My friend, and co-blogger at Market Correction, Andy Morriss has this superb letter in today's Wall Street Journal:

Holman Jenkins asks "Does Obama Want to Own the Airlines?" (Business World, July 8). I am sure he does not. Rather than own them, the president and his congressional allies want to control the airlines -- a crucial difference as ownership implies taking responsibility.

As Mr. Jenkins notes, the Justice Department's belated intervention against Continental's efforts to join the Star Alliance appears aimed at extorting concessions for the Democrats' union allies. That is not the action of an owner of airline assets but of someone determined to redistribute wealth from airline passengers and shareholders to favored special interests.

If either the administration or Congress cared about competition in air travel, they would relax the protectionist rules that prevent foreign ownership of U.S. airline assets and deregulate American airspace to allow foreign carriers to operate here.

Here's a letter that I sent today to the Washington Post:

No doubt such itinerant living served several royal purposes.  The historian Thomas Cahill explains one of these:

This quotation appears on pages 123-124 of Cahill's very enjoyable Mysteries of the Middle Ages (Anchor Books, 2007).

It's pretty horrific. Of course neither party wants you to see what the current system looks like. Also horrific. I do think the proposed reform is worse. But let's not pretend that the current system isn't a Kafka-esque bureacracy akin to the picture.

In his column in today's Washington Post, Harold Meyerson rightly applauds the fact that Robert Rubin is "concerned with the world's poor."  But I wonder if Meyerson himself gives a damn about the world's poor.

In many of his columns Meyerson argues against free trade.  He does so because it obliges high-wage Americans to compete against low-wage foreigners, and thus allegedly puts downward pressure on Americans' wage rates.  Forget that neither theory nor data support Meyerson's claim about trade's effect on high-wage Americans.  If Meyerson himself were truly concerned with the world's poor, he would unconditionally support free trade - a proven means for raising the wages of low-wage foreign workers.

Here's a letter that I sent recently to the Washington Post:

Here's a letter that I sent a few days ago to the Washington Post:

In yesterday's Washington Post, Peter Wallison rightly challenges the Obama administration's conclusion that ordinary Americans lack the capacity to understand complex financial instruments - an incapacity so overpowering that even full disclosure by sellers of these instruments is insufficient to ensure that the typical person can be trusted to choose whether or not to invest in such instruments.

But let's accept, for argument's sake, the administration's judgment that ordinary Americans can't adequately assess complexity.  Doesn't it then follow that Americans' election of Mr. Obama to high office deserves no credit?  After all, isn't the task of assessing the merit of one person's ideas on economics, foreign affairs, ethics, law, and other difficult topics extraordinarily complex?  Given that Joe Six-Pack and Jane Soap-Opera cannot be trusted with the relatively straightforward task of sensibly investing their own money, how can they be trusted to meet the far more complex challenge of choosing powerful national leaders?

Here's a letter that I sent recently to the Washington Post:

..........................................

"I want to keep what I earn" is regarded as greedy and unenlightened.

"I want to take what you earn" is regarded as selfless and progressive.

From Planet Money:

But those poor (and developing) nations have their own group. It's called the anti-G20, in a nod to the G20 collection of industrialized states. The anti-G20 met at the U.N. last month, where Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Martin Khor explained what keeps impoverished countries down. Answer: Their debt to the IMF and wealthier nations.

There are plenty of things rich countries do to make poor countries poor. Refuse to trade with them. Give the thugs who run the country money. But this IMF argument has always struck me as strange. The poor countries are poor because they IMF expects them to pay back the money that the poor countries borrowed? How do the loans get made in the first place? Don't the thugs who borrow the money bear some of the responsibility? How would forgiving those loans solve the problem?

Go here and scroll down to near the bottom. It's all good. But this part is the punchline, where he imagines Nancy Pelosi negotiating a car purchase. The picture is good, too:

DEALER: Yes sirree, I can let you have this cherry-red baby for $19,999.99! Plus undercoating and dealer prep.

