Evil Waltons

How could Wal-Mart do this to the people? The Waltons, with their $19B each should quit exploiting the people. Now 8600 more have volunteered to be exploited, with a waiting list of over 45,000.

War on Wal-Mart

The other night I watched a little of the CNBC documentary about Wal-Mart. It's a real interesting show that explains their culture and processes to keep prices low. I believe there is nothing inherently evil about Wal-Mart, even if I prefer Target.

Unfortunately, labor unions see Wal-Mart in a different light and Democrats are listening. The WSJ has an excellent op-ed today explaining the phenomenon (I don't usually like to excerpt a whole article but I don't have a free link).

Wal-Mart may be expanding in the People's Republic of China, but here in capitalist America the low-price retailer has become the Democratic Party's favorite pinata. The media like to portray this as a populist uprising against heartless big business. But what they don't bother to disclose is that this entire get-Wal-Mart campaign is a political operation led and funded by organized labor.

We've done a little digging into the two most prominent anti-Wal-Mart groups, and they might as well operate out of AFL-CIO headquarters. An outfit called Wal-Mart Watch was created by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), probably the most powerful union in America after the National Education Association. Wal-Mart Watch is backed by Five Stones, a 501(c)3 organization that received $2,775,000 in 2005 from the SEIU, or 56% of its $5 million budget. According to financial records, SEIU also gave Five Stones $1 million in 2004 to launch the anti-Wal-Mart group, and SEIU president Andy Stern is the Wal-Mart Watch chairman.

A second group, Wake Up Wal-Mart, is more or less a subsidiary of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW). Wake Up Wal-Mart refuses to divulge its funding sources, but here is what we do know: The group was founded by the UFCW, is housed at UFCW headquarters, and its campaign director's $135,000 salary is paid by the UFCW.

Wake Up Wal-Mart also has close ties to the Democratic Party. Its union-funded campaign director is Paul Blank, who was political director of Howard Dean's failed Presidential campaign. The group sponsored a 19 state, 35-day bus tour across the U.S. earlier this year, staging anti-Wal-Mart rallies. Nearly every major Democratic Presidential hopeful has joined in the Wal-Mart-bashing, including Senators Joe Biden and Evan Bayh, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, and trial lawyer-turned-man-of the-people John Edwards. They all seem to believe they have to take this line to pass union muster for 2008.

Even Hillary Rodham Clinton has joined in the political fun. Never mind that she served six years on the Wal-Mart board during her time in Beltway exile as an Arkansas lawyer and, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was paid $18,000 per year plus $1,500 for every meeting near the end of her tenure. Most recently, Mrs. Clinton returned a $5,000 campaign contribution from Wal-Mart to protest its allegedly inadequate health care benefits. Maybe someone should ask her if she's returned her director's pay, with interest.
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Most of the local protests against Wal-Mart are organized through the left-wing activist group ACORN, an acronym for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ACORN is the group that put the squeeze on the Chicago City Council to pass an ordinance this summer to require Wal-Mart, Target and other big-box stores to pay a minimum $10 an hour wage and $3 an hour in benefits by 2010. (Democratic Mayor Richard Daley vetoed the bill.) ACORN also pretends it is a locally organized and funded voice of the downtrodden masses. But guess where ACORN gets much of its money? Last year the SEIU chipped in $2,125,229 and the UFCW $165,692.

Then there are the anti-Wal-Mart "think tanks," if that's the right word for these political shops -- notably, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center. The job of these two outfits is to publish papers backing the economic claims of Wal-Mart critics. The UC Berkeley group recently asserted that Wal-Mart "reduces total take-home pay for retail workers."

The UC Berkeley Labor Center has received at least $43,550 from SEIU. The Economic Policy Institute received $100,000 from the SEIU and $40,000 from the UFCW in 2005 and has published several anti-Wal-Mart studies, particularly on the benefits of the Chicago ordinance. By the way, Andy Stern also sits on the EPI board. He's a busy guy.

Now, we're not predisposed to be pro- or anti-Wal-Mart. We've criticized Wal-Mart lobbying on policy grounds -- for example, when the company supported a minimum wage increase to court some nice publicity while also knowing this would harm any lower-priced competitors. However, it is simply fallacious to argue that Wal-Mart has harmed low-income families.

