voluntaryXchange

Bernard Goldberg On Liberalism

David Mamet's conversion to conservatism generated a lot of interesting letters to the editor in The Wall Street Journal.

From Bernard Goldberg came this opinion about liberalism:

Most of us "defectors" have one important belief in common: That liberalism deserted us and not the other way around. Liberals, I fear, forgot how to be liberal.

This struck me pretty early:

• Age 9: my teachers didn't like to be satirized, and responded like controllers
• Age 10: even little religious things - like the golden rule - weren't acceptable to some of my peers
• Age 12: my father started to reject idealism in favor as his politics moved towards the Democrats
• Age 13: no matter how cool I thought the counterculture was, I had more respect for America than some of Carter's folks
• Age 14: our liberal family friends couldn't properly place the country whose revolution they were in favor of
• Age 15: decentralization seemed like a pretty good thing to me and just about no one else

I didn't like Reagan until 1983, but I was already fertile ground as a 16-year-old in 1980.

FAA Factoid

From Holman Jenkins "Plane Wreck":

Here's a historical fact: The FAA's safety function was originally and explicitly created to compensate for the effects of economic regulation, which protected carriers from the competitive consequences of accidents. Then came deregulation. There have been 15 years since the late 1920s in which passenger deaths fell to single digits or zero, 14 of them since deregulation in 1978.

Why regulate at all? Because of the practices of the predecessors or passenger airlines - passenger ship lines.

Businesses don't exist unless they can cover their costs, and yet airlines exist. ... commercial aviation is a hugely valuable product without a close substitute. But profits are chronically elusive. Why? ... because the seats must fly whether they are empty or full, so competitive pressure drives carriers to provide more seats than they can fill and then to fill the seats by cutting fares ...

... Steamship operators who were unfettered by certain modern regulatory notions devised a solution to the circumstances they encountered: They engaged in price fixing.

Such price fixing did not make scheduled shipping excessively profitable, but it did discourage shipowners from cutting rates below cost to fill up their ships before their scheduled departures. And their customers actually benefited, because it made the reliable service they sought economically viable.

... Railroad regulation, and indeed airline regulation, in their day were also attempts to solve the same problem ...

In general, this is a good article for use in managerial economics classes, where the idea that there are some lines of business that are doomed to fail doesn't occur to some students without providing some examples.

It's also a good piece for discussions of regulation, given that passenger shipping continues to engage in legal collusion to fix prices.

Technorati Tags: airline,merger,delta,northwest,FAA

Megan McArdle Quote on American Exceptionalism

Some points are so easy to grasp that we avoid thinking about them:

I think the US has done a better job of occupying Iraq than, say, Iraq did of occupying Kuwait ...

Occam's razor is a really useful, and underused, principal.

Criticism of American performance in Iraq is both relative and absolute. With one sentence, she's rendered the former uninteresting and made the latter much weaker.

Read the whole thing.

True Believers Quote

From James Lewis in The American Thinker:

When True Believers begin to harbor doubts, they don't immediately give up the faith. It's too scary; too much pride and money has been invested; too many jobs and reputations are on the line; and they need to find a new reason to live. So they always try to add on new wrinkles and qualifications to their crumbling story.

I can't say that I've noticed that ;)

Via Newmark's Door.

Chesterton Quote About Education

David Mamet's conversion to conservatism generated a lot of interesting letters to the editor in The Wall Street Journal.

From Donald Chisholm I got this G.K. Chesterton gem:

The problem isn't educating the uneducated but rather uneducating the educated.

Quote About Minorities

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Ed Begley Jr. on Living Green

Fascinating interview with Ed Begley Jr. in the March 24 issue of The Wall Street Journal.

I tend to be unsympathetic about environmental concerns because the element of telling-other-people-what-to-do and forcing-others-to-do-what-you-want seems to trump the actual issues.

I liked this article because it wasn't like that. I'd even be tempted by Begley's book.

What I liked about the interview was the positive tone, and the idea that I did this, and you can too, but you don't have to follow a script:

You don't have to be shivering in a yurt in Topanga. You can have a very comfortable lifestyle. I have a fax machine. I've got a cellphone right here. I've got a computer. I have all these modern things, and I really contend that you can still have a cool beverage and a warm shower. We're just going to do it more efficiently.

My commute is under 4 minutes, and I like to bike and walk to work when my family can spare the time. How're you doin'?

And, I loved this quote:

...We have four times the amount of cars in L.A. since 1970, yet we have half the smog. We should all get a medal.

P.S. I can't believe I'm posting this - as an actor, Ed Begley Jr. has turned my stomach since St. Elsewhere.

Obama Quote on Religion

Truer words were never said:

...The most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.

From Barrack Obama's March 18 speech.

Quote 11 from "The Other Path"

DeSoto's The Other Path points out that formal property rights offers some of the same advantages as limited liability:

Financiers are generally reluctant to deal with informals and do so only at very high interest rates and on limited occasions, for they have no way of limiting the scope of their relationship to a legally defined financial sphere, which would obviate the need for them to inspect all the possible assets and liabilities of the informal who is requesting financing.  [pp 169-170]

Quote 10 from "The Other Path"

The Other Path points out why developed countries are different from the developing ones:

...A person newly arrived in the city soon realizes that it is difficult to find anyone other than a relative or someone from the same region who will enter into a contract. [pg 166]