Matthew Yglesias does not want to pay more to eat and suggests that the recent tariffs imposed on imported Canadian wheat are cut from the same cloth as the the rest of the Bush wealth redistribution program. My non-scientific study of Canadian food prices during a recent weekend trip suggested that restaurant prices are comparable to or a bit less then US restaurant prices. But this is before the exchange rate kicks in.
Some folks are talking about this article by Anatole Kaletsky.
Right Thinking uses the article to seque into a look at the origin of Mayday.
Curveball thinks the article is right on.
au currant(who does not seem to have permalinks so page down to the next to last may 1 post) tells us that
Shopkeepers all over London were boarding up their windows and doors yesterday in anticipation of soapdodgers throwing a temper tantrum against The Man today
And Instapundit tells us “He’s right, of course,” when Kaletsky says
For if there is one social principle on which all economists, historians and politicians must now surely agree, it is that capitalism has done more than any other human construct to benefit working people around the world.
I kind of doubt that all those folks will agree with him on this. But they should. And the world might want to head on a straight line to capitalism and get rid of this statist cronyism that continues to be mislabeled as capitalism. Then the working people around the world will begin to see real benefits.
The Progressive Policy Institute wonders about this:
Utterly mysterious fact: the United States seems to be the only country to discriminate by the “length” of silverware. If a fork is 27 centimeters or longer, the rate is 8.5% plus half a cent per fork; at 26.9 cm or less, it jumps to 15.8% plus nine-tenths of a cent per fork. Does anyone know why?
Do you know whether US tariffs are higher on gold plated silverware or stainless steel silverware? Read the rest of the article to find out.
I think Nurse Ratched’s arithmetic is just fine:
This all adds up to more points in the “good for the ecology, good for the economy” column than in the “perpetuating the petrochemical oligarchy and making the world less safe for liberals” column to me, but maybe my arithmetic is off.
Head over there and read the Nurse’s take on thermal depolymerizaton. If this technology works as advertised it will massively change the economics of waste management while dramatically reducing the import (ance) of middle eastern oil.
Oh, and a few years down the road I can see one of these things in every garage. I suspect that it was something like this tool that the folks on Dune used to reclaim the water from the dead.
And a bit earlier in the day Gregory Markle found himself in “..the old socialist/capitalist debate…” and as so often seems to be the case in these discussions it is not at all clear what the participants mean when they use these terms. If the debaters would simply provide a 2-3 sentence definition with their first use of one of these words (plus others like democracy, fascism, liberty, etc) these discussions would become instantly more meaningful to their readers (and I suspect the particpants as well). A link to a more detailed exposition would be even better.
My task, before I get too involved in similar debates will be to write my brief expositions or pick the variant closest to my position from the many that already exist on the web. Then, if I say something like “…was built on the shoulders of capitalist democracy…” you, the reader, might be able to figure out what country/society is being referred to and whether the writer means something like free market capitalism based on protecting individual rights or, as exists today in many variations, a state regulated and subsidized corporate economy (and no matter how many times some form of the latter is called capitalism…it isn’t).