Mark J. Perry alerts us to a great quote from P.J. O’Rourke:
“The free market is not an ideology or a creed or something we’re supposed to take on faith, it’s a measurement. It’s a bathroom scale. I may hate what I see when I step on the bathroom scale, but I can’t pass a law saying I weigh 160 pounds. Authoritarian governments think they can pass that law—a law to change the measurement of things.”
Perry then compares this to a minimum wage law:
The current crisis has economists, from mainstream defenders of central banking, such as Alan Blinder, to the leading interpreter of Austrian business-cycle theory, Roger Garrison, calling for a reexamination of the role of central banks and money in the economy.
This was in my RSS feed: Stephen Budiansky does some of the math and finds that, giving how efficient it is to move things by truck and by rail, the energy costs associated with shipping lettuce from California to New York are trivial relative to the energy costs associated with storing that lettuce in a New York refrigerator (my apologies to whoever first linked it; I owe you a hat tip).
It is a testament to the power of government propaganda that several generations of self-described conservatives have held as their core belief that war and militarism are consistent with limited, constitutional government. These conservatives think they are “defending freedom” by supporting every military adventure that the state concocts. They are not.
Just to add to the knowledge base, this is a real winner. You might have noted problems on the blog today. No one could figure it out. It was a mystery. Experts scratched their heads for 14 hours.
Finally, someone noticed something odd. The error log was too big, over 2GBs. The sheer size was causing the errors which were being logged, growing the size of the log, which was causing more errors, and so on. Delete the error log and all problems go away.
The end.
We all have a price, or so I’ve been told. Whether we do or not is probably a function of our individual ethical threshold. It is no different within our prison systems or for the individuals behind badges. Like contraband, drug paraphernalia, sharp objects and the various other illegal objects that make it into our prison system on a daily basis, prison systems can’t seem to keep cell phones out of the jail cells.
