbitrary person or bureau is going to set Y, that is, evaluate whatever it is you create.

Children are transparent when it comes to this sort of thing: If you want to kill a child's creativity and work ethic, simply evaluate whatever they produce. Obviously, trashing someone's output can make them stop producing, but even praise can have a deleterious effect. This is the pernicious side of testing and grading (and a mine field for parents).

Adults really are the same way. Even if you plan to give something away, creating it with the knowledge that not only will it be taken from you, but it will then be valued arbitrarily by someone who isn't going to consume it?

That's a joy killer. And, not coincidentally, a wealth killer.

And eventually you end up with this:

$ = 0

MMA Bonus: We are devo.

I follow Steve Simon on Twitter; he's one of the guys I followed early on in my far less discriminating days. But he has interesting stuff, so he survived the big purge I did when I realized there was no way I could keep up with all the tweets.

A few weeks ago he talked about retiring, and then about cutting costs by doing a variety of tasks--lawn care, oil change, etc.--on his own. Nothing wrong with that, especially if these are things he derives some pleasure out of.

But at a social level, it's a symptom of poverty: We specialize because it's more efficient. An expert with the right tools can do something better and more cheaply than you can at home. This is not really a different discussion than the previous one on fast food. Economies of scale, expertise and specialization (why even fast foods are usually separated by variety of slop: chicken, burger, Mexican, sandwiches) both result from and drive wealth.

One thing Americans don't get about European countries is that it's kind of a big deal to go to lunch. Even Canada, with its $9 Subway footlongs--which must suck given they can see the $5 footlong ads from America.

It's sensible--necessary, even--to do more for yourself if it saves money. And there are good non-monetary reasons to do things, too: Just so you know you can fix the pipes, change the oil, etc.

But it's better if that's a luxury you do because you like or want to, not because the economy is such that you can't get paid more at your specialty than it would cost you to do on your own.

You vs. MacDonald's

One of the homeschoolers I follow on Twitter linked to this analysis of home cooked versus McDonald's burgers on a cost basis, coming to the conclusion that you could make McDonald's burgers more cheaply at home.

In fairness, the guy breaks it down correctly enough to say that you could make 16 burgers more cheaply than you can buy 16 burgers from McDonald's. But then you have to eat 16 burgers. Granted, at that size, you probably could, or a family of six could, anyway--but would you want to?

There's a dual edge to this, too, that makes it kind of a pointless effort. On the one hand, if you're making burgers, why are you making them MacDonald's style? Could you, really? Wouldn't you be tempted to get a slightly better cut of meat and use a little more of it? Put on a crisp slice of lettuce and beefsteak tomato (instead of just catsup)?

What's more, if you really are going for Micky D's style, you won't make it. Your children will tell you all the ways your burger is inferior to one of those enriched-flour encased quarter-sized patties. Or, at least, that's what kids did back in my day. (They'd also trash your ravioli if it weren't Ravioli-Os.)

You'll eat (at least figuratively, maybe literally) any mistakes you make, too. And the amount of time you spend prepping, cooking and cleaning up is going to well exceed the cost in time of going to the nearest franchise.

These days, you're unlikely to be able to beat a fast food franchise for overall cost. The exception might be El Pollo Loco, because they're rather expensive. (Their chicken is a lot closer to real food, which doubtless factors into it.) There is something to economy of scale in this case. Even if you can achieve the economy of scale that allows you to make 16 burgers at once, you're probably not going to achieve it on the same scale as the billions of burgers.

On the flip side, you can't hardly miss beating them in terms of quality. And you can be very selective about where you economize.

Links You May Have Missed, But Probably Would Like To See, If Only You Knew About Them

These are for me as much as you. I'll thank me later. Mostly from Twitter.

Via Freeman Hunt : The blog of Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose" PBS series. Funny that for all the PBS crap I got shown in school, this wasn't among the viewing options.

Via Andy Levy via Allahpundit: Face transplant story with pictures. Amazing.

More on the voucher situation from the WSJ: "If, however, you are a pol who piously tells inner-city families that public schools are the answer -- and you do this while safely ensconcing your own kids in some private haven -- the press corps mostly winks."

Also, today is not the day where I wish I sent my kids to public school.

27% of all marketers suck? Sounds a little low to me.

