Moxie posts "A Day in the Life."#

6:15 - 7:17 PM:
My driver gets me to an undisclosed location in the new Hummer. There the local chapter of the VRWC exchange info about Iraqi oil. And chuckle at how we didn't mean to encourage Democracy in the Middle East, or ensure the absence of WMD. Oil, baby, oil!

7:30 PM:
Back at the Moxtopia compound I clean, polish and french kiss my gun collection.

8:00 PM:
Take an evening stroll and spit on the homeless man who's sitting outside the gates to my compound. Only because I'm out of rocks to throw. Lecture him about working hard and saving money. Call him lazy and a waste of a precious human life.

You want to be like Michael Feldman, I know I do:#

Back in the day, when the Dowbrigade was a rascal and an outlaw, our M.O. in this part of South America was to rent a small house in the nearby beach town of Playas, and take the 90-minute bus into Guayaquil to search for drugs (we were looking for cocaine hydrochloride but usually ended up with Pasta Basica de Cocaina, the raw material for snortable coke, which must be smoked like crack but which packs several times the wallop), hit a few pharmacies (Ecuador, like many Latin American countries with low per capita incomes, has an extremely liberal policy towards pharmaceutical drugs, on the basic principal that most people here have enough money to see a doctor or buy medicine, but not both, so the pharmacist ends up acting as a primary care physician, people wander in and cough, show their sores, and buy whatever the druggist recommends), stop in at the "Paradise of Fruits" on the Avenida Nueve de Octubre for fruit cocktail or black raspberry juice, eat at a chinese restaurant, maybe take in a movie, and in general, look for trouble and adventure in the big city.

Jay Tea on buying medicine through Canada.#

My main objection to this practice is philosophical and ethical. It's Socialism Lite. It's using price controls on private industry without getting one's hands dirty. Essentially, we're taking drugs, "laundering" them through Canada's socialistic price control system, and then bringing them back into the US. No Mafioso or drug dealer could aspire to do better.

If these mayors and governors are so enamored of the results of Canada's price-control system (and, by extension, it's socialized medicine program), let them have the courage of their convictions and put forth a similar program down here. Let's put this before the people and let them vote to seize control of the pharmaceutical industry. After all, it's for the elderly, the poor, and the children, isn't it?

If you support Medicaid and Medicare at all you're a socialist. One. And two, the government giving away monopolies de jure in the form of patents to companies is also very socialist and not conducive to free-markets or liberty.

Alex Tabarrok from The Marginal Revolution has a new article about the shortage of organ donations and what can be done about it.#

In the minds of many, financial incentives for organ donation means rich people buying up kidneys being hawked on eBay by the desperately poor. In reality, we need only make marginal changes to the current system in order to create a revolution that would save many lives. Two distinctions are especially important. First, financial compensation for cadaveric donation and for living donation are different ideas and it is quite possible to have one without the other. Indeed, the primary cause of so-called organ tourism—rich people flying to poor countries like India to undergo a transplant from a poor, living donor—is the shortage of organs in the West. By allowing compensation for cadaveric donations we'll increase the domestic supply and reduce the demand for people to fly to poorer countries for living donation. Financial compensation for cadaveric donation, in other words, is a substitute for both paid and unpaid living donation.

Second, organs are currently allocated according to a point system which is based on factors such as the quality of the match between donor and recipient, the length of time the potential recipient has been on the waiting list, the health of the potential recipient and so forth. It is not necessary to change these criteria in order to make use of financial compensation. Financial incentives can be used to increase the supply of organs without using finance to determine who will receive an organ.

Faré comments on The Last Samurai.#

In the end, a protectionist is defeated, which is good; but somehow it is sad that as usual industrialists be represented by a political lobbyist living off state corporatism rather than by entrepreneurs making a honest living on the free-market. Sigh. Actually, the political lobbyists does not represent capitalism, but indeed continues the Samurai spirit of racketeering productive workers, except that these new racketeers need not be luddites. The Samurai spirit also lives on with the Yakusa: racketting small producers and protecting them from the racketeers' own destructions, and from the racketee's personal choice. So the oppressors of the past may be vanquished, and still the oppression lives on.

All in all, a movie with beautiful pictures and a few correct combat scenes. Legolas has an asian rival. In other news, Tom Cruise finds opponents his size at long last.