More than one study has shown that the real "Wal-Mart effect" has been to increase the purchasing power of working families by lowering prices for groceries, prescription drugs, electronic equipment and many other products that have become modern household necessities. One study, by the economic consulting firm Global Insight, calculates that Wal-Mart saves American households an average of $2,300 a year through lower prices, or a $263 billion reduction in the cost of living. That compares with $33 billion savings for low-income families from the federal food stamp program.
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Alas, what's good for working families isn't always good news for unions and their bosses. They hate Wal-Mart because its blue-coated workforce is strictly non-union -- a policy that dates back to the day founder Sam Walton opened his first store. Today the company employs 1.3 million American workers, and its recent push into groceries has made life miserable for Safeway and other grocery chains organized by the service workers or the UFCW.

Wal-Mart pays an average of $10 an hour, which is more than many of its unionized competitors offer. And typically when a new Wal-Mart store opens in a poor area, it receives thousands of job applications for a few hundred openings. So Wal-Mart's retail jobs of $7 to $12 an hour, which the unions deride as "poverty wages," are actually in high demand.

But as we say, this campaign isn't about "working families," or any of the other rhapsody-for-the-common-man union slogans. If Wal-Mart were suddenly unionized, Big Labor's membership would double overnight and union leaders would collect an estimated $300 million in additional dues each year to sway more politicians. Short of that, their goal is to keep Wal-Mart out of cities so their union shops have less competition. That's what the war against Wal-Mart is truly about.

I guess because Democrats aren't in charge of anything they don't get branded with the catering to special interest stick. But, when do you ever see them turning down union money or doing something the unions don't like? The 2 shining examples of this are Wal-Mart bashing and support for public schools.

More Shelf Blogging

The shelves may be a little hard to see, but there's 4 of them there. We needed some shelves in the girls' closet to hold their winter clothes while we go through this Indian summer. Bonus points for me because these shelves had to be extra sturdy so my 20 month old girls couldn't pull them down. I believe I accomplished that mission. Also, we kissed the vertical blinds in the living room goodbye and hung up some horizontal blinds with a valance. I give you Shade Blogging!


For more Shelf Blogging check here, here and here.

Political Questions

If you're like me, and for your sake I hope you're not, you find yourself flummoxed to come up with questions when a politician comes to your door soliciting a vote. I have opinions and I want these people to tell me what they believe, but I don't want them to just give me the standard little "I'm for this, this and this and against that, that and that."

Also, typically the people trawling around in my neighborhood are candidates for city council, state representatives or some other local office. These are some of the most important offices for me, but, I typically can't come up with a question to ask these people on the fly, so I'm looking for the kind of questions that get at the candidates inner beliefs. The kind of thing Democrat and Republican used to mean.

For example, I would want to know if they believe in free trade, what they think the role of government is in this country etc. Those aren't questions John Q. Campaigner are typically ready to answer, but they're important for Campaigner to have an answer. Especially because today's local politician is tomorrow's national politician. I don't want to be electing someone for local office when I don't believe in what they think on national issues.

So, in light of this I'm going to email some of the bloggers I most respect and see what they think. I'm looking for pretty general questions that aren't stacked to get an answer a certain way like, "do you think it was worth thousands of American lives to start an illegal war in Iraq?". If the question's loaded, Campaigner will know how I want him to answer it.

R.I.P Buck O'Neil

I was saddened to learn last night via the Bottom Line on ESPN that Buck O'Neil had passed. Buck was probably the most famous Kansas Citian, certainly the most loved. It's like a piece of the city died. But, I know that Buck O'Neil meant a lot to people outside of Kansas City as well. Wright Thompson, a former KC Star reporter, has a nice tribute to Buck on ESPN.

We've all lost that magnificent baritone voice now, and the world is poorer for it. Not in the way we normally are when a famous person dies. No, O'Neil's voice was truly a gift to all of us. It taught us that love is more important than hate. It taught us that forgiveness is more important than bitterness. It taught us to live life now, to eat dessert always, to never let a red dress pass by.

When he didn't get into the Hall of Fame this year, people rightfully howled. As the news reached him, a final denied dream in a life full of dreams denied, he just smiled.

"God's been good to me," he said that day. "If I'm a Hall of Famer for you, that's all right with me. Just keep loving old Buck. Don't weep for Buck. No, man, be happy, be thankful."

On a day that should have been the pinnacle of a life dedicated to helping others, he showed up at the podium in Cooperstown anyway to help honor the Negro Leaguers who did make the cut, and he led the crowd in a song that will never be heard again:

"The greatest thrill Â… in all my life Â… is loving you."

