I like the political commentary of bumbling bureaucrats more concerned with image than the job their supposed to be doing, and how government interferes with education.

I’m in Book 6 now, and it seems that Book 5 (this one) has a large hole in the plot concerning how Harry and Sirius communicate. But maybe this gets cleared up later.

Closest I’ve found to surf-jazz.

I am interested in how people arrive at their political beliefs and linguist Lakoff has some ideas on the subject. Yet, he’s also steeped in lef-wing Statism, so it’s interesting to see what “frame” he uses to view government. He explicitly says it’s that of a nurturing parent. Great, so he sees adults as children.

Fellow linguist Steven Pinker harshly critiques Lakoff in The New Republic.

I also recommend The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan and Mike Huemer’s Why People are Irrational About Politics”.

Michael Cloud is a rare gem in the freedom movement because he studies how to present free-market arguments in a persuasive way. This book is a compilation of his Persuasion Points found in the on-line Liberator, published by the Advocates of Self-Government.

So far I like Richard Thompson enough for a greatest hits compilation, but not his whole collection. I heard a song of his called “I got the hots for the smarts” on 88.5 FM WXPN in Philadelphia, and would love to find a copy. As far as I know, it’s unreleased. Anyone have it on mp3 or WMA?

The first main idea of this book is that to have lasting and meaningful success (to you), you must love what you’re doing. The authors often stress that it must be meaningful to you which is a nice emphasis. This is not too original, but the idea that if you’re not passionate about what you do, you’ll be passed by someone who is, and hence will not compete well.

Check out author’s website for book excerpts.

Good analysis of the GOP’s ideological sellout to big government and why a consistent philosophy of liberty is essential for advancing it. Sager tells a good story, provides original analysis (esp. in his “look to the West” claim), and it’s a quick read.

Good quote from the book by Dick Armey: “We come to this town and we do things we ought not to be doing in order to stay in the majority so we can do things we ought to be doing that we never get around to doing.”

This movie has its moments as a dark comedy and a satire of the state of the art world, as described in this review. However, the film does not seem to hold together well. I wish I could articulate this more. In one scene an art professor, played by John Malkovich, makes pass a student, the male lead. It’s not convincing, or perhaps it’s just cliched. However, the social commentary is well done.

The author has made earlier drafts of some chapters available on his website.

Chapter 3, page 35:

On Nobel Prize winner George Stigler: “Stigler said that ideas and debates don’t matter; no one, Stigler insisted, chanhes his or her mind on the basis of ideas.” Interesting. It makes me think about the psychology of belief, from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People to Michael Shermer’s How We Believe, Andy Newberg’s work on religious beliefs, and Michael Huemer’s Why Political Beliefs are Irrational.

Chapter 4 recounts the fall of socialist (authoritarian) regimes in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. He draws on Yergin and Stanislaw’s The Commanding Heights, and it makes me wonder if current defenders of socialism are familiar with recent history.

Henderson quotes from Milton Friedman on the draft:
[General] William Westmoreland who had been commander of the troops in Vietnam] stated that he didn’t want to command an amrmy of mercenaries. Friedman asked, “General, would you rather command an army of slaves?”

Westmoreland: I don’t like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves.
Friedman: I don’t like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries. If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get meat from a mercenary butcher.”

58:
“David Kessler, while commissioner of the FDA, made a revealing comment ina 1992 article in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. Wrote Kessler,

If members of our society were empowered to make their own decisions about the entire range of products for which the FDA has responsibility, however, then the whole rationale for the agency would cease to exist.

62: Henderson relates a story about economist Gordon Tullock, who demonstrated that a student who doubted the legitimacy of property rights implicitly believed them. How? He grabbed the student’s wallet and refused to give it back.

Chapter 6, The Markets and Discrimination:
Great chapter on how free markets discourage racial and sexual discrimination in economic transactions. “Less well know is why buses and streetcars in the South were segregated in the first place. It wasn’t because the streetcar companies wanted it that way, but because local governments required it.” For more, see his reference in the . This page has the original reference: Jennifer Roback, “The Political Economy of Segregation: The Case of Segregated Streetcars.” Journal of Economic History 56, no. 4 (December 1986): 893-917.:

The resistance of southern streetcar companies to ordinances requiring them to segregate black passengers vividly illustrates how the market motivates businesses to avoid unfair discrimination. Before the segregation laws most streetcar companies voluntarily segregated tobacco users, not blacks. Nonsmokers of either race were free to ride where they wished, but smokers were relegated to the rear of the car or to the outside platform. The revenue gains from pleased nonsmokers apparently outweighed any losses from disgruntled smokers.

Streetcar companies refused, however, to discriminate against blacks because separate cars would have reduced their profits. They resisted even after the passage of turn-of-the-century laws requiring that they segregate blacks. One railroad manager complained that racial discrimination increased costs because it required that the company “haul around a good deal of empty space that is assigned to the colored people and not available to both races.” Racial discrimination also upset some paying customers. Black customers boycotted the streetcar lines and formed competing hack (horse-drawn carriage) companies, and white customers often refused to move to the white section.