Funny and short: Why copywriters should be native speakers.

Cringely talks about the future of television on the Internet. It's interesting.

Hot: Bill Whittle schools John Stewart on the history behind Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The beauty of being a useful idiot is that you never have to research and you never have to say you're sorry. Because, damn the facts, you're right, and Harry Truman was a war criminal.

Lastly, Tabitha Hale aka Pink Elephant Pundit has started doing a radio show/podcast/audio blog/whatever the hell the kids these days are calling it. Episode One is here. I was going to listen to it, but there's, like, the entirety of "Walk This Way" at the front and that used up any time I had, plus confused me.

Free Marketing

There's a bit of back and forth about free trade here, which seems to be centered around externalities. (Centered around externalities? Nu?) Guy A argues, well, sure Barbies are $2 cheaper, but a thousand guys are out of work and doomed to alcoholism and divorce (ok, not all). He doesn't follow through with the thought, though. Are those the only implications?

I immediately wondered how many fewer Barbies were sold at 20% higher cost. And what happens, on a larger scale when, say, 20% fewer toys are sold. Do you get 20% fewer toyshops? Do you spread the formerly localized misery around throughout the supply chain, down to 20% fewer little girls getting what they want for Christmas?

Guy B argues, but what about the Chinese, now saved from alcoholism and divorce? Also, he goes to the root issue about using force and the implications of allowing the government to, essentially, make business decisions for people.

But when you start with protectionism, you have to assume the people you're arguing with are taking the position that, yeah, it is okay for the "greater good".

You know, the heartless businessman is such an accepted trope, I bet nobody has ever even tried to tackle the reality. It's just taken for granted that businessmen will save that $2 and lay off their workers, which doesn't really match what I've seen. Most of the businessmen I've known really loathe laying off people, especially good people.

Anyway, as someone whose field went from esoteric to hot to increasingly downgraded and outsourced--all without ever being really understood--I'm inclined to wonder if the damaging thing is the idea that a Man Can Only Do One Job In His Life and a Company Must Take Care Of Him.

Protectionism is, at its best, an attempt to preserve that notion. We're still serfs serving feudal lords, in that view, though at least we have some mobility. At its worst, protectionism is a tax on the populous to ensure the wealth of the entitled. Someone decides some occuptation is entitled--say, corn farmer--and so we all pay more for sugar and can't get a decent soda any more.

Of course, the educational system was set up to provide exactly this kind of worker: Someone who'd take orders and sit still and do things by rote all day. As it turns out, this 19th century "ideal" isn't the best approach for survival in the 21st century, though our schools don't reflect that.

But it's easy for me to take this tack, as a guy whose resumé qualifies as ridiculous in terms of the various things I've worked with, and who picks up new things pretty aggressively. (I sort of have to do that, because the more logical and robust approach--building a business and customer network--is not something I'm good at.) It's more interesting to look at whether it's ever neccessary for industry to be protected.

Consider, in a truly free trade system, that a foreign supplier can flood a zone with cheap goods at a loss and drive local suppliers out of business. And having established a monopoly, they can raise prices again. This is a gag pulled by big companies, not just foreign ones, and it does raise some thorny issues.

But I do note that these thorny issues can be resolved with flexibility, agility and mobility, given the right technology. If local suppliers can't compete with larger ones when they cheat, then you bring in more of the larger suppliers to keep each other honest. And if the local suppliers still can't compete in that arena, you move them to a different one. If you've got 1,000 people making Barbies, maybe you split them up into 10 groups of 100, all able to act indepedently and fill demands at a level a foreign supplier can't.

With heavy-duty industrial stuff, that's not possible--yet. But perhaps it will be. I'm biased, due to being heavily involved in computers over the years, but I see high-tech electronics not being all that different from 19th century tech, only much, much faster. And it seems like that high-tech stuff infringes more and more on clunky ol' steam-era tech.

But regardless where technology takes us, businesses and their employees are always going to be served by being able to shift gears and change directions.

(Original article tweeted by Freeman Hunt, who has some cool 60-year-old pix up on her blog now.)

Brick and Martyr: TMI

The telephone broke this week. (So did the refrigerator and the water heater, but more on that later on.) Well, it had been breaking for a while. It had been submerged in water more than once, and was slowly losing features. The LCD panel was the first to go, of course, so all the caller ID features were gone. And last weekend it stopped ringing.