He sang those words to the folks there and to those at home. Sitting here now, trying to imagine a world without Buck, I can't stop thinking about that song. As a former reporter for The Kansas City Star, I had my share of interaction with Buck. I heard him make cynical school children stand and sing in loud voices. It's clear to me now that knowing and loving Buck has been the greatest thrill in my professional life. It's been a thrill for all of us who knew and loved Buck, either in person or in spirit.

Thompson felt it appropriate to point out that he worked in KC in his national article. I think that's appropriate, Buck was one of those people that made you proud to be a Kansas Citian. He was our own and we loved him.

I met Buck once and got my picture taken with him. He had taken hundreds of pictures with people that day (it was a Royals open house) but, he took the time to ask my name and several other questions. He was particularly interested in the girl I was with, I remember.

Sometimes I would see Buck at Royals games and I would wave, he would wave back like he knew me. It always made me feel like he remembered me from the day we took that picture. I think he made everyone feel that way whenever he was around.

Craig, over at Royals Authority, has the text from Buck's Cooperstown speech here as well as his personal Buck stories.

Alright, sit down. This is outstanding! I’ve been a lot of places. I’ve done a lot of things that I really liked doing. I hit the homerun. I hit the grand slam homerun. I hit for the cycle. I’ve had a hole-in-one in golf. I’ve done a lot of things I liked doing. I shook hands with President Truman. Yeah. Oh, man, I took — Oh, [shook hands] with the other President and I…hugged his wife, Hilary. So I’ve done a lot of things I liked doing. But I’d rather be right here, right now, representing these people that helped build a bridge across the chasm of prejudice — not just the ones like Charlie Pride and me that later crossed it. Yeah. This is quite an honor for me.

Next, Negro League baseball. All you needed was a bus, and we rode in some of the best buses money could buy, yeah, a couple of sets of uniforms. You could have 20 of the best athletes that ever lived. And that’s who we are representing here today. It was outstanding. And playing in the Negro leagues — what a lot of you don’t know. See, when I played in the Negro leagues — I first came to the Negro leagues — five percent of Major League ball players were college men because the major leaguers wanted them right out of high school, put them in the minor league, bring them on in. But Negro leagues, 40 percent of Negro leagues, leaguers, were college men. The reason that was, we always spring trained in a black college town and that’s who we played in spring training, the black colleges. So when school was out, they came and played baseball. When baseball season was over, they’d go back to teaching, to coaching, or to classes. That was Negro League baseball. And I’m proud to have been a Negro league ball player. Yeah, yeah.

And I tell you what, they always said to me Buck, “I know you hate people for what they did to you or what they did to your folks.” I said, “No, man, I — I never learned to hate.” I hate cancer. Cancer killed my mother. My wife died 10 years ago of cancer. (I’m single, ladies.) A good friend of mine — I hate AIDS. A good friend of mine died of AIDS three months ago. I hate AIDS. But I can’t hate a human being because my God never made anything ugly. Now, you can be ugly if you wanna, boy, but God didn’t make you that way. Uh, uh.

So, I want you to light this valley up this afternoon. Martin [Luther King] said “Agape” is understanding, creative — a redemptive good will toward all men. Agape is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. And when you reach love on this level, you love all men, not because you like ‘em, not because their ways appeal to you, but you love them because God loved them. And I love Jehovah my God with all my heart, with all my soul, and I love every one of you — as I love myself.

Now, I want you to do something for me. I’m fixin’ to get off this stage now. I think I done my six minutes. But I want you to do something for me. I want you to hold hands. Whoever’s next to you, hold a hand. Come on, you Hall of Famers, hold hands. All you people out there, hold hands. Everybody hooked up? Everybody hooked up? Well then I tell you what. See, I know my brothers up here, my brothers over there — I see some black brothers of mine and sisters out there — I know they can sing. Can you white folks sing? I want you to sing after me:

The greatest thing — come on everybody –

The greatest thing in all of my life is loving you.

The greatest thing in all of my life is loving you.

The greatest thing in all of my life is loving you.

The greatest thing in all my life is loving you.

Thank you, folks. Thank you, folks. Thank you, folks. Thank you, folks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Now, sit down. Now, sit down. I could talk to you 10 minutes longer, but I got to go to the bathroom.

