I love it and put layers of it on hamburgers: above the patty, again above the lettuce, and a huge quantity on the plate for dipping (dipping the burger as well as the fries). Yes, yes, the sugar, the corn syrup, yackety, and yes, the U.S. eats more salsa now than it does ketchup, but hey ... 38 years old. I don't digest salsa like I did when I was, you know, 37.

Strange then that my restaurant will not offer ketchup.

And for my third complaint of five, a complaint o' the day of Milton Friedman's policies and positions? I cannot stand that he ever said this:

"I am a libertarian with a small l and a Republican with a capital R. And I am a Republican with a capital R on grounds of expediency, not on principle."

Libertarians do have, you all realize, their own separate party?

(I just set out to type "no more than" and had my fingers on the wrong keys. And that was the result, Bi niew rgB. I like it quite a bit more. It should be the name of a newspaper in Scotland, although I have probably just inadvertently tossed profanities at you in Interlingua.)

What I was going to type was "no more than three five-star Dallas restaurants serve breakfast." Who knows if it is true? It probably is. And why is that?

1. Reverse cachet? "Breakfast? Bah! Bacon and grits are not fancy. Goose liver on quinoa is fancy."

2. Herd mentality? "Five Star Fishery in Euless opens late afternoons, so it is settled. I will open late afternoons. I will now rest my worn cerebellum."

3. Outsourcing? "My strongest meal is my duck a l'orange. Why bother with Shredded Wheat and table sugar? Let the Sri Lankans serve cold cereal. Bah!"

My restaurant will absolutely serve breakfast: cold chipotle chicken wings and eggs, sunflower seed toast and coffee. And no scrambled eggs -- we will fry them in a skillet and flip them once or twice, or not at all. Your choice. Patrons demanding scrambled eggs will be asked to take a swim.

As promised, my second point of contention with Milton Friedman is his position on copyrights.

My dream restaurant would sit its patrons ankle-deep in the blue waters of the Caribbean, one hundred yards or so from the beach. It would serve lamb short ribs à la Nick & Sam's, rigatoni with butter and salt, crisp and buttery green beans with almonds, Carta Blanca beer and Breyer's ice cream. Despite its geography there would be no seafood on the menu. In spite of what they say no one really likes seafood, with the possible exception of fried oysters.

It would be named The Duke Ellington Martini, which, yes, would be the signature drink, even though I don't like martinis. But enough folks do like them that I imagine I am missing something.

The restaurant and reception area, necessarily on dry land, would hang pictures of diners with crabs and fish at their ankles. And no bathing suits! Patrons may leave their shoes behind and roll up their pant legs, but the dress code will otherwise be strict and strictly enforced.

As promised, Milton Friedman wrote, "With respect to education, I pointed out that government was playing three major roles: (1) legislating compulsory schooling, (2) financing schooling, (3) administering schools. I concluded that there was some justification for compulsory schooling and the financing of schooling."

My first point of contention with Friedman's work: a philosophical basis for breaking any public or private function into independent line items seems unsupportable.

...here it is, “The Power of Choice: The Life and Ideas of Milton Friedman,” a 90-minute documentary that remembers his many accomplishments. You can check local listings here.

For a different sort of look at Milton Friedman, including a question I would have liked to answer in his place, click here (half-way down the page).

And to recognize Milton Friedman Day, I hope to spend the week next week finding points where I disagree with him, a point a day. Right now I have only a point for Monday in mind.

As if on cue -- recall my post yesterday -- Professor Cowen responds to economists who favor equality policy. In a piece absolutely bursting with quotables, my favorite is:

Most American wealth today is produced rather than taken from other people.

Cowen also blogs on consumption equality here, and cross-posts parts of his NYT article here.

Dan Klein, whom I found through Tyler Cowen, asks those economists who believe in minimum wage laws to justify their beliefs. Answers fall into a few general categories:

1. A nod toward cultural beliefs and expectations

2. An attempt to improve democratic institutions

3. An expression of solidarity

4. Simple arithmetic: higher pay for low-income workers means fewer families on the government dole

As Professor Cowen points out, there is little mention of economics.

As philosophical statements go, # 1 is amateurish and # 4 is downright ghoulish. Cultural beliefs should not drive philosophy; the reverse should be true (and mathematics should not drive philosophy either). # 2 has a sort of reversed Law of Unintended Consequences vibe that turns me off, meaning # 3 is my favorite answer by default, in spite of its rather eerie scent.

