A few of us DOLers are in Guatemala for the APEE board meeting. Since I can't shoot any roman candles this year, allow me to celebrate with you by pasting these timeless words, never perfunctory.

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Interesting archive here.

Here is historical downtown Auburn (date unknown).

From an AACSB newsletter (LH column; scroll down):

Oberlin College created a sustainability house called "SEED," which stands for Student Experiment Ecological Design. Students work to combat global warming by finding ways to reduce carbon admissions in their own lives.

As if carbon emissions aren't bad enough, we now have to deal with carbon admissions. Mon dieu!

In a few weeks, I'm giving a short talk for the graduate fellows at AIER about my reflections on academic life two years out. Basically, I'm going to give them a first-hand perspective on my successes, failures, and mistakes.

Given my offbeat interests, I don't think I really appreciated or internalized the core material in grad school as much as I should have. I don't have data on this, but I think that a lot of people outside of the mainstream of their disciplines make the same mistake.

A book I'm reviewing contains this sentence, which I take to heart as I develop as a scholar: "Jackson Pollock could draw like a camera, but instead he chose to splatter paint in a wild manner that pulsed with emotion." I've heard the same about Picasso and others. Their abstract expressions become much more meaningful, and they gain more credibility, when one considers them against the backdrop of their technical mastery.

It'll be a busy summer. Co-blogger Larry White and I will both be in residence at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, MA during June. You can also catch me giving a "Brain Candy" lecture entitled "Homer Economicus Responds to Incentives" at a Rhodes Summer Writing Workshop for high schoolers on June 16 or 17, in the audience at the International Society for New Institutional Economics meetings at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management on June 20-21 and at the Institute for Humane Studies "Liberty and Society" seminar at Bryn Mawr, where co-blogger Josh Hall--who coined the term Homer Economicus--and I will give the economics lectures. My only time in New England consists of a couple of trips to Boston, so I'm really looking forward to the AIER trip. If anyone can recommend a good Asian restaurant in Toronto, please let me know (Mrs. Carden and I will be celebrating our fifth anniversary while we're there). Finally, my only other trip to Philadelphia was in eighth grade; I'm looking forward to going back. The Mint was closed the last time I was there, so it would be neat to be able to take a tour and watch as my currency is debased before my very eyes. We'll be back in Memphis for good around July 6, just in time for the late-summer heat.

This announcement arrived in my email today. I participated in one of these sessions a few years ago, and it's a great opportunity to get on the circuit in the early stages of the job market.

A number of sessions at the 2008 conference of the Southern Economic Association, to be held at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C. on November 20-23, 2008 (academic sessions will begin at 8 am on November 21st), are designated as graduate student sessions. These sessions provide an opportunity for graduate students to present their scholarly work, and to receive feedback from members of the organization who hold professional positions. Each southern university with a Ph.D. program in Economics is invited to nominate one advanced graduate student, preferably a student who will be on the job market, to participate in one of the sessions designed for graduate students. The graduate students selected will receive a $100 cash award, complimentary one year membership to the SEA, and the registration fee for attending the conference will be waived. I am writing to encourage you, if you are at an institution that grants a Ph.D. in Economics, to ask your department head or graduate coordinator to nominate a graduate student to participate in this initiative.

The Association recognizes the importance for young scholars to establish a habit of attending professional meetings with the idea of placing their work before an audience of professionals in their field. This experience will provide them with feedback that can sharpen their ideas. Moreover, they will have an opportunity to meet scholars from other institutions interested in their area of research. In addition, at the 2008 SEA conference, graduate students will have the opportunity to observe the presentation styles and ideas of prominent members of the profession by attending the Presidential Address of James D. Gwartney (Florida State University), the Distinguished Guest Lecture featuring Peter Diamond (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and the Association Lecture delivered by David Laibson (Harvard University).

Please ask your department head to provide me with the name of the graduate student selected to represent your department via e-mail at (GoldsmithA@wlu.edu). In addition, please have the graduate student selected provide me with a word file containing an abstract, 200 words or less, of the paper they plan to present, along with their complete contact information (mailing address, e-mail address, fax and phone numbers) by August 15, 2008--although the earlier the better. For additional information about the 2008 conference, please visit www.southerneconomic.org.

I want to thank you in advance for participating in this initiative and for providing this important opportunity for professional growth for one of your outstanding graduate students.

Sincerely,
Art Goldsmith
Graduate Student Program Manager

1. Matt Ryan and I sniffed around some MLB game data looking for interesting trends about extra inning games. The basic idea is that some moves that a manager might undertake to win an extra inning game could reduce the likelihood of winning the team's next game. Indeed, it looks like teams are less likely to play an extra inning game if they have a game (instead of an off day) the next day. Matt provides details. BTW, Matt's going to be on the market next year; he's a clever and collegial guy who'd be a nice addition to a department.

2. Demand curves are downward sloping: Driving in the US becomes a luxury.

3. The proposed area of oil drilling in ANWR is 1/13 the size of Berry College; Mark Perry has nifty graphics. BTW, the offer still stands for Mankiw to locate Harvard South on our back forty.

4. My reading list just got longer--Russell Roberts has a new book out this summer. I've used his previous books The Choice and The Invisible Heart in class; the description makes me think this one will also make its way into my classes.

5. Our mediocre president gets so few things right it's worth pointing out that his veto of the farm bill is spot on. My congressman, who proclaims "[h]e is committed to lowering taxes for hardworking Georgians and protecting the traditional values so important to Northwest Georgia," voted for it. Grrrrr.

6. Great moments in government schooling: State throws out CRCT results.

7. For kicks and giggles: Suspect to police: I drive with pants down and Clayton Co. teen accused of biting butts at Wal-Mart

Newsweek's new ranking of 1300 public high schools is out. The school district we're leaving, Bexley, Ohio, came in 404, but the one we're moving to, Auburn, AL, came in 369 so that's good I guess. The rankings are based solely on the percentage of graduating seniors taking AP or IB exams.

Needless to say, not everyone is happy with the simple Newsweek methodology. US News has a ranking based on a more complicated formula created by SchoolMatters.