DDT's New Friend

Finally the World Health Organization has come around and approved the use of DDT to eradicate malaria in undeveloped countries. The WSJ has a nice editorial outlining my thoughts.

Malaria is the number one killer of pregnant women and children in Africa and among the top killers in Asia and South America. It's long been known that DDT is the cheapest and most effective way to contain the disease, which is spread by infected mosquitoes. But United Nations health agencies and others have for decades resisted employing DDT under pressure from anti-pesticide environmentalists. After tens of millions of preventable malarial deaths in these poor countries, it's nice to see WHO finally come to its senses.

The agency's malaria chief, Arata Kochi, told reporters that "one of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual spraying. Of the dozen or so insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT." He also said, "We must take a position based on the science and the data."

Mr. Kochi's intellectual honesty is commendable and all too rare among public health officials in this debate. For decades, the science and empirical data about DDT's effectiveness have been distorted or suppressed. Nevertheless, and Rachel Carson's scare-mongering notwithstanding, there is no evidence that DDT use in the amounts necessary to ward off malarial mosquitoes is harmful to humans, wildlife or the environment. Period.

By contrast, there's plenty of evidence -- from the U.S. and Europe to Australia, India, Sri Lanka and Brazil -- that spraying DDT is the best intervention. According to Pierre Guillet, another WHO official at Friday's press conference, South Africa temporarily stopped using DDT in 1996 because green groups were opposed, not because it wasn't working. Malaria takes a heavy toll on a country's economy by discouraging foreign investment and incapacitating otherwise productive people, so these anti-DDT alarmists have been helping to impoverish those they don't kill. There is something other-worldly, or worse, about well-heeled greens trying to deny the world's poorest people the very tool used by rich nations to eradicate this disease.

Even if WHO's decision won't change those minds, its stamp of approval on pesticide use matters in the public health world. Other organizations, ranging from the World Bank to Aid for International Development to Doctors Without Borders, look to WHO for guidance and will now likely reassess their own guidelines. The U.S. is typically the largest donor to these international agencies, and the recent efforts of Republican Senators Sam Brownback of Kansas and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who have called for DDT intervention and more responsible allocation of aid dollars generally, no doubt played a role in WHO's decision.

One insecticide won't end malaria, and DDT's proponents don't claim it will. But by keeping more people alive and healthy, DDT can help create the conditions for the only lasting solution, which is economic growth and development. It's encouraging that even a U.N. health agency seems to have figured that out.

Emphasis mine on my favorite sentence. Development is the malaria eradicator, not DDT, but DDT supports development.

Democrats Vs. Wal-Mart

I love it when George Will really lays into something.

Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce -- yes, announce -- that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by . . . liberals.

Before they went on their bender of indignation about Wal-Mart (customers per week: 127 million), liberals had drummed McDonald's (customers per week: 175 million) out of civilized society because it is making us fat, or something. So, what next? Which preferences of ordinary Americans will liberals, in their role as national scolds, next disapprove? Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet?

No. The current issue of the American Prospect, an impeccably progressive magazine, carries a full-page advertisement denouncing something responsible for "lies, deception, immorality, corruption, and widespread labor, human rights and environmental abuses" and for having brought "great hardship and despair to people and communities throughout the world."

What is this focus of evil in the modern world? North Korea? The Bush administration? Fox News Channel? No, it is Coca-Cola (number of servings to Americans of the company's products each week: 2.5 billion).

Next up is football (too violent), beer (fattening and causes drunkenness) and television (should be exercising or reading).

Consumer Choice in Health Care

I've been reading, for the past 2 days, all the lefty bloggers tut-tutting about the Rand survey that studied medical care that a group of seniors was getting. Now, I admit that the results of the test were pretty damning (the patients rated their care higher than the quality it actually was). But, it still didn't sit right with me. I don't think a third party can determine what I like better than I can. Let's call this the Totino's pizza corollary. I like the $1.50 Totino's frozen pizzas better than I like the $5.99 Digiorno frozen pizza. I'm sure that in a taste test among 250 of the top pizza experts the Digiorno pizza would come out a huge winner. But for me, I like the crisp crust and the ratio of sauce to cheese on the Totino's (for those that haven't had the pleasure, Totinos doesn't have a lot of cheese). Does the fact that the experts would agree that Digiorno is better invalidate my opinion? I would argue, no.