Fine with me.

But ultimately, no, the flashing light on the phone is not enough to alert me that it's ringing. And tragically, it sometimes matters. So I went to get a new phone. It was kind of funny. I was walking around Fry's and first saw a book on Tenzing Norgay. The only reason I know of Tenzing Norgay is because I'm a fan of the Coen Brothers, and the following exchange is from Intolerable Cruelty.

---

Wrigley: Who are you looking for?
Miles Massey: Tenzing Norgay.
Wrigley: Tenzing Norgay? That's someone she slept with?
Miles Massey: I doubt it. Tenzing Norgay was the Sherpa that helped Edmund Hillary climb Mt. Everest.
Wrigley: And Marilyn knows him?
Miles Massey: No, you idiot. Not the Tenzing Norgay. Her Tenzing Norgay.
Wrigley: I'm not sure that I actually follow that.
Miles Massey: Few great accomplishments are achieved single-handedly, Wrigley. Most have their Norgays. Marilyn Rexroth is even now climbing her Everest. I wanna find her Norgay.
Wrigley: But how do you determine which of the people on here are...
Miles Massey: How do you spot a Norgay?
Wrigley: Yeah.
Miles Massey: You start with the people with the funny names.

I swear: maybe 20% of the knowledge I have comes from a dogged pursuit of a particular topic while the other 80% comes from random mentions in pop culture. I saw this cool physics book
as well. (I'm looking for something for The Boy that is not too math heavy but also not juvenile. My own texts from school are pretty dry, as well, and this looked like a good mixture.)

Fry's is interesting. The branches communicate to the main office through a text-based system on (I think) a private network, and none of the hundreds of computers anywhere in the store are hooked to the Internet. But I had my Blackberry with me and began to wonder:

Is this really a good price for the Tenzing book? (It was $8; I can get it used for half that--including shipping--from Amazon.) Is it a good Tenzing book? (So-so. The minimal reviews on Amazon are all over the map.)

What about the Head Start book? I can get a new one cheaper or save a few bucks on a used copy, but I also get the reviews that say it's a practical book. About the mechanics rather than the more difficult-to-grasp optics, audio, etc. areas. So, actually, it's perfect.

I put those two books back.

I also wanted to pick up a scanner. (I have a scheme to put some things on t-shirts.) But the scanners just sit there in boxes with numbers on them. Very unhelpful. I realized I didn't know what I needed. I thought to myself, "What am I doing here?"

Fry's is the sort of place you go when you know exactly what you want. The best deals you get there are on discontinued things. (A lot of people think they're getting an incredible price on cutting edge stuff and end up disappointed. A lot of people get angry at Fry's. A lot of people are dumb.)

But then, a funny thing happened: I still needed a phone. I generally shop at Amazon because of the free shipping, so I went there. And you know what? It was too much information. Too much dubious information, actually.

I need a phone that's nigh indestructible. The only feature I can't live without is the speakerphone. (I hate holding the phone up to my ear.) The caller ID is good, too, because I don't have an answering machine or even a phone book, really, so if you want a call back, you better be IDed.

The reviews on Amazon were things like "Oh, these are great. We only had to take one of the three we bought back." Also, Amazon's inabiality to do a secondary sort sucks. In other words, yeah, I want the most relevant items first, but after that, I want the cheapest.

I went to Radio Shack instead. But, of course, there was no one in the Radio Shack, so I went to target. This was actually strangely reassuring. I had gone to Radio Shack for an antenna coupler last weekend and actually got one there for $2.70 and it actually worked! Almost everything at Radio Shack is ridiculously overpriced and then doesn't do what I want, so I was actually disturbed when I got in and out in five minutes with just what I needed.

Going in this week and finding a bunch of overpriced phones that no one was around to sell me was comforting.

Anyway, I went to Target and picked up a phone for about $25. I have no idea how good a phone it is, but it has a handset speaker and caller ID. It's probably good enough. Which is good enough. And I guess the brick-and-mortar stores still have their uses.

Of course, it hasn't been submerged yet. I give the Barbarienne 3-4 weeks to feed it to the toilet.