Craig Newmark writes about graduate study in economics and gives many links. This is all kind of scary stuff for me, because that's what I'm thinking about doing. Currently I'm doing a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics with a minor in Economics. Hopefully, this and my grades will set me apart from other applicants.#

Last week I read the book A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1297-1344, by Judith M. Bennett. I have to write a paper about it for a class, and this is just some of my notes, maybe I'll post the paper as well.#

The book is about the life of a rather unimportant peasant woman who lived on a manor of the king's in the early 14th century. The author assembled the story of her life by looking at many court records that mentioned her and her family.#

Bennett did not set out to write about Cecilia Penifader, but while researching her manor she realized how much information about this one woman was saved, so she used that as a focal point of her book.

One of the interesting things about Brigstock, is that it was an "ancient demesne, defined as the manors held directly by William the Conqueror at the time of Domesday Survey in 1086." (pg. 35) This meant that peasants there had many more privileges than other peasants who lived under a smaller lord.#

[The] tenants of Brigstock and other ancient demesne manors had privileges unknown to other peasants, either free or serf: they did not have to pay tolls or customs anywhere in England; they could not be obliged to attend county courts; and they were able to use royal writs to bring their cases to court (this meant that they could use the power of the king to resolve disputes, especially property disputes, in their favor). Cecilia's status, then, exemplifies the blurring between free and unfree that was so common by her time. Neither a freewoman nor a serf, she tolerated a few servile obligations but also enjoyed other exceptional privileges. [pg. 35]

The other thing that was very different about Brigstock manor was that it was leased by the tenants--this meant that they managed it and took the profits of the community land as a community--typically to pay the lease. Something else that this meant was that the bailiffs and officers of the manor were elected by the tenants themselves, an atypical situation that helped put wealthy peasants in relatively powerful places. (pg. 104)

So, although Cecilia was a peasant woman, she was very well-off compared to other peasants from other areas, and as I shall indicate below, compared to other peasants in Brigstock.

Another defining fact about Cecilia Penifader is that she never married, and because she never married she had many more privileges than any other woman would. This included the right to buy, sell and manage her own land, as well as appear in court as the head of her 'household.' This is one of the reasons that she managed to become so wealthy and why much is known of her. If she had been married, then she would not have bought and sold so much land (although maybe her husband would have,) and she would not have ever (probably) appeared in the three-weekly courts.#

By her death, Cecilia had acquired over 70 acres of land from the Brigstock manor's active land market. A well-off household would probably have about 30 acres, and a poor one may have only 7.5 acres, or less. All of this land was purchased on her own, as she did not inherit any land from her family, although her parents may have been "silent partners" in her early purchases. (pg. 97)

One of the reasons that Cecilia may have been able to get so much land is that she was alive during the Great Famine of 1315 to 1322. During this time a great deal of land was likely to be being sold a cheap prices as poorer families tried to get cash for food to survive. Although this helped them in the short-run, it probably hurt them in the long-run, but was a good situation for someone like Cecilia to be in. It should be noted that she was not untouched by the famine, which can be seen from the death of parents during it. (pg. 99)

Cecilia was a woman, and this made her situation more difficult than if she had been a man. She could not participate in many manorial functions, such as: tithings, community policing units that every man was a member of; court pledging, and a pledge was required for every person involved in every case; and manorial offices, she could not be elected to public positions. (pg. 115)#

It is hard, however, to say whether she would have been better off had she been married. Maybe she would have been lucky and have a husband who was as business savvy as she was who did not feel the need to beat her and treat her poorly.

For Cecilia, only downward mobility would have resulted from bringing a male lover into her household. She would have gained no extra economic security; her family would have objected strenuously; and neighbors would have been scandalized. What could be tolerated for her brothers was not acceptable for her--unless she contracted an upwardly mobile liaison with a merchant or knight. [pg. 123-124]

All in all, because Cecilia was a well-off women, it seemed she didn't much need a man for an reason, which is probably why she never married one. This is not to say that the same would go for any woman and that there was no reason to marry, there was, just not for Cecilia. (pg. 125)

Bennett wants to make sure that no one reads too much into Cecilia. She was in some respects very common in the ways she made her money and not marrying was not incredibly uncommon. Additionally, her business sense should not be overestimated--she was not incredibly rich and did not become a merchant.#

Cecilia and other English peasants were not modern before their time. After all, she was a villein of the ancient demesne, subject to the jurisdiction of her manor; she passed her life firmly rooted in the land and the work of her own hands; her social world was profoundly and somewhat narrowly shaped by kinship, community, household, and parish. Cecilia was a well-off peasant, neither a rugged individualist nor an early entrepreneur. [pg. 135]