George Will wrote on equality earlier this week.

And I find it interesting that top-down economies such as Venezuela and Zimbabwe have higher income inequalities than does the United States, which, in turn, has more inequality than does New Zealand, for example. Wasn't that the point of central planning in the first place? To reduce inequalities?

A government, like any group of men, does not possess values.

Yesterday after writing an apology for blind ideology, I challenged myself to write one for pragmatism, and that was it, all eleven words of it. If you like, I'll go on, but really, I'm already done:

Groups of men are not moral or immoral, groups of men are not rational or irrational, are not religious, spiritual, agnostic, atheist, or adversarial to religion. These are words that describe individuals, not groups. So it is impossible for a government to be a blind ideologue: in governing there is only pragmatism.

Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005), established that certain homes could be legally seized and razed to make space for waterfront shopping, a museum, and Pfizer offices. The outcry was swift, loud, and long.

Pragmatism may best be described as "a doctrine that determines value through the test of consequences or utility." There is no question that more New London residents would benefit than those who would suffer from this decision: only 15 home owners chose to sue, whereas the entire town stood to benefit from the development plan. So why the outcry? The development plan clearly passes a test of utility.

The decision offends our blind and collective ideology that a home can only be taken for the most urgent cases of national security. Barring the highest claim of pressing national needs, we believe that the sovereignty of a family begins with residential property. I have not made the case just now. We have already all made it together.

(Tomorrow, a case for pragmatism.)

Lifted straight from Marginal Revolution, with respect.

Read Tyler Cowen's full dispatch. Frankly, I disagree. I think the key is simple: another answer. Universities are built to challenge us for another answer. God is an answer I have already heard, they say. So do not answer "God." Give me another answer.

Ironic but fitting, then, that (Professor) Cowen outthinks the question with his post.

Of course my favorite metaphysical question is: Why is there something instead of nothing? But this one is used up: no one will answer it anymore. So try this one: How else does the Christian bible so accurately predict the history of the Jews?

Hat tip and stately bow to Ray for the slick new site design.

I wrote my congressman, for the first time in years. I hope to do this once daily.

Find your congressman here, and your senator here.

I wrote:

Congress should begin to phase out all farm and business subsidies altogether. Crops and industries should compete for market share individually. This is the only true "level playing field."

If it isn't already clear: A is for agriculture. This coming Monday, maybe B will be for Balco; I haven't decided. Write yours today, it only takes ten minutes or so.

Read it here. Written by David Boaz for Encyclopedia Britannica.

Fair warning: some libertarians will become apoplectic over the clause "God-given individual rights."

Here is mine:

An ethical system that recognizes one man as sovereign from the next. Thus libertarians advocate capitalism, diplomacy, and limited government by representative republic.

Libertarians in turn define capitalism as a network of voluntary exchanges and strict private property rights; formal in that civil rights are specific and inviolable, informal in that central planning is not only considered inefficient, but morally errant.

Apparently Wolf Blitzer posed this question on his show last night. (Disclosure: I was eating dinner when this segment aired and missed it altogether.)

Neoconservative? Who knows? Fantasy? No doubt. How else would you describe a slick and scary alt-universe where cell phones never need charging and Southern California has no traffic? This is a world where suspects are named, tracked, found, interrogated, tortured, and left to die off screen within an hour or two. Federal agents divine complex terror cell movements without sleep, permission, or evidence. And with all of the surveillance equipment and electronic mobile waterboarding with web access, the viewer can only believe that FBI means Federal Batman Institute.

But why neoconservative, exactly?

1. The torture? By my memory, Season Four found Jack Bauer torturing four suspects in a single shift. (347 suspects a year, at that rate.) Who knows if or when the neoconservative movement became the party of torture. As far as I have heard, it was a single memo that caused all the fuss. And aren't other conservatives, even many liberals on board with the "ticking time bomb" caveat? (Which Reason Magazine takes down quite deftly here.)

On the other side of the debate, headlines such as "Torture Chamber: FOX's 24 terrifies viewers into believing its bizarre and convoluted plot twists" deeply underestimate network audiences.


2. The Arab-centrism? In other words, more of the terrorists ought to be home-grown, Timothy McVeigh-styled nihilists. But the show takes pains to have plenty of these.


