Capitalism, the Dynamo

Jonah Goldberg says of this essay:

If you missed this shockingly long essay in the Wall Street Journal by Nobel winner Edmund Phelps, print it out and save it. One day it will be useful to force your college-age kids to read it for deprogramming purposes. I think some folks at Tapped simply burst into flames when reading it.

I agree, except for calling it “shockingly long”.

I still haven’t read any Hyek (and yes, I know I should), but I’ve read Rand. Phelps put them in nice perspective for me:

We all feel good to see people freed to pursue their dreams. Yet Hayek and Ayn Rand went too far in taking such freedom to be an absolute, the consequences be damned. In judging whether a nation’s economic system is acceptable, its consequences for the prospects of the realization of people’s dreams matter, too. Since the economy is a system in which people interact, the endeavors of some may damage the prospects of others. So a persuasive justification of well-functioning capitalism must be grounded on its all its consequences, not just those called freedoms.

Frist Foolishness

Gotta love Andrew Stuttaford’s take on Frists dumb anti-gambling move. The part that makes my head real is not this quote:

“If an adult in this country, with his or her own money, wants to engage in an activity that harms no one, how dare we prohibit it because it doesn’t add to the GDP or it has no macroeconomic benefit. Are we all to take home calculators and, until we have satisfied the gentleman from Iowa that we are being socially useful, we abstain from recreational activities that we choose?… People have said, What is the value of gambling ? Here is the value. Some human beings enjoy doing it. Shouldn’t that be our principle? If individuals like doing something and they harm no one, we will allow them to do it, even if other people disapprove of what they do.”

It’s who said it.

Update 12 Oct :
Stuttaford got some feedback from the Hill which may be illuminating.

Place Your Bets

Fearlessly speculating, Buttle’s World hereby predicts that this plane crash in NYC turns out to be a suicide, not an accident. And I’m going with better than fifty percent odds that the pilot (no passengers) turns out to have a middle-eastern name, whether given at birth or recently taken.

You don’t just bump into the broad side of a building in VFR conditions like that.

I hope I’m wrong. Just putting a time stamp on my guess here.

The Road to Serfdom

A depressing bit of reality from Ray Haynes this week. Speaking of the business community in California, he writes:

They are afraid, they tell me, of retaliation from the government, if they don’t oppose the initiative. Local governments are telling business and developers that, if they don’t oppose Proposition 90, they will make their business lives miserable. They are being told that if they donate money, their projects will be fast tracked. However, if they don’t help, their projects will go into some sort of governmental purgatory, lost in the bowels of some regulatory or planning agency until the new temple is built in Jerusalem. I am told that they have to oppose us because they just can’t risk it.

That is how far down the road to socialism California has gone. So much of the financial future of our business community depends on government action that the business community trembles in fear of the government officials. The ruling class in California knows that Proposition 90 will be their Waterloo, and they are trying to enlist the aid of all of their economic slaves to fight this last battle. The business community, now the economic slaves of our state government, is willing to sell out the freedom of us all to stay in business.

Curse Hayek for being so right.

When I Run for Office

I’ll have David Zucker do the campaign ads.

Probably.