The advantage of the Newsweek methodology is that AP and IB exams are the same nationwide while just about all other data are not comparable across states. The US News rankings plow ahead despite the comparability issues looking at state test scores primarily and placing greater emphasis on the relative performance of disadvantaged and minority students.*

Anyway in the US News report, Bexley High made the cut with a "silver medal" but, Auburn High was left out in the cold, so that's not so good. I suspect the reason is that Bexley has very few of disadvantaged and minority students (just 5% qualify for federally subsidized lunches), and the ones it has do relatively well. Auburn, in contrast has a more diverse student body with more disadvantaged and minority students (25% qualify for subsidized lunches), many of whom one may presume don't do that well on state tests.

From my point of view, as a parent of a non-disadvantaged, non-minority student, I suspect Auburn will serve our needs quite well with lots of AP opportunities and participation opportunities in the IB program.

As you might guess, unlike many commenters on these rankings, I think it's better to measure badly than not to measure at all. Bad measurements at least start the conversation and overtime can lead to calls for better measurements.

My own alma mater was on neither list.

*I must note that SchoolMatters' own Compare Schools utility won't compare schools from different states "because most states use a unique test to measure student performance."

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a story about deferred maintenance at colleges. The teaser just below the link to the story laments:

Public colleges compete with other state agencies when making their case for maintenance money.

How awful--public colleges having to compete with other state agencies for funding. Private colleges have to compete with public colleges that get taxpayer provided funding.

The Lexus LS600H, which costs £84,000, was a gift from Lexus to the 65-year-old former Beatle [Paul McCartney], who helped promote the hybrid vehicle.

But instead of arriving by boat as expected, the car was flown to Britain on a Korean Air flight, creating a carbon footprint almost 100 times bigger than if it had come by sea.

Source. NB--The article suggests the blame may lie with Lexus not McCartney.

Final day of class
Students will be leaving soon
Still too cold to walk

Congratulations to Master Sergeant Brendan O’Connor, who on Wednesday, April 30th will receive the Distinguished Service Cross for his valor as a medic with the Green Berets in Afghanistan. (This will be only the second DSC for Afghanistan duty.) CBS’s 60 Minutes told the remarkable story of his battlefield heroics on Sunday. Brendan and I grew up in the same town (Moorestown, NJ). One summer I was his boss at a local go-cart track owned by my classmate Mark Molz (I was the hired manager, paid in greasy $1 bills). Discipline, teamwork, and courage under fire – that’s what the go-cart track was all about, so I'm sure I can take some tiny credit for having had a formative influence on the young Brendan. Well, maybe.

HT: Mark Molz

Three items from yesterday's Brit Hume program on FNC; quotes are from the program transcript on Lex/Nex.

First, here's an exchange between Hume and Mort Kondracke--no friend to free markets--on Obama:

HUME: What about Obama on the question of taxes and the capital gains tax? The premise of the question from Charlie Gibson was every time we lower the capital gains tax rate, we get a larger gusher of revenue from capital gains taxes. Would you want to raise it anyway?

Obama said yes, not so much because on the revenue side, but because of fairness. How about that?

KONDRAKE: That shows that he doesn't understand how markets work, and he is less interested in growth for the economy and for controlling the deficit than he is in, quote unquote, "fairness."

Jack Kemp had a wonderful piece in "The Wall Street Journal" today about how it is that even blighted neighborhoods grow. You create an enterprise zone where the capital gains rate is zero, and that encourages investment. That's what you want in those kinds of places.

I don't think Barack Obama understands anything about a capitalist economy.

ZING!

Next, here's radical environmentalist Lester Brown on ethanol:

LESTER BROWN, PRESIDENT, EARTH POLICY INSTITUTE: In our efforts to reduce our oil insecurity, we have created unprecedented world food insecurity.

If even someone as green as Brown understands ethanol to be a boondoggle, you'd think .... Oh, never mind, it's all about politics.

Last, here's a bit on solar power program in SD schools:

And the movement to convert San Diego's schools to solar power has stalled because it has led to a huge increase in energy costs. "The San Diego Tribune" reports electric bills went up $20,000 a year after solar energy systems were installed in 28 schools.

I've been to DC twice in the past three weeks. Last week I was there for a reading discussion at the Koch Foundation. I thoroughly enjoyed the time with the Koch Associates, including my former student Mike Rupert. Thanks for the invitation and the warm welcome.

Also on last week's trip, I caught a Rent-Seekers Nationals game at the new DC ballpark. I thought it was a decent venue, though going to a $600 million taxpayer fleecing give me a bit of a slimy feeling. Most enjoyable was being accompanied by my former students Dan Alban and Keri Anderson.

My earlier DC trip was about 3 weeks ago--I took Pee Wee for Spring Break. It was a pretty standard trip with a 6 year old--monuments and museums. Our visit to the Air and Space Museum was marred by the tight crowd. It'd be much more pleasant if tickets were somehow rationed--by reservations or, heaven forbid, by price.

I've gone to a lot of conferences and given a lot of talks this semester, and this has given me the opportunity to reflect on what goes into good and bad presentations (I've given many of both). On Ben Parizek's suggestion, I recently read Seth Godin's e-booklet Really Bad Powerpoint. It reminds me a bit of The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation. Together, they offer a pretty clear guide to very good and very bad presentations and are definitely worth the time and effort. The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation makes the point beautifully.

Amy Rice feared for her dog's life when a pit bull jumped over a fence into her yard and attacked her pooch. So she took matters into her own mouth.

Rice says she bit the pit bull on the nose Friday after trying to pull the dog's jaws off her Labrador retriever, Ella.

I think it's close enough to consider man bites dog. Source.

Earlier this month, treasury chief Alistair Darling raised taxes on cars and cigarettes, but it is his new alcohol duties — which raised the price of a pint of beer — that have gotten Britons' backs up.

So when a pub landlord in Darling's home town of Edinburgh barred the chancellor from his establishment, drinking holes across the country followed suit, posting pictures of the white-haired, bespectacled treasurer above the big red word "barred."

Bar manger Andrew Little at the Utopia pub, which kicked off the campaign, told The Associated Press the poster was put up "tongue-in-cheek," but the sentiment snowballed.

"It looks like we've touched a nerve," Little said.

Hundreds have joined Internet groups devoted to running Darling out of every pub in the country, and establishments from the Tap And Spile in the north England town of Lincoln to the Plough Inn in Finstock, near Oxford, said Darling would not allowed to partake of their booze.

Source here.

