No Not Tonight
Andrew Moroz points to The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons!#
Doug Kern writes a new Screwtape Letter.#
Arnold Kling comments on a fabulous bit of new research from the UCal-Berkeley Labor Center.#
The study authors treat the entire amount of public assistance to Wal-mart workers as a cost to the state. But since Wal-mart workers are at the bottom of the economic ladder, why doesn't it make more sense to add up all the wage payments by Wal-mart to the workers, and count those as a saving to the state?
The question is: what would these workers be doing without their Wal-Mart jobs? I would confidently assert a lot of them would be unemployed, and then the full cost of their subsistence would be borne by the state. The study assumes, bizarrely, that if Wal-Mart would just fire these workers they would be employed in high wage jobs paying full subsistence wages, and the state would pay them nothing. (To be fair to them, the authors say they don't assume this. To be fair to logic, no other assumption generates the study's supposed "results").
Those study authors could be right. Maybe, since knowledge of basic economics is not required, all the Wal-Mart workers could get hired at Berkeley.
Chip Gibbons on people holding each other back.#
Hardly a day goes by when I do not come in contact with yet another another person, with a fraction of my intellect and skills, who feels that they possess a "right" to tell me what I need to be doing with my life or what I should be buying or why it should be important to me.
Sometimes I just want to say, "I sure hope your IQ is 150 or above since you seem so convinced that you know what's best for all of us."
What future is there for mankind when those with IQs less than 100 telling those with IQs of say 120 and above what they should do with their lives?
A friend of mine recommended this ridiculous article by Craig Lambert called The Way We Eat Now in Harvard Magazine. The author has a Ph.D. in something from Harvard.#
This article is part of the growing cry around the leftist world about the "crisis" of obesity and unhealthy eating. I will highlight some of the more ridiculous policies he recommends and things he suggests.
- We are slaves to advertising: "Personal responsibility surely does play a role, but we also live in a "toxic environment" that in many ways discourages healthy eating, says Ludwig. "There's the incessant advertising and marketing of the poorest quality foods imaginable. To address this epidemic, you'd want to make healthful foods widely available, inexpensive, and convenient, and unhealthful foods relatively less so. Instead, we've done the opposite.""
- We should really be French.
- The world we live in should be more in convenient and dirtier: ""The way we do our work has changed, and so has the way we spend our leisure time," he continues. "The average number of television hours watched per week is close to a full-time job! People used to go for walks and visit their neighbors. Much of that is gone as well." Not only do many adults spend their work lives in front of computer screens, but the design of public spaces outside their offices eliminates physical activity. In skyscrapers, it's often hard to find the stairs; electronic sensors in public restrooms are eliminating even the most minimal actions of flushing toilets or turning faucets on and off."
- The article sometimes verges on the completely inane. How is the following sentence different from "The sky is blue.": "Cooking might be considered the first food-processing technology,"
And finally the kicker that makes you wonder if this is not Dictator Weekly...
"There was once a very successful U.S. government program aimed at changing eating habits," he continues. "It happened during World War II, and it was called 'food rationing.' They made it a patriotic thing to change the way you ate. The government hired the best people on Madison Avenue to come to Washington and work for the War Department. It worked splendidly. To convince people to eat wisely, a determined, clever program could make a difference." Ludwig compares the obesity crisis to global warming. "Is it 100 percent proven that we are in for an environmental calamity? Do we want to wait until Washington, D.C., is submerged by rising ocean levels to take action?" he asks. "The risks of inaction are much greater than the risks of action."
Only the government can solve this "problem" and the best solution is complete control over what we eat. I completely agree.