Gina Smith quotes this story, and I quote her.#

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - President Bush is disliked by more Hungarian secondary school children than former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, according to an opinion poll published on Wednesday.

Bush also topped the list of most-liked foreigners with eight percent of the vote, ahead of Pope John Paul with six percent.

The survey of 34,000 students, aged 16-18, from 655 high schools showed Adolf Hitler was the most disliked foreign personality with 25 percent of the vote, followed by Bush with 23 percent and Bin Laden with 16 percent.

Bush was even more unpopular than former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, according to the poll.

Trey Givens links to weird Japanese ice-cream.#

Deep Sea Water (Umi no Mizu Aisu)

Brine may well rhyme with fine and shine, but this flavor offering the salt of the seas does neither. Imagine drinking some milk at the beach precisely the moment you cop a mouthful of water after a huge wave dumps on you and you've got something like this out of the ordinary taste.

I used to eat peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches.

Christopher Westley asks, "Why Be Proud of Government Work?"#

Recently, when walking home from work, I was passed by one of those red monster pick-up trucks with an oversized bumper sticker on the back window that announced: FORMER MARINE.

It made me wonder why it is that Marines are the only federal employees who feel the urge to proclaim that they once were paid with taxpayer loot. You never see Volkswagens buzzing around town with a sign that says FORMER POSTAL WORKER, or Lexuses chugging down the street with a sticker proclaiming FORMER FEDERAL FISHERIES STAFF ACCOUNTANT.

So, what's with the Marines? Like any other federal employee, they live off of other people's money (acquired via conscription), they operate on a socialist model, they specialize in bullying people, and they are always faithful (semper fi!) to the government bureaucracy, whether or not that bureaucracy is acting in accord with the Constitution (or natural law).

Tyler Cowen wonders about books...#

My question is whether people are more likely to buy books and never read them, or take books out of the library and then never read them. The naive economist might think that you get more phoney-baloney behavior when the books are free. I suspect the opposite is true. If the book costs nothing, bringing it home involves little signaling or self-signaling. It might impress your neighbor to see a weighty tome on your bookshelves, but only if you had to spend money. So the good news would be that those people actually wanted to read the Greene book.

Don Boudreaux gives his home-life anecdote to counter John Edwards'.#

Already the spin on protectionist John Edwards is that his humble, working-class background — as a mill-worker's son — makes him especially attuned to the "needs" and "concerns" of "ordinary" Americans. As Edwards himself put it: "I come … from a working family where my dad worked in a mill all his life, and I was the first to go to college and spent my whole life fighting for the same people I grew up with."

Well, one anecdote is as good as another. (That's the trouble with anecdotes.) So here's another.

Dave Hyatt writes about the Safari extensions to HTML.#

A second complaint leveled against us was over the canvas tag, namely that it should have been done using SVG. My response to this is simple. Go to the w3c Web site and print out the SVG specification. Twenty minutes later, after you've killed a few dozen trees, then maybe you'll have an appreciation for why this wasn't practical.

[...]

In other words, in an ideal world where we had two years to craft Dashboard, maybe we could have used XHTML and SVG, but we aren't living in that ideal world. We can basically manage only one "huge" layout engine feature in a development cycle, and given our developer feedback the choice of HTML editing as the feature to focus on this cycle was clear. We would still love to implement SVG and XSLT and other great technologies in the future, but we simply can't do everything at once.

Finally we have submitted all of our extensions to the WHAT-WG for review. The slider in particular is already in the Web Forms draft. It is our hope that these HTML extensions will ultimately be standardized by a working group, but I wanted to emphasize that we are working with other browser vendors such as Opera and Mozilla to ensure that these extensions are implementable in those browsers and that these extensions can be standardized. We are not simply off "doing our own thing."

Richard of the Gwai Los takes me up on some of my comments yesterday to Nova Spivack about The Corporation.#

Richard thinks that the idea that employees have control over their employers because they can quit or refuse to work for them is simplistic. I agree that it is a simple idea, but I do not agree that it is wrong. If I owned a business and had manager X managing 10 people, then 9 of those people announced they were going to quit if manager X was not replaced, I would try to figure out the answer to this question: Will it cost me more to fire the manager (and lose his skills and experience) or the employees (and lose their skills, experience, and have the potential that it may happen again.) Obviously not everyone is like me, but these situations do occur. Unions are essentially ways of organizing this action. (Note, however, that unions lose their cool by being propped up by governments.)

Richard adds to my list of a company's resolutions of losing customers a "government bailout." Of course, the next sentence covers this case, so I'm not sure why he wrote that.

It seems as though Richard connects my "customers" to a company's "shareholders", but this is not who I am referring to. He says, "The book also argues that only through governments (and not through non-governmental organizations) can the psychopathic nature of corporations be restrained." I believe that this statement really means "Only through coercion (force and violence, the tools of the government) can corporations be influenced, not by negotiation." I believe this to simply be wrong. If a company's customers begin to stop buying, the company will try to recover them--no matter what the reason is they are leaving. This is true when companies respond to boycotts or to new diet crazes.

Richard writes that there is a challenge on the part of the customers to share information about the practices of the company and what not. This is not a problem now, why? He doesn't say but I will put words in his mouth and say "The government protects free speech." But, if the government and corporations are so in bed with one another why would they? The market provides the answer: Just like it is in the best interest of BP to be seen as perfect, it is in the best interest of a hypothetical provider of a free-speech zone to provide said free-speech zone. The only way either can be prevented is by force. The only entity with the right to coerce is the government, which is why it is so dangerous.

He writes that "Corporations are creations of the government, [...]" and I would stop him right there. Yes, the laws associated with how corporations are regulated were created by the government and often are in their favour. But this is an argument against government, not corporations. In the absence of government people would still create corporations, why? Because to become an employee of a corporation is a voluntary decision. It is in my best interest to work for a company, so I do it. Liberty, given by man's existence, allows for free associations (corporations) to be created when two or more men decide to ally in some endeavor.

Any power that corporations have over society at large that is not voluntary is granted to them by the government, thus if you truly want to curb corporate excesses you would want a complete hands-off approach: No regulation. Then you'd want to buy (as you already do) according to your values, which for you may have some sort of environmental or social criteria. Richard claims that I am in error to believe that other people buy according to their values. Does he really believe that everyone except for Jay McCarthy and Richard Gwai Lo do not think at all about their purchases? I'm not saying that everyone's values are the same, just that they have them and that the market finds the most optimum distribution of our scarce resources according to these competing values.

I think that Richard is having a hard time understanding what I'm saying when he writes, "Corporations [...] are even more responsible to their owners [than their customers], who don't really care what their customers think as long as they keep buying the product [...]" If the customers decide not to buy, based on their values, then the owners care because the customers aren't buying, and thus the corporations are influenced on both sides. The customers say, "Stop that," and the owners say, "Fix what they're complaining about." Where is the confusion?

 

Another note about regulation, there is a vast amount of literature about how government regulation cannot improve the situation in general, that it can only move the burden around in a way dictated by whoever happens to force themselves into control. Individuals own their life, liberty, and property regardless of how many other people disagree. Democracy is not an excuse for tyranny.