Wired carries the AP story:

New Entry in Space Tourism Industry (By JOHN ANTCZAK Associated Press Writer) Mar 26, 2:03 PM EDT

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A California aerospace company plans to enter the space tourism industry with a two-seat rocket ship capable of suborbital flights to altitudes more than 37 miles above the Earth. The Lynx, about the size of a small private plane, is expected to begin flying in 2010, according to developer Xcor Aerospace, which planned to release details of the design at a news conference Wednesday.

[...]

Xcor's announcement comes two months after aerospace designer Burt Rutan and billionaire Richard Branson unveiled a model of SpaceShipTwo, which is being built for Branson's Virgin Galactic space tourism company and may begin test flights this year.

Which will eventually be a very cool thing. But in the meantime, it's an excuse to not so randomly quote the second funniest movie ever, Airplane II: The Sequel.

[in a montage of news reports] Buffalo Anchorman: Our top story Tonight, Four-alarm fire rages through Downtown Buffalo. Also in the news, Lunar Shuttle heads for the Sun, and certain disaster. Tokyo Anchorman: Our top story Tonight, Four-alarm fire rages through Downtown Tokyo. Also in the news, American Lunar Mission locked in death struggle. Moscow Anchorman: [with a gun pointed to his head] A Four-alarm fire in Downtown Moscow clears way for a glorious new tractor factory. And on the lighter side of the news, Hundreds of Capitalists are soon to perish in Shuttle disaster.

honorable mention:

Steve McCroskey: Jacobs, I want to know absolutely everything that's happened up till now.
Jacobs: Well, let's see. First the earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died and they turned into oil. And then the Arabs came and they bought Mercedes Benzes. And Prince Charles started wearing all of Lady Di's clothes. I couldn't believe it.

An inside view of home schooling:

"[H]ome-schooling" is a misnomer, really. Most of it doesn't even take place at home, and the schooling has little in common with what goes on in school. [...] What home-schoolers most readily reflect are the virtues of the old American frontier settlement or the Amish barn-raising -- we co-operate in self-reliance. My wife and I have been teaching our children ourselves for more than 15 years, and we've found that home-schooling opens doors that schools leave closed.

And contrary to most popular belief, home-schooling isn't the brainchild of religious fanatics. It actually got started in the counterculture of the 1960s. [...] My wife and I hadn't originally planned on home-schooling, but with six children and one modest income, we couldn't afford a house in one of the better school districts in the state. We were living in Plainfield, an elegant old central New Jersey city with typically poor urban public schools characterized by bureaucratic mismanagement, low teacher morale and student violence. [...]

Home-schoolers also work across a much wider socioeconomic spectrum than the conventionally schooled. We have worked on many projects, and in many organizations, that draw participating home-schoolers from all around our state, from far beyond school district borders. [...]

The results? Studies have shown that home-schooled children outperform the conventionally schooled not only on standardized academic tests but also on tests of social skills. This, I believe, isn't because home-schoolers do things better than schools do them but because we do better things than schools do. [...]

Conventional schools are like the nation's Rust Belt companies, designed in the 19th century but struggling to meet the standards of international competition today. [...] People who are free to think for themselves usually get together and find solutions that are better than what bureaucrats can devise.

I was in DC over the weekend for an excellent IHS workshop on "Liberty and the Art of Teaching." A couple of quick observations about Julian Simon, iPods, and commerce are below the fold.

Read More »

From Rich Lowry's appreciation:

Back in 1959, Buckley excoriated the flabbiness of thought that attended an invitation to Nikita Khrushchev to visit the United States. He concluded: "Khrushchev cannot take permanent advantage of our temporary disadvantage, for it is the West he is fighting. And in the West there lie, however encysted, the ultimate resources, which are moral in nature. In the end, we will bury him." Throughout the decades, with his intellectual pickax, Buckley uncovered those ultimate resources.

Among the "Four Wrong Reasons for Pessimism":

Want to know the truth about business journalists? Most of us are failed sportswriters. . . . Think about what it takes to be a first-rate business journalist. One must be facile with numbers and financial statements and have the confidence to talk to CEOs, high-level executives, board members, analysts and so forth. One must delve deeply into the industry one writes about--what is the competitive landscape, what are the technological disruptions on the road ahead? It is also critical that one have a coherent global economic view to be able to put a story into context. And one must be a good storyteller.

Now, if one possesses all of these talents, what are the chances one goes into the low-paying field of journalism? Not great. . . .

The thin talent pool in business journalism combines with two other forces: Journalism is populated by left-of-center people, many of whom are hostile to business; and traditional journalism itself faces threats of disruption from the Internet, leaving business journalists in a fearful mood, which gets projected into their stories.

That's the claim made on the gas pumps at Wal-Mart. They have cute little cardboard green and yellow ears of corn on the hoses. Just one problem--saying gasoline is enhanced by ethanol is like saying a swimming pool is enhanced by pee. Since ethanol reduces gas mileage and can increase deposits in engines, a more accurate word would be contaminated or diluted.

Just for the record--no one should worry that I'm getting wobbly on Wal-Mart. :-)

Bryan Caplan, author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, will be speak at Rhodes on Thursday night at 8:00 PM in Hardie Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public; more information can be found here. This is particularly interesting in light of Fidel Castro's resignation, which President Bush hopes will lead to "a democratic transition."

My former student Ryan Simmons made this YouTube video of Berry. My favorite scenes are the one with the cows and the one in the president's office.

... for his talk "Looking for Heroes in Adam Smith's World" before a standing room crowd at Berry yesterday. Thanks, too, to my colleague Melissa Yeoh for arranging Bruce's visit.

In a reversal from the current discussion about the appropriate use of water:

For having doused his wife with cold water while she lay in a bed Edward J. Donnelly of 140 Hobart Avenue, Bayonne, was yesterday sentenced to ninety days by Recorder Lazarus. Donnelly said he tried the water cure on his wife to stop her from talking, and said she talked so incessantly that he could not sleep. He slept after he threw the water over her.

Some quick hits I've meant to blog about more extensively, but lately I've been very short on time.

1. Of light and carbon: From www.spiked.com, here is the best article I've seen summarizing the incandescent vs. flourescent craze. To reduce my carbon footprint, I henceforth resolve to boycott "carbon copy" and "blind carbon copy" emails.

2. Dani Rodrik recently posted a short paper, "Second Best Institutions," that is highly worthwhile but raises many puzzles.

3. Bob Lawson is visiting Liberty Fund today to give a talk on why we don't see countries with both high political freedoms and low economic freedoms.