PELOSI: I'll pay $50,000.

[+] Enlarge

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais"Children, this is where we give away your future."

DEALER: For a limited time only, I can throw in remote-controlled eight-way power cupholders, for another $999.99.

PELOSI: I'll buy them at $75,000.

DEALER: Do you want the extended warranty?

PELOSI: No. But I'll pay another $25,000 for it.

DEALER: Aren't you worried something will go wrong?

PELOSI: If it does, I'll just send the bill to the taxpayer.

DEALER: So you are willing to pay $150,000 for a $20,000 car? I'll have to go ask my manager! (Disappears into back, pretends to talk to manager, returns.) Lady, you drive a hard bargain. He says that for $31 billion, we will give you absolutely nothing at all.

PELOSI: Sold.

Here's a letter that I sent yesterday to WTOP radio (103.5 and 107.7 on your FM dial in and near DC):

Here's a letter that I sent today to the New York Times:

Paul Krugman also stands to translate his reading of today's oil prices into big bucks.

A Cafe Hayek reader writes the following to me in an e-mail:

I have no delusions that sliced bread (or the machines and processes for making it commercially profitable) is a world-changing phenomenon.  By itself, its contribution to human welfare is small compared to many other innovations and certainly compared to the accumulated innovations over time.  But this fact reveals one of the beauties of the decentralized market process.  To explain, I reprise here a June 28, 2004 post on the prosperity pool.

The Prosperity Pool

Don Boudreaux

I’m continually impressed by the countless, seemingly daily improvements in the quality and range of goods and services available on the market. I reflected on these improvements yesterday as I watched my seven-year-old son, Thomas, play with plastic “water noodles” in the swimming pool. Water noodles are brightly colored flotation devices shaped like very large pieces of macaroni. They make playing in a pool both more enjoyable and safer for young children.

In fact, think of human material prosperity as being like water contained in a gargantuan swimming pool. The higher the “water” level, the greater is our prosperity. Call it the “prosperity level” in the prosperity pool.

How is this pool filled? Mostly, small drop by small drop. Countless people line the edge of the pool, each dripping in a drop or two of additional “water” – additional prosperity – from time to time. Very few single drops have any noticeable effect on the prosperity level. Had water noodles never been invented and produced, no one would have noticed. Ditto for almost everything else that comes available on the market – new shades of paint color for homes; improved quality of stereo speakers; improved food-freezing techniques; slightly longer-lasting light bulbs; a new fusion cuisine; a more-efficient machine for weaving fabric; improved corkage for wine. The list is practically endless.

A very few drops are large – say, the polio vaccine, and Henry Ford’s innovation for producing automobiles. But almost all drops are tiny. These tiny drops, though, together result in an enormously high level of material prosperity.

Many people want the prosperity level raised noticeably, by one gigantic infusion. Because each of us individually, even large corporations, are small compared to the whole, no one of us can ever really hope to raise the prosperity level noticeably. As a result, too many of us believe that we don’t “change the world” by contributing little drops; we arrogantly want to make a big splash – a move that raises the prosperity level noticeably.

So what do those with a passion to “change the world” do? They naturally call upon government, the one institution that can make a big splash.

To make a big splash, government makes unusually large infusions into the prosperity pool. Unfortunately, because government officials are not directed by market signals, because of public-choice problems, and because the nature of market prosperity is for it to grow decentrally and incrementally, the big splashes that government makes are too often the result of giant boulders bureaucratically tossed into the pool. These boulders often do make big splashes. They often noticeably change the level of the prosperity pool – too often downward. Giant splashes, after all, are rather wild; much of the splash ends up outside of the pool, where it dissolves.

And even if the measured level of the prosperity pool is higher after the big splash, this higher level might well be due to the fact that a large boulder is now in the pool; the volume of prosperity in the pool might be lower.

Of course, maybe I’m all wet.

(HT Carrie Conko)