3. The neoconservative characters? Maybe -- but what about the rest of the characters?


4. The frequency of attacks? It's a TV show, people. Would you rather watch the agents eating turkey sandwiches and talking football?


My point? I would hate to see 24 join SUVs, Ben & Jerrys, March of the Penguins, sushi, Wal-Mart, male grooming, NASCAR, french fries and CVS Pharmacy as another of those red state/blue state cultural flashpoints. The cultural war in all of its evergreen splendor is stupid and accomplishes little, other than making pundits feel better for scoring a significant point.

And yes, I feel better.

As a follow up to this post, find the following Nation Master statistic, "Patents granted (per capita) by country:"

#1 Luxembourg: 431.098 per million people per 1
(...)
#9 New Zealand: 25.5266 per million people per 1
(...)
#38 UK: 1.35669 per million people per 1
#39 Spain: 1.04112 per million people per 1
#40 United States: 0.97723 per million people per 1
#41 Canada: 0.944978 per million people per 1
#42 Uzbekistan: 0.931064 per million people per 1
(...)
#56 Iran: 0.014702 per million people per 1
#57 Brazil: 0.0107462 per million people per 1
#58 Mexico: 0.00941593 per million people per 1
#59 India: 0.0009257 per million people per 1
#60 China: 0.000765513 per million people per 1

I'm not altogether sure what to make of these numbers. At least my first post on the subject is validated somewhat.

Post postscript: it occurs to me that very large populations (China, India, Brazil) might grant fewer patents per capita than smaller populations (Luxembourg, New Zealand) simply on mathematical grounds. There is no ideology to the statement that number n divided by a larger divisor ld will result in a smaller ratio sr. It is clear that there needs to be some balance between protecting intellectual property and maintaining perpetual monopolies. I'll let the policy wonks figure out what precisely that balance is.

The Romans invented fascism. A bundle of bound twigs was its symbol.

One twig could be broken. A bundle would prevail. Fascism ... strength in unity.

I believe in strength. I believe in unity.

And if that strength, that unity of purpose, demands a uniformity of thought, word and deed then so be it.

I will not hear talk of freedom. I will not hear talk of individual liberty. They are luxuries.

--From Chapter Five of V for Vendetta (Roman numerals, get it?). I actually prefer the film. Who has time for 296 pages of graphic novel?


This passage is a finer case for fascism than I could ever do, even if I was playing the devil's advocate. But let me try to play anyway, to append my own sentence or two:

Proponents for freedom will contest that individual rights of life and property are ours by our very nature, that all liberties are permitted except those which deprive another man of what is his by right: life and property. But man's lot in nature is nasty, brutish and short, is striken by poverty and illness. There is no life or property to be had in nature, outside of the city walls. A man keeps only what he can defend from force with force.

Stepping inside the city walls, the man can find all manner of luxuries not available before: food, drink, music, art, leisure time, easy work. Also long life and property, preserved without need of force. But in an emergency, the first sacrifices are the luxuries.

As a follow up to an earlier post, find the following Reason Hit and Run dispatch, and a lively comments section.

The gist? Is the U.S. government just a "large buyer" of anything? And should it be a large buyer of drugs? And, as our earlier post alluded, if drug companies are not allowed the protection of long patents, will they be willing to make large R & D expenditures for other, potentially life-saving drugs?

26) Q: Ben travels to a distant planet. In outerspace, with essentially no gravity, he can throw a baseball (mass = 0.5 kg) and a shot put (mass = 4 kg) at the same speed with no discernable difference in effort. True or false?

A: (False.) According to Newton’s second law, force equals mass times acceleration. If the objects are thrown at the same speed by the same person they must have the same acceleration. For the same acceleration the force exerted by the person’s arm has to be much higher for the more massive object. Gravity, or the lack of it, does not change the fact that the shot put will always be harder to throw. It has more inertia.

Source.

14) Q: When a person on Earth stands on a floor, the upward force the floor exerts on her feet is the force which is directly responsible her perception or sensation of weight not the downward force of gravity. (Assume the person is supported only by the floor.) True or false?

A: (True.) When a person stands on the floor she has both a weight force acting on her in a downward direction and a normal force which is the force the floor exerts on her in the upward direction. If we remove the normal force by springing a trap door located over a bottomless pit the person will fall. During the fall she will feel weightless even though the weight force has not changed. Since the weight force is present both when the person had a sensation of weight and when she didn’t, we have to conclude that the attractive force of gravity is not directly responsible for its perception. The perception of weight exists only when a normal force is present.