4. Harvey Mansfield says economic thinking lacks virtue.

5. Alex Tabarrok says don't sweat the recession talk and reminds us (ahem!) that the real impact of economics lies less in clever applications of welfare analytics to Christmas, but more in enlightened understanding of growth and prosperity.

Amazingly, there are only about 6 million scientists and engineers in the entire world, nearly a quarter of whom are in the U.S. Poverty means that millions of potentially world-class scientists today spend their lives trying to eke out a subsistence living, rather than leading mankind’s charge into the future. But if the world as a whole were as wealthy as the U.S. and were devoting the same share of population to research and development, there would be more than five times as many scientists and engineers worldwide.

6. Finally, the January issue of W highlights the fascinating artist Thomas Nozkowski. There are some insights into originality and genius. I like the rich descriptions of his quirky, creatively-destructive methods and their beautiful results.

1. From the ok for me but not for thee department: NY Mayor Bloomberg is photographed nibbling on some Cheez-Its (0.5g of trans fats per serving) after leading NY's ban on trans fats.

2. MIT economists Jonathan Gruber and David Rodriguez find:

Our best estimate is that physicians provide negative uncompensated care to the uninsured, earning more on uninsured patients than on insured patients with comparable treatments. Even our most conservative estimates suggest that uncompensated care amounts to only 0.8% of revenues, or at most $3.2 billion nationally.

Not that it'll stop the socialized medicine crowd but this paper is very important because it rebuts one of the alleged failings of the current system.

3. Cato's David Boaz nominates someone for The Diff (previous installments here, here, and here).

4. Mark Steyn's column on capitalism as the real agent of change is a must read. See especially the paragraphs on John Edwards.

5. Carpe Diem posts on Krugman's recession forecasts and mortgage fraud via fake paystubs.

6. MR is hosting a book forum on Tim Harford's The Logic of LIfe. I got an advance copy and read it over Christmas break. I thought it was superb; I am pleased to see someone pushing back against the behavioral economics tide of the past few years.

7. I also read and liked John Lott's Freedomnomics. I would have liked it better if it had less emphasis on rebutting of Freakonomics. I don't think Freakonomics is flawless (I hated the chapter on baby names), but I thought Lott's constant harping on it was tiresome. Moreover, like Russ Roberts comments on Lojack and concealed handguns, I don't think of Lott's and Levitt's work as opposites.

I think both books miss a plausible explanation for the reason realtors take longer to sell their houses and get higher sales prices. Many people who put houses on the market do so because they are moving out of town. They have higher monitoring costs to make sure the house isn't burglarized. They also have higher transactions costs to consummate a sale from out of town. These factors push someone moving out of town (or across a large city like Chicago) to sell faster and at a lower price. Realtors, on the other hand, probably are not moving out of town and therefore have lower costs to hold out a bit longer for a higher price. I also suspect that it is somewhat common for realtors to deliberately own two (or more) houses at once. They then put both on the market and sell the one that draws the more attractive bids. People who are not planning to simultaneously market two homes may face liquidity constraints that nudge them to sell their first home sooner (and at a lower price) before taking on their next home.

On the status of the University of North Carolina in the late 19th century:

Ad placed in the Waynesville (N. C.) Daily News on July 12, 1886.

University of North Carolina

The next session opens August 26th. Fifteen Professors offer a wide range of instruction in Literature, Science and Philosophy. The Law School and the Department of Normal Instruction are fully equipped. Special higher training in all the departments is provided for graduates of the University and of other Colleges free of charge. Select Library of 20,000 volumes; Reading Room of 114 Periodicals. Total collegiate expenses $88.00 a year. Board $8.00 to $13.50 per month. Sessions begin last Thursday in August. For full information, address
President Kemp P. Battle, L. L. D.
Chapel Hill, N. C.

From the Dec. 11, 1908 NYT:

The total enrollment of students at Harvard University this year is 5,763. The total is a decrease of 26 from last year.

The total registration in the Department of Arts and Sciences is 2,836. The Divinity School has 31 members, the Law School 716, the Medical School 345, the Dental School 68, the Busely[?] Institute, devoted to agricultural courses, 22, and Radcliffe College 167.

The January 5, 1908 NYT reports on the status at Yale:

Official registration figures at Yale show that the university has 3,306 students this year, against 3,247 last year.

Surprise is felt that the Academic Department shows a falling off of 36 students. There are 474 members of the faculty against 442 last year.

The Sheffield Scientific School is the only department showing substantial gains. Its numbers have increased from 875 to 948. The Graduate Department has dropped from 260 to 257, and the Medical School from 157 to 154. The Law School has increased from 294 to 330.

In 2006, Yale had 11,415 in total enrollment with 5,332 undergraduates.

Wikipedia's entry on the Sheffield Scientific School

Test your vocabulary on FreeRice.com. I made it to level 47.

In the news,

CINCINNATI (AP) — Two college students say the high cost of tuition led them to rob a bank.

The men pleaded guilty to two charges of aggravated robbery and six charges of kidnapping. They face 20 years in prison when sentenced Dec. 27.

Andrew Butler, 20, a student at the University of Toledo, told Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Steve Martin on Monday that tuition increases outpaced his scholarships and financial aid.

Christopher Avery, 22, a student at the University of Cincinnati, said he couldn't pay for summer classes after an internship at a grocery store fell through.

Armed with guns and wearing masks, Butler and Avery made off with $130,000 from a crowded Valley Central Savings Bank in suburban Reading on July 17, said Assistant Hamilton County Prosecutor Brian Goodyear.

An attempt to rob a check-cashing business a day earlier was thwarted when the students couldn't get through the business' security system despite firing four shots at the bullet-resistant glass, Goodyear said.

Craig Newmark comments on university taglines. I absolutely detest the patronizing tone of my own university's "An Education You Want. The Attention You Deserve."

But do like Southern Mississippi's "Freeing the Power of the Indvidual".

If you want mass-market candy reviews that read like fine wine reviews, accompanied by excellent photos, check out Candy Blog. A sample:

The flavor of Good & Plenty is more complex, I think, than some of the European pastilles. First, the sugar coating doesn’t completely contain the licorice flavor so when you stick your nose into a movie-sized box of Good & Plenty and you get a woodsy whiff of anise. The sugar shell isn’t very crunchy, in fact, it’s a little grainy, but it works pretty well for Good & Plenty, letting the flavor permeate. The licorice itself has a high sweet overtone and then the molasses hits, dark and slightly burnt and with a light salty bite. After it’s gone there’s a lingering sweetness and clean licorice/anise flavor ... until you pop the next few in your mouth.