185 Henderson discusses the crowing out effect where government-funded compulsory charities force out voluntary charities. I was surprised he does reference David Beito’s From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State. He does site Russell D. Roberts: “By 1935, government relief expenditures were more than triple their 1932 level and private expenditures had fallen to one fifth of their previous level. People didn’t stop giving, but instead started giving to other causes that government didn’t support.” For more, see my links on the subject.

Chapter 12: A Tour of Washington
This chapter is based on Henderson’s experience working in the U.S. Labor Department (1981-82) and with the Council of Economic Advisors in Reagan’s White House from ‘82 to ‘84. The following is a rather disturbing story about how an economic advisor recommend a policy she knew would not be effective:

In about 1986, I visited Washington to see various economists I knew in the Reagan administration. One economist I visited was someone whom I agreed with on over 90 percent of the issues. A few months earlier, college basketball star Len Bias had overdosed on cocaine right after being drafted by the Boston Celtics, and Ronald Reagan was so upset by this that he announced harsher measures to fight the drug war. Economists tend to be skeptical because such measures generally make the problem worse, forcing drugs underground, pushing their prices higher, thus leading to more crime by people to support their habit, and so on. The economist I visited was someone I would have expected to oppose the drug war, based on earlier opinions she had expressed to me. Instead, she strongly favored the drug war and Reagan’s actions. She shared with me a memo she had written, in which she made a case for the drug war based on what economists call “market failure.” The main such failure she highlighted in her memo was the loss of productivity of people who abuse drugs. But economists, including her, usually believe that people are paid an amount roughly equal to their value of what they produce. Therefore, someone who loses productivity because of drugs is paid less than otherwise and thus bears the cost of his lost productivity; there is no market failure. I made this argument to her and, because she was a seasoned economist, she knew very well the data supporting it. But she didn’t answer with data. He answer, rather, was that this was a way that she, as an economist, can help her boss, President Reagan, justify heis measures. Her tone was one of desperation, as if she was so tired of saying “no” to every proposal for increased government regulation that she just wanted to be able to say “yes.” So, even someone with strong professional training that led her to an informed skepticism about government programs felt a strong incentive, even in the face of her own knowledge and understanding, to support augmenting an already-destructive government program.

Chapter 13: Taxes

Henderson does a fine job explaining how taxes affect our behavior. We buy larger houses and finance them via loans because mortgage interest is tax deductible. Employers provide health insurance as a method of paying employees with tax-free income. (In Ch. 15, Henderson has a scathing critique of how government regulates the health care industry.) He also relates how taxes on buildings, determined by the number of chimneys, windows, or area of a side of building, gave designers incentives to evade the tax by building around the regulations. This is discussed here.

Chapter 14: Social “Security”
Is the federal government’s paternalistic, compulsory, and fraudulent Ponzi scheme tax also racist? Consider:

In 1996, according to the insurance Web page www.insure.com, a 40-year-old black man could expect to live until age 71, compared to 76 for a white 40-year-old man. In other words, the black man could expect to collect Social Security for about 5 years (the age for receipt of full benefits will be 66 by the time he retires) versus 10 years for the white man.

Henderson summarizes an study by the RAND Corporation showing that higher health insurance deductibles caused consumers to spend lesson health care w/o effecting health outcomes.

269

A Canadian newspaper reported that in Toronto in 1991, dogs could get a CT scans for $300 with less than 24 hours notice, whereas people has to wait up to three months for the same CT scanner. Why couldn’t people get scans easily? Because, explained the news story, only the provincial health service could legally pay for a human CT scan. Get it? The dog’s owners are allowed to get a CT scan within 24 hours because the government doesn’t care about dogs. News story: “Humans Wait in Pain, Dogs Don’t,” The Daily Mercury, Guelph, Ontario, June 14, 1991. This paper has a reference to it.

On the same page he writes: “Similarly, because of socialized medicine, many young Canadian women get to experience the pleasures of natural childbirth. An Ontario doctor who administers an epidural is paid only about $100 for it, versus $1,000 in the United States. At that price, it is often not worthwhile for an anesthesiologist to stick around at, say, 3:00 a.m., when a delivering mother would like him there.” Reference: Don’t give Birth Up Here,” Wall Street Journal, March 31, 1994.

Once again Martin Seligman provides a feast of empirical data showing how certain mental habits foster or inhibit to happiness and fulfilling relationships.

Chapter 11: Love
page 193: “Secure adults remember their parents as available, as warm, and as affectionate. Avoidant adults remember their mothers as cold, rejecting, and unavailable, and anxious adults remember their fathers as unfair.”

See the Wikipedia article on Attachment Theory.