We might say that the sensation of weight requires both a normal force and a weight force but it also turns out that the sensation, of weight can occur even when there is virtually no weight, or gravitational attraction force. This is the basis of so-called artificial gravity on space stations in science fiction movies. The spinning motion of the space station creates a normal force on the space station dwellers’ feet. This normal force acts as the centripetal force, which keeps the station inhabitants rotating in a circle along with the space station. If the station rotates at the right speed, the normal force on the inhabitants will be the same as on Earth, and they will feel like they have a gravitational force acting on them even though they don’t. Hence, the perception of weight depends on the normal force.

Source.

I found a nice physics quiz the other day. My final score is ... none of your business. I thought we would finish out the week with some of the high points (which is to say: some of the low points).


28) Q: Iron can exist as a gas. True or false?

A: (True.) Although iron is a solid at what we call normal temperatures, iron can also be a liquid, gas, or plasma. This is true of any element.


Plasma iron, then? Where do I sign up?

Yes, says Bruce Bawer, in his book While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. To be sure, it is an idea that impugns religious tolerance and open borders.

But according to Tim Cavanaugh it is A Clockwork Orange that describes the future of Europe, not 1984. For example, of the recent French labor riots:

...you've got underemployed but well fed kids with plenty of time on their hands, the depraved indifference of a welfare state that usurps the role of parents but provides no useful structure for the youth, a housing-project culture that sees itself (not without reason) as a defenseless ward of the state, politicians who veer between mealy-mouthed coddling of sociopaths and vicious denunciation of people with legitimate grievances, and kids who react to it all with theatrical violence.

Interestingly, it is not difficult to prove that France over-protects her culture. (Read: her non-Muslim culture -- America incubates her culture under no such legislative wing.) So while it is silly to state that French film subsidies have given birth to radical Islam, it is certainly reasonable to question whether the us v. them characteristic of everyday French life causes disenfranchisement and submits Islamism as a worthy alternative.

And there are other French examples than just film.

American film and television each operate in as l'aissez faire an environment that exists today. I am not speaking of the message of Hollywood, but the process, the way films are made. So although these two indicators are seemingly unrelated, it squares the circle that American Muslims are more assimilated, more je ne sais quoi American than are their European counterparts.

Read the Wikipedia backgrounders here, and put emphasis on the reaver backgrounder here.

Read a review that almost surpasses the film itself here.

My take? "Legislation does not engender more moral men."

"Send a gentleman to take on a madman, not another madman."

"Belief is dangerous -- the good kind of dangerous."

(An interesting aside: writer and producer Joss Whedon claims that he is quite a bit more liberal than the main character. "Mal's politics are very reactionary and 'Big government is bad' and 'Don't interfere with my life'," Whedon explains. "And sometimes he's wrong." Frankly I don't believe him. Left-wing political thought is the dress code of the entertainment industry, and I believe that Whedon is simply dressing appropriately.)

Weekends are casual at Cuennei, so please, necktie off, shirt tail out, feet up.

My wife would quickly answer that The Lord of the Rings most improved with each new picture, but from where I sit, very few film experiences top the first ten minutes of my first crack at Fellowship of the Ring.

Each successive Matrix film improved intellectually, but not artistically. The filmmakers seemed to forget the golden rule: the play's the thing.

The second (meaning the first) Star Wars trilogy started preposterously and finished strong. (Interesting that this is a reversal of the ep.4-6 trilogy, which started brilliantly and ended with ewoks.) So by the time Revenge of the Sith was released, it had been over two decades since Darth Vader had appeared on the big screen. This way George Lucas could have patched in lost episodes of Twin Peaks and the film would have worked.

Evil Dead? Contender.

American Pie Ha! Never. Nothing beats Shannon Elizabeth's Full Frontal Plus scene in Part I. Not even the genesis of Darth Vader in SWE3.

So the winner is? X-Men. No question at all. And if you repeat this I'll deny it, but The Last Stand even made me well up a little bit.

It's official. My favorite new websites are Anecdotage and 10 Zen Monkeys. A November 2006 TZM article posted by R.U. Sirius posed a real goatee-scratcher: has the U.S. fallen into fascism yet? Respondents ranged from a former consultant for Michael Badnarik's 2004 presidential run, to a founding member of F.A.I.R.