Probably not--it tends to support levying taxes to finance "economic development" and has occasional outbreaks of populism--though the competition is slim. Fortunately, the RNT does offer up healthy doses of libertarianism from time to time. Here's a sample from today's issue:

EVIDENCE MOUNTS that Rome needs a new “Clean It or Lien It” ordinance —one that would be applied to the brains of some in the municipal bureaucracy. The nit-picking mentality of some of the “hired guns” charged with protecting the beauty (in some places) and historical ambiance (in even fewer places) of this fair city is starting to get obviously out of hand. Rules should be guidelines with some flexibility built into them. Those increasingly seem not the sort that Rome has.

Worse, there appear to be so many chefs stirring the pot that an odd concoction is sure to result. Planning Commission, Rome Historic Preservation Commission, Zoning Board of Appeals and Adjustments, City Commission all seem to have some sort of say on the most trivial of appearance matters — and often the ability to “veto” the opinions of the other.

At some point, perhaps already reached, this state of affairs will drive away new enterprises. Is it really impossible to do business in Rome without having a staff of lawyers on retainer to deal with the city?

I've opened comments for readers to suggest other papers with libertarian leaning editorial pages. I've also put another sample from the RNT below the fold.

UPDATE (12/8): I have added another example below the fold.

Read More »

... and apparently they are not all of the positive variety. To wit,

While blondes may have more fun, a new study suggests that fair-haired ladies may be making those around them dumber.

Researchers found that men's scores on general knowledge tests drop when they are shown photos of blonde women, the Sunday Times of London reported.

I spent the first part of this week at the Southern Econ meetings in New Orleans. Besides seeing several DOLers, some grad school pals, and lots of friends, a couple of highlights:

1. My former student Andrew Chupp, now in GA State's Ph.D. program, did a superb job presenting his paper on how emissions policies affect the demand for hybrid cars. Well done!

2. While taking the shuttle from the airport to my hotel, I got in a brief conversation with the driver about how jammed New Orleans will be in January with the AEA meetings and national championship Sugar Bowl back-to-back. The driver indicatd he's a LSU fan but hopes LSU will not be in the Sugar Bowl. Why not? Many LSU fans will be driving to the game and, consequently, there will be less demand for shuttles and other tourist services. This one insight alone makes the driver a better sports economist than many of the folks who cook up fanciful economic impact studies for major sports events and new arenas.

From the AJC comes this example of using technology to save labor and employee monitoring costs:

Stats, a new downtown sports bar, spent $110,000 to install the system. The Table Tap technology lets guests serve themselves once waitresses check identifications and turn on a meter. The taps connect to 16 kegs in a basement cooler, and guests can pick which two they want hooked up at the table.

"I want one in my house," said Kevin McDonough of Sandy Springs, who was sipping on a pint of Harp that he'd poured himself./

The meters tick away suds by the ounce, with prices ranging from 25 cents to 37 cents. That amounts to $4 a pint for the least expensive beer.

When the table hits 180 ounces, the taps stop pouring until a server checks over the table

Table Tap founder Jeff Libby negotiated the limit with the Georgia Department of Revenue, settling on an amount equal to the largest pitchers in use at other restaurants. It's the same self-serve concept, he figured.

Still, the pour-your-own approach is much more appealing than scanning cereal through a self-serve checkout lane. Not just for drinkers, but for restaurateurs.

With meters on many of the taps, including at an upstairs bar, nobody gets a freebie.

With guests at seven tables and 10 private rooms free to pour their own, labor costs shrink.

Another news item on employee monitoring is below the fold.

Read More »

News item:

Charles and Linda Everson were driving back to their hotel when their minivan was struck by a falling object — a 600-pound cow.

The Eversons were unhurt but the cow, which had fallen off a cliff, had to be euthanized.

The year-old cow fell about 200 feet from the cliff and landed on the hood of the couple's minivan, causing heavy damage.

For those in need of having theses or dissertations bound, I recently used Thesis on Demand. I found their prices to be quite reasonable and the quality was excellent. The really nice thing is you just upload the .pdf and pay by credit card and 4-6 weeks later you get a really nice, well bound, thesis or dissertaion in the mail.

Is it just my imagination, or are those cars with bumper stickers that command us to "Stop Road Rage" among the most irritatatingly driven cars on the road?

The 2006-07 Garvey Essay topic was

Is foreign aid the solution to global poverty?”

A 2005 United Nations report called for a doubling of foreign aid to poor countries as the means to reduce poverty. Yet the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a for-profit microloan bank and its founder, an apparent vindication of the ideas of Peter T. Bauer, Henry Hazlitt, Deepak Lal, and others. As Bauer wrote, “Development aid, far from being necessary to rescue poor societies from a vicious circle of poverty, is far more likely to keep them in that state.…Emergence from poverty requires effort, firmly established property rights, and productive investment.”

Congratulations to the winners.

Junior faculty winners are Peter Leeson, Jason Sorens (University at Buffalo), and Art Carden (Rhodes College).

Student winners are John Parker (U. of Alabama), James Estes (Pittsburgh Theological Seminary), and Juan Ramon Rallo (U. de Valencia).

The contest drew 600 applicants from 48 countries. Details, including prize amounts and webbed essays, are here

I spent a few days last week attending a Liberty Fund conference organized by Aeon Skoble. A fantastic experience--thanks for the invitation and thanks to Liberty Fund for its generosity. Also attending were friends Ed Stringham and Elizabeth Hull.

From the AJC:

PETA: Cobb shelter illegally euthanized animals

I guess PETA would rather give animals lethal injections and dump them in dumpsters.

I'll be away for a couple of weeks to (1) give a talk at the International Policy Network in London, (2) attend and give a couple presentations at the annual Economic Freedom Network meeting held this year on the Adriatic Coast in Budva, Montenegro, and (3) give a talk for the Liberalni Institut in Prague.

I'll also find some weekend time to hike in the Durmitor Mountains of Montenegro where I hope to summit Bobotov Kuk (8274').

As the world's top condom experts convene this week to update international standards, one American entrepreneur has a simple message: Size matters.

It's shaking up an industry that has generally taken a one-size-fits-all approach.