Greg Mankiw takes my Totino's Corollary to new territory today;

What if the quality of the health care were judged not by the consumer but instead by an employee of the postal system? Or, worse, by a random member of Congress, while he was running for reelection and accepting campaign contributions from a variety of health-care providers? Yes, decision making in health care is hard, so mistakes are inevitable. But is there any reason to think that collectivized decision making is usually better than individual decision making?

Granted, my Totino's Corollary certainly makes light of educated health care opinion, but I also believe that a medical treatment that the consumer believes in has a much better chance of succeeding than one which is foisted upon them when they have very little choice in the manner. Especially a treatment that is determined by what would be a gigantic bureaucracy that kowtows to political interests.

Free to Choose in Estonia

Greg Mankiw excerpts John Tierney's column about Estonia, the Baltic Tiger. I wrote a couple of papers in graduate school about the reforms that Estonia undertook and how American businesses can capitalize on those reforms. What I find most interesting is how Laar instituted the flat tax and other Friedman ideas in a formerly Soviet republic.

Earlier today I read this post on Drum's blog.

Nonetheless, we desperately need radically more attention paid to full employment policies; to labor organization in service industries; to the distributional inequities of free trade policies; to national healthcare; and to significantly more progressive taxation.

I read Drum to remember why I am not a Democrat. Everything he is advocating in that sentence is everything that Friedman, Estonia, Ireland and other success stories would strongly stand against. Estonia has a very free market and their distribution inequality is virtually nonexistent in relation to the US. Why is that? Government policies aid in making the poor poorer, not free market economic policies.

Liberal School Choice

Let the schools pick the students. Anything to give more power to public bureaucrats instead of to the people.

Betts suggests this: first fund the schools equally on a per-student basis. Then distribute trade-able rights to admit highly advantaged students; and allow schools to auction those rights. Schools would then be forced to figure out how much they valued the money they were spending relative to the highly advantaged children they wanted. We don’t know what the outcome would be. At one end of the spectrum you’d have schools with high concentrations of advantage and not much money; at the other end of the spectrum high concentrations of disadvantage and loads of money. It would probably take a few years for administrators to work out what the real costs of disadvantaged children were; but they would have a powerful incentive to work it out.

I'm just about speechless.

Chicago Living Wage

Cafe Hayek's Russell Roberts takes down a proposed law in Chicago. The Chicago city council has a proposal to force big box retailers (defined as more than a billion dollars in sales with stores greater than 90,000 square feet) to pay workers $10/hr plus $3 in benefits. Target and Wal-Mart have responded by suspending plans to open more stores and deciding whether to close additional stores. Mayor Daley would also like to know how the aldermen in Chicago are going to replace the 8000 lost jobs if Wal-Mart doesn't continue its expansion.

Of course, if this plays out where the "living wage" is enacted and Target and Wal-Mart leave, then we're left with the unseen effects of such a law. With no big boxes prices will gradually rise to levels seen in the non-big box retailer world. Of course, this effect will be slow and unseen, therefore no one will really complain about it. There will just be 20,000 less jobs in the greater Chicago area. But that's not what gets aldermen elected, raising people's wages with a law gets them elected. Unfortunately, this law not only won't raise anyone's wages it will end up lowering wages by having more people fighting for fewer jobs in the retail sector.

In addition, the unskilled teenagers who can't find work stocking shelves or whatever unskilled kids do at Target are not going to get any job experience. With fewer business unable to give a teenager a job because of wage standards that teenager never gets a chance to get a toehold in the labor force. How's he going to get started? What happens is the kid gets public assistance at the first opportunity, then becomes involved in the neverending circle of government dependency. This dependency is what draws him out to vote for an alderman who will raise the wages of the poor by imposing some minimum wage. The cycle starts again, relegating another generation of teenagers to government dependency.

Global Warming Skeptic

Coyote Blog once again makes a coherent and unvitriolic case against global warming alarmism. Of course, to question the conventional wisdom of future doom from global warming is to be the ultimate in wingnuttery. But until climatoligists can come up with a model that works for the past 50 years, I don't necessarily believe their model for the next 100.

City Busybodies

Mike Hendricks takes the city of Kansas City to task for outlawing selling gas to someone who hasn't already paid for it. It seems the city is tired of enforcing theft laws so they're putting the onus on business owners. Hendricks asks the next logical question.

Will bank lobbies be outlawed because that’s where bank robberies often occur?