Planned Irrelevance

Somebody tweeted about this today: It's called the "Congressional Effect Fund". It's a mutual fund premised on the idea that Congress destroys wealth. That's putting your money where your mouth is, eh? Or rather, where their mouths ain't.

I don't know enough about how this stuff works to know if they can actually minimize their exposure on non-Congress days, and I do sort of wonder whether, if something like this took off, it wouldn't end up creating distorting effects.

But it is interesting from the standpoint of "libertarian optimism" we were talking about before.

Also interesting are the various cities and states (AP snark warning on that state link) resisting the current power grab.

Could we build a society around the Federal government? In-between? In the unregulated and unregulate-able nooks and crannies?

To an extent, the "black market" or "underground economy" (WSJ.com) has always flourished in supressive times--and regulations are suppressive, however necessary they may be--and, in a totalitarian environment, the black market is often the only market there is.

By the way, another word for "underground economy" is "free market".

I'm not an OUTLAW like some people, but it doesn't take much to realize that people will seek to survive and to improve their conditions, and if the environment works against them they will push back against the environment, escape the environment or operate under the table (which is a form of escape after all).

Technology can play a big hand here: Even while it gets harder to start a business due to regulation, technology can make it cheaper than ever.

The real question is whether you can work in your current physical space well enough to fight the creeping, smothering embrace of government--or whether you need to move to a new, less paternalistic locale.

Rock of Ages

Schoolhouse Rock was a defining cultural moment for a generation: Thousands of kids that schools had failed to reach were suddenly aware of nouns, times tables and American history.

So it's not surprising to see it used to describe modern situations, as in "I'm Just A (Stimulus) Bill". Ruth Anne at The Maternal Optimist links to one of the second revival's songs, Tyrannosaurus Debt. (The first and best run was from '73-'79, and the series was revived in the '80s, briefly, to get some computer stuff in there, and then again in the '90s for a money series. None caught fire like the original.)

On a related note, Blossom Dearie, who sang "Figure Eight" and "Adjectives" died last week at the age of 82.

Lileks reminisces on Reagan, whom the left is trying to blame all our current ills on, so they can--well, you know, take all the money and run the show. That's the goal, right?

Reagan was worse than stupid – he was conspicuously indifferent to our futures. It was generally accepted that he either wanted a nuclear war or was too dim to understand the consequences. It went without saying that he didn’t read Schell’s “Fate of the Earth.” It went without saying that he didn’t read anything at all.

Remember kids, Republicans are either stupid or evil: Ike (Stupid), Nixon (Evil), Ford (Stupid), Reagan (Stupid), GHW Bush (Evil), GW Bush (Stupid). This narrative hasn't changed in my father's lifetime, much less my own. And it probably goes back to the 19th century, though not so one-sidedly as it has in the past 80 years.

Finally, Clarendon at the New Pamplheteers (h/t Instapundit) writes a little bit about the history of the Boston Tea Party and what those who would co-opt those historical giants should know about how that event came about.

We live in intersting times.

Almost Right

Via Instapundit comes this interesting quote from Samizdata:

In the mind of the anti-free-marketeer, the government occupies the same kind of intellectual territory as the divine designer in the mind of an anti-Darwinian.

That's almost right. It would be perfect if God attributed with all these wondrous abilities were actually out there stopping evolution.

Deflating Expectations

This story linked from Instapundit reminded me that I wanted to post about deflation.

There's a lot of talk these days about how some amount of inflation is good. Good cases are made for this. You can read the link and see some economists who obviously cleave to that notion.

I don't honestly know if the theory is true or not. And there's one guy there (Burton Folsom) who talks about how the US prospered during the deflation that followed the Civil War.

But what I've been thinking about for a while is the unidirectionality of the pro-inflation types. I'm suspicious of it. Economic systems seem to need to flow in both directions. Markets need to expand, but they also need to contract. You just want them to end up a little bigger than before.

Money is essentially a commodity (with certain special properties, to be sure) and it seems to me that it needs to be able to become more or less valuable along with everything else. There's something odd about being pro-inflation as well, given the pride that countries have in the value of their money. The British have loved lording their pound over the American dollar, and the Euro-promoters loved it when the Euro towered over the dollar.

On the other hand, when money gets expensive, it's harder to export stuff. So, why all the bitching when money gets cheap?

Sometimes I think economics is just an excuse to complain about whatever.