The world's top condom experts gathered this week in South Korea to update international standards for condoms, where one American entrepreneur was pushing for more different sizes to be allowed.

Frank Sadlo, founder of TheyFit, which makes what he claims are the world's first custom-fit condoms, is pushing for updated standards to allow greater variation in condom size.

Story here.

The reference is just to offset Frank's gloom and doom report.

This morning, after a report about on bureaucrats running up large travel bills flying first class, the hosts of "Fox and Friends" introduced a guest thusly

MR. DOOCY: More on this waste with an expert.

MR. NAPOLITANO: Yes. We're joined now by California Congressman Ed Royce.

Although the introduction could be interpreted (and was intended) to mean that Rep. Royce opposes government waste, I bet he'd prefer not to be introduced as an expert on government waste. For what it's worth, Royce had a score of 84 (rank of 21) on the Club for Growth's 2006 House Scorecard.

Following up on the Anarchist handbill story from last week, the Sept. 24, 1907 NYT reports on the exercise of private property rights:

On account of the Anarchist notice, which was posted on the property of H.C. Frick at Fifth Avenue and Grant Street, the other day, the property is to be closed to the public in the future. There is a high board fence about it, but during the Summer the gates have been thrown open and the place was used as a playground for the poor children in the downtown districts.

This afternoon all the entrances to the property were boarded up, and notices were posted announcing that persons who trespassed on the property would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Today's WSJ has an article (sub req) about MIT reporting incorrect SAT scores for the U.S. News rankings. It's a pretty small error and there may not have been an attempt to deceive, but this paragraph caught my eye:

Says Mr. Shmill [MIT's interim admissions dean]: "It was a pretty harmless error, or we wouldn't be talking about it."

So if it wasn't a "pretty harmless error" MIT would have kept it hush, hush. A real paragon virtue, eh?

The Sept. 21, 1907 NYT reports about ongoing testimony concerning the business practices of Standard Oil including, for the first time, revelation of the major stock holders of the company.

In 2005 dollars, J.D. Rockefeller's holdings would be worth approximately $2,4 billion. This amount seems relatively paultry compared to those on the Forbes 400. Indeed, J.D.'s Standard Oil holdings would put him around number 188 on today's list.

The level of concentration amongst the people listed here is moderate - the Herfindahl index is 2722. Here's the Lorenz curve:

Stata Data File

---

Another story carries the headline "Rockefeller Saves $198," and concerns the wages Rockefeller paid college students who worked on his estate during the summer. The daily wage was reduced from $1.50 to $1.25. When several of the students complained, the foreman said "If you don't want to work for $1.25, you know what you can do." Promptly, three people quit.

Interesting article on the Mises blog:

The English Wikipedia alone includes nearly two million articles, and has a word-length fifteen times that of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia is the single largest encyclopedia ever assembled, having long since surpassed the Yongle Encyclopedia of 15th century China.

The man credited with founding Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales — known to Wikipedians as "Jimbo" — was a finance major at Auburn University when the Mises Institute's Mark Thornton suggested he read "The Use of Knowledge in Society," a now-famous essay written by Austro-libertarian economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek. ... According to a June 2007 Reason magazine interview, this insight of Hayek's is what led Wales to found Wikipedia. The rather lofty vision that inspired Wales? "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

Those who refused to believe that a user-generated encyclopedia could compete with the monolithic, traditional encyclopedia written by experts and organized by professional editors, were no doubt shocked when Nature magazine published a 2006 article comparing Wikipedia to the well-known Encyclopedia Britannica. The article concluded that Wikipedia articles were comparable in accuracy and thoroughness to those of the older, paper encyclopedia.

According to [a Pew Research Center] study, "Wikipedia has become the No. 1 external site visited after Google's search page, receiving over half of its traffic from the search engine." All that traffic does not include sites that syndicate Wikipedia content, such as Ask.com.

Such syndication is free thanks to the special license agreement to which all contributors consent when adding content to the encyclopedia. The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) allows for royalty-free reproduction — in original or modified form — even in for-profit projects.

I have an attraction to GNU projects: I've been using GRETL (Gnu Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library) for both instruction and research. I co-authored a review article that describes GRETL's capabilities as of a couple of years ago. As happens with things GNU, these have increased a good bit since then.

Frank notes below that a government school didn't call 911 when a student fell ill.

Heck that's nothing; a couple years ago there was a local high school here in Columbus that didn’t call 911 after a girl was RAPED.

Bob's waiting for the Ohio AG to sue failing government schools, here's a story of a government school that wouldn't call 911 when a student fell ill:

The typed words on the school memo are as direct as they are stunning: "No Deans are permitted to call 911 for any reason."

An assistant principal at Jamaica High School wrote the order just two weeks before ninth-grader Mariya Fatima suffered a stroke at the Queens school in April.

Employees waited more than an hour before calling 911, according to court records, costing Mariya crucial minutes of medical treatment, a delay that may have made her paralysis worse.

A month after Mariya collapsed, the same assistant principal sent out another memo, flip-flopping and telling the deans it was okay to call 911, but instructing them to downplay assaults.

The author of the memo and the school's principal have both since left Jamaica High School, but that's little comfort to Mariya's family.

"You take it for granted that your child is going to be safe, but if they don't want to call 911, no matter what the circumstances, your child is not protected," family lawyer Gary Carlton said.

Mariya, who lost use of her right hand and leg, has had to relearn how to speak and walk since the stroke.

I once heard a talk show blabber call government schooling the most common form of child abuse. Articles like these make you wonder if it just might be so.

Yesterday's WSJ had an article on people moving from the auto to health care industries. Several bloggers have, rightly, commented on how this exemplifies the fluid nature of a market economy. But what caught my attention was the article's subtitle:

NURSING AMBITIONS In Shift, Auto Workers Flee to Health-Care Jobs Many Seek New Starts In Field That Bled Big 3; Detroit's Next Migration

Wrong--health care didn't bleed the big 3, the UAW did. The subtitle only fits if workers were leaving the auto industry to be union organizers. Sure the big 3 have high medical expenses, but those expenses are there because of the UAW.

We just bought a Honda Odyssey for my better half. We paid about 4% more than we did for a similar vehicle 10 years ago. In real terms we paid about 20% less than we did a decade ago. Moreover, it ignores the fact that the Odyssey has lots of improvements (airbags all around not just in the front, a 6 CD changer, remote control sliding doors for letting Pee Wee in and out, and more) over our old car.