Capitalism and Freedom

I'll let Kevin Drum's post on public vs. private education lead off my review of "Capitalism and Freedom" by Milton Friedman.

First, there's that 8th grade reading score, which is a whopping 5.7 points (about half a grade level) below that of private schools. That's a big difference.

Second, these scores confirm a widely-reported and disturbing trend: public schools seem to do OK at the elementary level, but student scores start to drop significantly in secondary school. In this study, the delta between public and private schools dropped 6.8 points in reading and 3.5 points in math between 4th and 8th grades. If the study had been extended to 11th grade, I suspect that decline would have continued.

I don't have any answers here except for a guess: namely that the pedagogy wars don't really matter much. Phonics vs. whole word? New math vs. old? Open classrooms vs. strict discipline? Without disparaging the people who work hard trying to figure this stuff out, it seems as if practically any of these approaches can succeed or fail depending on how well they're implemented.

But what does seem to show up over and over again is the effect of concentrated poverty. Nearly everything I've read suggests that when the number of kids in poverty reaches about 50% in a school, teaching becomes nearly impossible — and that this matters much more in secondary school than in elementary school.

(First off, Drum asserts that there really isn't much of a difference between public vs. private; the portion that I selected doesn't make that clear, but I was mostly interested in the paragraphs selected. Sorry, if I misrepresent the point of Kevin's post.) Friedman addresses the point of concentrated poverty on the public schools in "Capitalism and Freedom". His policy suggestion is vouchers which allow parents to choose their child's school based on factors they deem important rather than having the state decide based on geography. Friedman argues this would alleviate some of the problems of concentrating poverty in certain schools. Of course, another reason of poverty being concentrated geographically is the state's entry into building housing for those poverty, concentrating all of the impoverished into a small geographic area. Friedman's solution to this is to give the poor cash to use how they wish. The main part of this cash would come in the form of the negative income tax, which today is called the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Friedman's writing is truly inspiring (admittedly, I am predisposed to believing in what he is writing). Above, I chose 3 policies that I believe the government has failed it's citizens; housing, education and poverty. As Friedman argues, government control in and of itself is to blame. This control has really affected other aspects of the system, for instance Housing and Urban Development affecting the education system. Whereas, giving the power to the people would not have affect the schools as much as concentrating poverty in one location.

Friedman's argument is against the concentration of power instead, to borrow from George H.W. Bush, of the thousand points of light. This week is the FDA's 100th anniversary. Friedman also takes down the idea of giving licensing function to the government, specifically the FDA and licensing of doctors. In this OC Register editorial by Satya Thallam, you can find the Friedman influence.

The FDA requires that a manufacturer of a new drug must prove both safety and effectiveness (the latter mandate added in 1962). By increasing the time and cost necessary to bring a drug to market, fewer drugs are developed, and even approved drugs forgo years of beneficial use. Fortunately, things have been improving, with the FDA now on par with the speedier approval times of similar agencies in Europe.

Economist Sam Peltzman has shown that the number of new drugs approved declined precipitously after imposition 44 years ago of the effectiveness requirement. He also showed that the proportion of inefficacious drugs didn't change in wake of the added requirement, writing that the "penalties imposed by the marketplace on sellers of ineffective drugs … left little room for improvement by a regulatory agency." His conclusion has been confirmed by other researchers.

But even if the FDA does little in the way of ensuring effectiveness, we should sing its praises for keeping us safe, right?

Noble intentions aside, any reasonable concept of safety is at best relative. The safe use of a drug is dependant on innumerable particulars, unique to the individual. By attempting to create a safety standard for something as variable as physiology, the FDA imposes onto the marketplace a rule that is at once clumsy and constricting.

Manufactured insulin may be essential to some and deadly to others. Radiation therapy and the AIDS cocktail often entail debilitating side effects. What should be the rule for considering them safe or not?

While the regulation of dosage, side effect and precautionary information helps the FDA mitigate this one-size-fits-all problem, the agency's failure to account for variation is seen in significant off-label usage, the unregulated prescription of drugs for uses other than the ones they were approved for.

Consumers are protected by a dynamic mixture of expert consultation, individual experimentation, independent and industry certification and the tort system. The FDA should be mindful of this existing system, because no one lobbies for the patients who die, or delay treatment, while waiting for a promising therapy to be approved.

The FDA's mission is ubiquitous; it affects every aspect of our lives. And so the story goes, we have the sausage- (and law-) making process to thank.

