The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill Said in the middle of the 19th century in “On Liberty.” The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual’s own good.--Freidman
An article in the WSJ arguing that the climate change debate has been sinking:
A good indicator of why climate change as an issue is over can be found early in the text of the Paris Agreement. The “nonbinding” pact declares that climate action must include concern for “gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity” as well as “the importance for some of the concept of ‘climate justice.’ ” The descent of climate change into the abyss of social-justice identity politics represents the last gasp of a cause that has lost its vitality.
Who is ...Ehrlichman?
Friedman's quote above was said in reference to drug legislation. He opposed legislating anything that was an isolated individual choice. But how far does this go? Should people with rubella have the freedom to access maternity wards? If low level drugs lead to higher ones, should a child be exposed to such a risk? He said, "It’s a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don’t approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else. Most of the arrests for drugs are for possession by casual users." But isn't the very availability a risk for some?
A strange story. It sounds like an internet ad campaign for a guy who wants to be a professional activist. Fortunately we paid for his education and his ad platform:
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www.foxnews.com
The West Point graduate, who last year posed in a picture holding a cap that had “Communism will win” written inside, is officially out of the U.S. Army with an ...
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This is pretty terrible story for all those with confidence in the powers that be.
Baum, in his 2016 article in The Atlantic on Nixon's motivation for the drug war: "At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”"
Nice. But we can rely on our leaders to do the right thing.
Penguin Random House’s new company-wide goal for both new hires and authors to “reflect UK society by 2025 taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability.” Maybe elderly Hibernians with failing eyesight will get published, too.
Turophile: n: Lover or connoisseur of cheese. Turophile a rare word not only in meaning but also in its spelling. The combining form -phile is very common in English, but the combining form turo- is unique: it comes from the Greek noun tȳrós, which is nearly always Romanized as tyro-, as in the technical term tyrosine (an amino acid). Tȳrós comes from a complicated Proto-Indo-European root tēu, tewe, teu, tū “to swell, coagulate, be or become thick”: for the Greeks cheese was “thickened milk.” The Latin word būtȳrum “butter” is a borrowing from Greek boútyron “butter,” literally “cow cheese.” Būtȳrum “butter” was adopted by the West Germanic languages, e.g., Old English butere, English butter, Dutch boter, Old High German butera, and German Butter. Turophile entered English in the 20th century.
The price of medical care has increased almost three times more than consumer prices in general and the price of hospital services has increased about five times more than overall inflation over the last 34 years. Except for college tuition and college textbooks, there has been no consumer product, good or service that has increased over time as much as medical care services and and hospital services:
Many of the largest US-based Multinational corporations have close to (or more than) two-thirds of their total sales outside the US, e.g., Intel (80%), Mondelez (76%), Coca-Cola (70%), ExxonMobil (65.4%), Apple (63.2%), and GE (62.1%). Other large American MNCs generate more than 50% of their sales overseas, e.g. Procter and Gamble (58%), Chevron (57%), Oracle (53%), Alphabet (52.7%), IBM (52%) and Pfizer (50.5%).
Almost all of these MNCs have close to half, or more than half, of their global staffing outside the US. Alphabet has almost 87% of its workforce outside of the US, which is a ratio of 6.5 foreign workers for every US employee. DowDuPont (73.8%) and Procter and Gamble (73.4%) have nearly three foreign workers per American employee.Many of the US MNCs above have close to half, or more than half of their corporate assets (property, plant, and equipment) located outside the US, and some like Coca-Cola (92.4%), Mondelez (84%), Johnson and Johnson (75%), Chevron (72.4%), and DowDupont (66.1%) have two-thirds or more of their assets overseas.
While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.--Hayek
This is a big idea, the equality of rights vs material condition, of opportunity vs achievement, of access vs production.
Economics is the study of people’s rational choices when they’re faced with scarcity and uncertainty. The problem is people aren’t always rational. They often act against their own economic interests—or appear to. So we have behavioral economics to figure out why.
But what happens in a world of surplus?
The United States is one of two--two--countries that allow direct to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing. The other is New Zealand.
In the U.S., last year 3.5 Billion dollars were spent on consumer-pharmaceutical ads.
Harry Anderson, an actor from "Night Court," died a while back.
A People magazine story in 2002 said Anderson disappeared from Hollywood and resurfaced as the owner of a New Orleans magic shop.
"I am richer than Davy Crockett," Anderson said in the story. "I can settle back and do what I want to do. And what I want to do is card tricks and magic.' That includes magic shows for corporate clients ("Fifty-five minutes with applause," says Anderson) at $20,000 a pop.
According to the story, Anderson was disenchanted by the prospect of chasing acting roles into middle age. "I don't understand why guys have that Don Knotts syndrome of having to be out there." He sold his home in Pasadena, California, and moved back to New Orleans, where he had lived in the 1970s. Following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, he moved to Asheville.
"Up until now, Comey has been a devastating witness against Trump because, unlike the president, he is so obviously upright and so careful in what he has said. He sounded truthful when he testified under oath that Trump tried to extract a loyalty oath from him and asked him to go easy on disgraced national security adviser Michael Flynn. But Comey is now undercutting his own standing as an impartial avatar of justice by giving into the temptation to tell the world what he really thinks of the president who fired him.
I am still convinced that Comey is a good man, and an honest one. But once again, he is showing that his judgment is flawed." --Max Boot
In 1906 San Francisco was hit with a Richter 8 earthquake. Fires broke out everywhere. It was estimated that some 3,000 people died as a result of the earthquake and the devastating fires it inflicted upon the city. Almost 30,000 buildings were destroyed, including most of the city’s homes and nearly all the central business district.
Foreign-made pickup trucks are subject to a 25 percent import tariff, a policy heartily endorsed by U.S. producers. So a foreign truck valued at $20,000 costs the importer $25,000 before he can even clear customs. Meanwhile, domestic producers of $20,000 pickups have an artificial $5,000 cushion, enabling them to increase prices without appearing out of line.
AAAaaaannnnnndddddd.....a graph of the U.S. fertility rate:
Source: St. Louis Fed
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