Our good deal got me wondering about the new car price component of the CPI. According to the Economic Report of the President (Table B-61), the CPI for new cars fell from 141.7 in 1997 to 136.4 in December 2006.

[U]sing results from our full sample, an increase in study-effort of one hour per day (an increase of approximately .67 of a standard deviation in our sample) is estimated to have the same effect on grades as a 5.21 point increase in ACT scores (an increase of 1.40 standard deviations in our sample and 1.10 standard deviations among all ACT test takers).

Paper here.

Quick quiz: This paper is based on survey data of Berea College students. What is the mean number of hours per day that they report studying? Answer below the fold.

Read More »

It's the first day of school here. As I do every year, I offer the following advice to new college students:

There are basically three things you can do with your time in college: (1) Study, (2) Drink, or (3) Work at a job/Play a sport. My advice is to pick only 2. You cannot do (1), (2), and (3). Well you can but not well. Options (1) and (2) work together well as do Options (1) and (3). If you pick options (2) and (3), then drop out now and save yourself/your parents/the taxpayers a lot money.

Todays about.economics contains a few interesting items:

• Ross McKitrick's proposal for a carbon tax. I think a carbon tax is the way to go, relative to cap-and-trade. The latter just has too much potential for mischief.


• DOL ranks #30 among economics blogs, based on incoming links from other blogs.


• A link to Stephen T. Easton's calculation on the revenue the government could realize from legalizing and taxing marijuana

In the news (w/ a HT to WSJ's Best of the Web Today):

A robber who held up a bookmaker's shop in Leicester with his girlfriend's vibrator has been jailed.

Nicki Jex, 27, of Braunstone, Leicester, hid the sex toy in a carrier bag pretending it was a gun, Leicester Crown Court heard.

Stuck in an iTunes rut? Pandora Radio will take a couple of your favorite artists, analyze them and stream in similar music. It's dynamic and gives very cool descriptions of what it's doing as it goes along. HT: Noel Campbell.

Current forecast is for Hurricane Dean to hit land between Corpus Christi and Houston. Damages could be severe.

Any more severe than Howard Dean?

Only time will tell.

AP story on the Hurricane Dean.

Pentagon Paid $998,798 to Ship Two 19-Cent Washers

Hard to believe some folks think government run medical care would be cheaper.

In the news:

Moscow - A Russian region of Ulyanovsk has found a novel way to fight the nation's birth-rate crisis: It has declared Sept. 12 the Day of Conception and for the third year running is giving couples time off from work to procreate.

... splendidly explained by George Leef.

Woman Kills Raccoon With Her Bare Hands

The headline on a story in today's AJC:

Number of Black Murder Victims on Rise

A paragraph from the article:

An estimated 16,400 people were murdered in the United States in 2005, down from a peak of 21,400 a decade ago. Similarly, the number of black people slain dropped over the last 10 years, from 10,400 in 1995 to almost 8,000 in 2005.

Here's another paragraph from the article:

Two years ago, 6,783 black men were murdered, up from 6,342 in 2004, the study shows. The murder rate among white men also rose, but less dramatically: 5,850 were slain in 2005, compared with 5,769 the year before.

So there's been a decline in both white and black murder victims over the past decade albeit with a small (compared to the 10-year decline) increase over the last two years of the period. How does it get reported? Not the good news of an overall decline; not the bad news that the there's been a small increase in both black and white murders over the 2004-2005 period. Instead, the headline points only to the increase in black murders.

BTW, the article also mentions that the vast majority (93% for black victims; 85% for white victims) of people had killers of the same race. Since the number of black and white victims is roughly equal (actually approx 15% more black victims), the fact that nearly all killers are of the same race means that the number of people of each race convicted should be roughly equal. Just for the record: I doubt the justice system is color blind--this article finds it is not--the murder data suggest that a color blind system would not yield incarceration rates proportionate to population. For actual data on executions by race and death row population by race see this page; whites outnumber blacks in both cases.

While on vacation in June, we bought Wendie Old's To Fly: The Story of the Wright Brothers for Pee Wee. We bought the book because we planned to visit the Wright sites (and the spectacular Museum of the Air Force) in Dayton later in our trip, so we thought the book would give Pee Wee some good background on the places we'd visit. The book fulfilled that purpose well, and, to my delight, it also takes a swipe at government funded competition to the Wrights. Olds writes (p. 43), "People like Samuel Langley, who received more than $55,000 from the government, could not solve the problems of flight. It took two bicycle repairmen from Dayton, Ohio to solve them."

Today the movers came and swept up most of my stuff, which I won't see again until a week after we get to Indy. Between my wife and I, this makes our 5th move in two years. We're enjoying the chance to purge junk and simplify. In a year we'll do it all over again. A year as resident scholar at Liberty Fund should definitely be worth it all, and then some.

Having been out of it lately, a bit of quick catching up on some interesting finds.

Sunday's NYTimes book section had this deep review of what could be an important war book. I found the review to be overstated in some areas.

Speaking of Indiana, my buddy Eric Schansberg landed a piece at the WSJournal on Indiana property taxes. Eric blogs about his experience with the editors here: http://schansblog.blogspot.com/. Text of article is posted there too.

The latest issue of The Lighthouse features William Gray on hurricanes and global warming, Alex Tabarrok on class action torts, news from the ethanol boondoggle, and---get this!---Bob Higgs taking on Randy Barnett on justifying the Iraq war.

I really enjoyed Todd Zywicki's article on Tullock's critique of the common law. I've been reading some of Tullock's early law and econ work, and Todd has as strong a handle on the value of the contributions as I've seen.

Our last night in San Francisco was at The Red Victorian Inn, a "B&B" and "Peace Center" with galleries of home grown art and plants in the Haight-Ashbury. An oasis for communitarians. A funky sort of convenience for me, being around the corner from the apartment we vacate today.

Happy travels.

Craig's post below reminded me of my trip a few years ago to the National Museum of Health and Medicine at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in D.C. It's a really creepy museum, off the beaten path, but well worth the trip if you're tired of all the glitzy museums on the Mall.

The purpose of our visit was to see the shattered lower leg of Civial War General Daniel Sickles. Ick.