Of course the answers fell under three general headings: "No! Never!" ... "Without a doubt, yes!" and "Not yet."

The liveliest reply is that of Ken Layne, the West Coast Bureau Chief of Wonkette:

Fascism is such a twisted, loaded and abused word. We need a completely new term.

Humorless liberals yell “Fascist!” at anything they don’t like: NASCAR, Wal-Mart, or especially somebody enjoying a nice hamburger.

The Neocons have made the bizarre decision that Fascism is actually a 1,400-year-old Semitic religion from Arabia, even though that religion is virtually indistinguishable from the monotheistic Semitic religions they claim to follow. Of course, the Neocons are the closest thing to a purely Fascist party in America.

And my beloved libertarians have the bad habit of believing Fascism is a mom asking grandpa not to blow cigar smoke on the babies, or the cops asking some target shooters to point away from the pre-school.

So what the hell is Fascism in 2006? Russia provides a pretty good example: Media directly controlled by the Kremlin, ethnic minorities literally deported by the military (re: Georgians), oil companies nationalized (and their executives jailed), official skinheads attacking farmers markets, faux-terrorist apartment bombings in Moscow used to justify aggressive wars against bordering ethnic states, and the murder of investigative journalists.

Read the rest, and the other replies at 10 Zen Monkeys.

(Find my favorite Anecdotage here.)

As U.S. Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD) recovers over the next number of months, the question becomes pertinent.

The Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the federal constitution is clear: a disabled president can be involuntarily withdrawn from the office. That Wikipedia backgrounder even writes of an event where Ronald Reagan risked removal from office, due to "perceived laziness and ineptitude."

Try to disregard the precarious balance of power in the Senate, because the answer to this question will resound long after the present matter is resolved. Together with the House of Representatives, the Senate passes legislation, declares war, impeaches presidents, regulates currency, and establishes rules of immigration. A single senator can filibuster most of these actions and effectively kill them. Given this, should a months-long disability not disqualify a U.S. senator or representative from service?

And how long of a disability is too long?

The debate goes something like:

(From the left)
1. Corporate greed and irresponsibility

2. Disease mongering boosting sales (see also # 6 below)

(From the drug companies themselves)
3. Price fixing in all other world markets (try this link as well)

4. Pipeline expense and failure rate, combined with regulatory uncertainty

5. Simple economics: how can a massive research and development campaign work effectively for drugs intended for rare or short-lived diseases?

(From free-market proponents)
6. Increased demand

7. Extended monopolies on drugs

8. No competition (try this link as well)

There is certainly a kernel of truth in each of these, although #4, 5, and 8 seem the most culpable. Curiously enough, each of those three indicts the FDA in spirit as well as in letter.

The same five names come up all the time: James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, Andrew Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, and George W. Bush.

James Buchanan served from March 4, 1857 to March 4, 1861. Historians credit his detachment from the slavery question as one cause of the American Civil War. Andrew Johnson served from April 15, 1865 to March 4, 1869, and scholars assert that he fumbled the Reconstruction effort. Warren G. Harding served from March 4, 1921 to August 2, 1923, and his short administration was rocked by the Teapot Dome corruption scandal. Richard M. Nixon served from January 20, 1969 to August 9, 1974, and needs no further introduction. Neither does current president George W. Bush, inaugurated January 20, 2001.

No student of history, I will leave the answer to the reader. Recall that George Bush has yet to complete his term, and that while the administrations of Buchanan and Johnson are described with words such as "failure" and "ineffective," those of Harding and Nixon are described with words like "corruption," even "treason." Failure and ineffectiveness are passive crimes. Corruption is the active violation of a sworn oath.

But then again Nixon's administration may have been more moderate than younger readers will know:

As President, Nixon imposed wage and price controls, indexed Social Security for inflation, and created Supplemental Security Income (SSI). The number of pages added to the Federal Register each year doubled under Nixon. He eradicated the last remnants of the gold standard. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), promoted the Legacy of parks program and implemented the Philadelphia Plan, the first significant federal affirmative action program, and dramatically improved salaries for U.S. federal employees worldwide. As a party leader, Nixon helped build the Republican Party (GOP), but he ran his 1972 campaign separately from the party, which perhaps helped the GOP escape some of the damage from Watergate. The Nixon White House was the first to organize a daily press event and daily message for the media, a practice that all subsequent staffs have performed.

Reason has an excellent survey on similar matters here.