The policy prescriptions Friedman espouses in "Capitalism and Freedom" will probably never be extremely popular, but generations will read this book and be inspired by it's expression of freedom. It is a wonderful book that is as relevant today as it was in 1962.

The Wikipedia page for the book describes the impact of "Capitalism and Freedom".

The effects of Capitalism and Freedom were great yet varied in the realm of political economics. Some of Friedman's suggestions are being tested and implemented in many places, such as the flat income tax in Slovakia, a floating exchange rate which has almost fully replaced the Bretton Woods system, and school vouchers for Hurricane Katrina evacuees, to cite a few prominent examples. However, many other ideas have scarcely been considered, such as the end of licensing, and the abolition of corporate income tax (in favor of an income tax on the stock holder). Though politicians often claim that they are working towards "free trade," an idea the book supports, no one has considered taking his suggestion of phasing out all tariffs in 10 years. Nevertheless, Friedman popularized many ideas previously unknown to most outside economics. This and other works helped Milton Freedman to become a household name. The Times Literary Supplement called it "one of the most influential books published since the war." However, many of the ideas described in this book remain radical (or, according to critics, reactionary) and controversial to this day.

To see Friedman explain his theories, Radley has a link to a '60's era taxpayer subsidized television interview.

School Choice

When we stop calling school choice and vouchers a satanic idea maybe we can have a real debate about it. Milton Friedman explains his revolutionary idea from 50 years ago in the linked article.

“The fundamental thing that’s wrong with our present setup of elementary and secondary schooling is that it’s a case in which the government is subsidizing a product,” he says. “If you subsidize the producers, as we do in schooling, they have every incentive to have a status quo, and a non-progressive system, because they are a monopoly.”

Friedman finds it unfair that a mother who sends her child to private school should also have to pay to educate children whose parents send them to public school — an injustice made more egregious in his view by the fact that the private school mom probably has more money and so has already paid more in taxes.

But he is just as ticked off by what he sees as the great unfairness to poor kids.

“It’s very clear that the people who suffer most in our present system are people in the slums — blacks, Hispanics, the poor, the underclass.”

When I ask him about the “achievement gap” separating low-scoring black and Latino students from better-scoring whites and Asians, he blames my “friends in the union.”

“They are running a system that maximizes the gap in performance. . . Tell me, where is the gap between the poor and rich wider than it is in schooling? A more sensible education system, one that is based on the market, would stave off the division of this country into haves and have-nots; it would make for a more egalitarian society because you’d have more equal opportunities for education.”

But how would overburdened minimum-wage workers be expected to find the time to research a slew of school options, I ask — hearing the patronizing tone of my question as it crosses my lips.

“Who’s in a better position?” Friedman asks.
...
“In the last 10 years, the amount spent per child on schooling has more than doubled after allowing for inflation. There’s been absolutely no improvement as far as I can see in the quality of education. . . .
The system you have is like a sponge. It will absorb the extra money. Because the incentives are wrong.

“Would you really rather have your automobile produced by a government agency? Do you really prefer the post office to FedEx? Why do people have this irrational attachment to a socialist system?”

Friedman says that Americans have benefited enormously from free market competition in virtually every other part of their lives. He thinks it’s a matter of time before consumers demand the same right to choose how their children’s minds will be nourished as they do in deciding what food to feed them.

Kitchen Confidential

Over the past several weeks I have been enjoying "Kitchen Confidential": Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain has a show on the Travel Channel where he goes to exotic locales and eats their local fare. Fox had a sitcom last season based on this book starring Bradley Cooper, or as I refer to him, Sack Lodge. I liked that show which was a behind the scenes look at a kitchen at a fine dining restaurant. Wow, what an introduction.

The book was eminently enjoyable. There were no punches pulled by Bourdain. He describes kitchens as unbridled cruelty and pain, what I like to refer to as scraped knuckles. There is no coddling in a kitchen; slice your hand open? Stick it in ice water, wrap it up, get back on the line. Burn your hand? Shut up and get back on the line. Get your feelings hurt? Leave.

Bourdain takes several enjoyable detours through his life story, such as items for your home kitchen, how to cook like a chef, and what not to do at a restaurant; such as don't get fish on a Sunday. Bourdain's life story is rough. His early line cooking days were done as a junkie as well as copious amounts of weed and coke. Nowadays, just 7 or 8 drinks while doing a shift in the kitchen.