Daniel Sickles was my great, great, ..., great uncle on my mother's father's side. He's more infamous than famous. A Tammany Hall politician and U.S. Congressman, before the war he shot and killed the son of Francis Scott Key in Lafayette Park and was the first person ever acquitted on the grounds of temporary insanity. As a General in the war he was a disaster; he almost lost the battle of Gettysburg for the Union by moving his troops off Little Round Top as ordered and into the Peach Orchard far in front of the union lines on Cemetery Ridge. After getting his Corp III almost wiped out, complete disaster for the Union was only narrowly averted by a quick-thinking major who dragged several cannon up Little Round Top to stop the Confederates from taking the unguarded hill and outflanking the union lines. If he hadn't suffered the leg injury at Gettysburg and been so well connected politically, he most surely would have been court martialed for disobeying orders.

UPDATE: Perhaps I was too unfair to Gen. Sickles? I received the following e-mail.

Sir: With all due respect, I don't take such a dim view of your "great, great, ..., great uncle on my mother's father's side" as you do. Perhaps you have accepted as gospel Thomas Keneally's hatchet job, "American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles." Personally, I think you'd be better served by embracing W. A. Swanberg's "Sickles the Incredible: A Biography of Daniel Edgar Sickles" or Edgcumb Pinchon's 1945 book "Dan Sickles: Hero of Gettysburg and 'Yankee King of Spain.' " In any event, regarding the incident at Gettsyburg, I used to tell visitors to the National Museum of Health and Medicine (where I worked for 6 years until retiring in March) that if Sickles hadn't disobeyed the incompetent Gen. Meade (who was actually about to order a retreat!) by moving his soldiers 3 miles forward to higher ground, that the Confederates would have easily overrun his Division and then perhaps have encircled the remaining Federals and won the battle. Sickles was the right man in the right spot. Not having gone through the ranks, he had no problem arguing with Meade and eventually doing what he felt was best. I'd compare him to General H. Norman Swartzkopf. As to his other exploits, shooting Francis Scott Key's son, moving in with Queen Isabella, etc., I think these add to the aura of his swash-buckling reputation. The author Norman Mailer has written a screenplay about Sickles. And although he's never released it I have talked to his archivist and we both hope that someday he will. Wouldn't that be something?

PS: And as far as your comment about his leg, the first time the Medal of Honor was ever awarded was to soldiers who fought in the War of the Rebellion. Sickles received one along with thousands of others. Years later, when the Army decided to make the medal a more meaningful decoration, it rescinded most of the medals it had awarded. They did not take Sickles' medal back. The Army felt he deserved it!

I am aware that there is some dispute about Sickles' role at Gettysburg. True, Meade was a boob and he was probably going to retreat. True, Sickles' moving of his III Corps lured the Confederates to attack and committed both sides that the battle. True, the Union ultimately won the battle. Still my (now dated) reading of military histories of the battle (as opposed to Sickles biographies) is that his move was pretty foolish and almost resulted in complete disaster (as opposed to disaster just for his III Corps). It was pure dumb luck that it didn't turn out very badly for the Union. Meade ultimately was fired in disgrace and rightly so. But if anyone was in a position to write the history books in his favor it was Sickles, and he definitely tried, yet he still is given low marks in most accounts.

Another news item from my vacation in northern Michigan:

The Material Girl's father, Tony Ciccone, recently decided to advance his winery business by releasing Madonna Wine, which is available in five varieties: Pinot Grigio, Pinot Noir, Gewurztraminer, Cabernet Franc and Chardonnay.

"Most of our wines are state-bottled wines," Ciccone said. "We don't try to make California wines or wines from France. We make wines that are Michigan wines."

Ciccone, who has been bottling wine out of his Ciccone Vineyard & Winery in Suttons Bay for nine years, is a regular visitor to Bay City. And when he's not seeing friends and family, he ventures over to the Water Front Market to visit owner Greg Schultz.

"Sales have been pretty good, considering it's a $40 bottle of wine," Schultz said.

Madonna Wine was released in December 2006, Ciccone said, and its popularity has increased ever since. The label on each bottle features a colorful picture of Madonna, with whom he consulted beforehand to make sure his daughter approved of the idea.

BTW, if you're inclined to buy a bottle via mail you might owe a thanks to Juanita Swedenburg who recently passed. She filed the suit, litigated by IJ, that led the Supreme Court to open interstate wine shipment.

HT to MR for the Markets in Everything concept.

I'm currently visiting some family and friends in Michigan. En route, I had a nice visit with co-blogger Bob and his family.

The big news up here is an online database of public employee salaries created by the Lansing State Journal. The database lists the salaries of some 53,000 state employees. State employee unions are not amused--they are threatening a boycott of the LSJ.

Speaking of things Michigan--Mark Perry reports that Michigan has overtaken Mississippi for the highest unemployment rate in the country.

I've been unplugged most of the past week but here are a few things that caught my eye.

1. A news item (with a HT to Reason):

Traffic officials in the Swiss city of Bern are hoping to stop men grabbing the extra large parking spaces reserved for women drivers by painting them pink, and adding flowers and other feminine symbols.

Apparently the spaces are near store exits and have video monitoring and are intended to increase women's safety. Fair enough, but why are the spaces extra large?

2. Recently I took issue with a WSJ article claiming summer employment for teens has decreased because of immigrant competition (I think the decline results from increasing affluence among teens). Today's WSJ (sorry no link)--apparently forgetting its gloomy article three weeks earlier--had an article headlined "Employers Beef Up Their Summer Hiring" and subtitled "Students Find More Options."

3. While we're picking on the WSJ (with reporting like this Rupert Murdoch might be an improvement), yesterday's issue had an article on subprime lending. An excerpt:

Some [subprime borrowers living on West Outer Drive in Detroit] used the money to buy their houses. But most already owned their homes and used the proceeds to pay off credit cards, do renovations and maintain an appearance of middle-class fortitude amid a declining local economy. Three now face eviction because they couldn't meet rising monthly payments. Two more are showing signs of distress....

The fate of people on West Outer Drive offers a glimpse of a drama that is playing out in middle- to lower-income, often minority-dominated communities across the country. In addition to putting families into homes, subprime mortgages and the brokers who peddle them are helping to take families out of homes in which they've lived for years ....

So why are subprime loans to blame for credit card debt, poor decisions for home renovations, or Detroit's lousy economy? If anything it seems that people would have lost their homes even sooner were it not for the democratization of credit. I'm beginning to wonder if the stink about subprime lending is another manifestation of Mencken's quote:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

4. Mark Cuban wants to start a new pro football league--Skip Sauer explains.