Bourdain tells a great story and his love of cooking shines through his surprisingly good writing, being that he's a cooking school graduate and never went to college. I'm probably the only person to put this combination together but "Kitchen Confidential" reminded me of "The Things They Carried". The way Bourdain tells story is not unlike how O'Brien tells a story. Towards the end of "Kitchen Confidential" when Bourdain is telling of how a chef he greatly admires runs a kitchen is completely unlike how he himself runs a kitchen, writes that everything the reader has read in the book before is obviously wrong. That reminded me of O'Brien's chapter explaining that it didn't matter whether a war story actually happened because it could have happened. Bourdain's explanation just struck me as being similar.

"Kitchen Confidential" was a very enjoyable read. I will probably read Bourdain's new book, "The Nasty Bits" and another book called "Heat" which has interested me on the New Releases table at Barnes & Noble. Having never worked in a restaurant before, yet loving restaurants, I enjoy the look that Bourdain gives.

Worst People in America

The folks at Right Wing News (a funny title for a 'news' organization) compiled a survey of right of center bloggers, as to who are the worst people in America. They used the definition that Keith Olbermann is using for his upcoming book "The Worst Person in the World: And 119 More Strong Contenders"; "It's a euphemism for somebody who's wrong and egregiously stupid and abusing their own position."

Some interesting names on the list are Pat Robertson and Fred Phelps. So, I must conclude that Robertson and Phelps basically offend most people, not just one side of the political spectrum. The not so interesting names are Barbra Streisand, George Clooney and Natalie Maines. They're just lightweight celebrities without the power to make drastic change and, I believe, when they speak, most people take what they say with a grain of salt. Of course, the usual suspects, Hillary and Bill, Al Gore, Barbara Boxer, Howard Dean and Harry Reid are strongly represented, no real surprise there.

The people on the list that I would include are Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman, Michael Moore, Jesse Jackson, Ted Kennedy, Cynthia McKinney, Nancy Pelosi, Jimmy Carter, Phelps and Robertson. Chuck Schumer made Honorable Mention on their list, but, he would definitely have a spot on mine. I would also throw in Dick Durbin, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Mike Nifong, Morgan Spurlock, Don Fehr, Dusty Baker, the investigator who raided Jason Grimsley's house and Dennis Hastert. Coming up with 20 is kind of hard so Baker has to be included. I don't like to pick on people because they have opinions and express them, right or wrong. The people on my list, I believe, have opinions, but express things they don't believe to further their own careers in a niche that they've carved out for themselves. Offer suggestions in comments if there's anybody I missed who should be on this list.

Bias

I've been enjoying for the past couple of days the 'discussion' between Jane Galt at Asymmetrical Information and Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber about alleged bias in an Economist story. Without giving away my feelings on the issue at hand, organized labor and immigration, I enjoyed Ms. Galt's eloquent refutation of the perceived bias in the Economist article.

it's the natural human tendency to find things more believable when they agree with what you already believe. Mr Farrell, I'd suggest, simply doesn't notice it in other papers because, well, they agree with him more, and hence he finds them more believable. The Economist is no less methodologically rigorous than any other paper anyone I know has written for; indeed, it is rather more rigorous than most about things like fact-checking. The difference is that The Economist states its opinions, rather than maintaining a facade of neutrality while slanting the article so that the readers come to the same conclusion that the reporter did. This, of course, is more irritating if you happen to disagree with the analysis, but it is not measurably more "objective".

I have the same view. Fox News is nearly universally hated in the liberal blogosphere for being 'right-wing hacks', but what if they only feel that way because watching Fox News makes liberals question the story because they viscerally disagree with how the story is presented, balanced. I'm not saying that Fox News is balanced, but I definitely think it's more balanced than CBS News or CNN. Liberals just can't see the bias in CBS because they believe the stories presented.

Shelf Blogging

For Father's Day, I was tasked with hanging some shelves. I'm very pleased with how they turned out. I measured, used the level, employed some power tools and now I have 3 very sturdy shelves which I can use to hold picture frames so the desk is a little less cluttered.

Inspiration for shelf blogging comes from Radley. I'm sure he'd be as proud of this as being cited in Breyer's dissent from Hudson.

North Korea Photos

Every time I see photos of North Korea, I'm always amazed at the empty roads. More depressing pictures can be found here.