Jeff Tucker’s cold medicine post got me thinking. As the government’s creeping power to regulate all sorts of things continues to expand, for each new regulation you always hear the same argument: “But it’s really not a big deal!” There are always people ready to argue that it is not really a big inconvenience or a great restriction on your freedom for the government to restrict the amount of cold medicine you can buy, prevent a restaurant from serving you trans fats, require you to wear a seatbelt, etc. These things are simple. You hardly miss them.

by Larry Sechrest (Sul Ross University)

I pointed out in There’s No Such Thing as a Free Patent that “The conventional defense of the patent system is that it is essential in order to stimulate creativity.” And here, on the widely-read Patently-O Patent Law blog, we have patent attorney Dennis Crouch casually admitting:

Scrooge speaks: To hell with writers. They’re all the same. They carry a simple formula in their empty minds; mix one small fact with a headful of dreams and Eureka! A best seller. Give a writer a drop of truth and he’ll make a Thames; thereby providing him a monthly royalty check, good roast beef and pudding. Not to mention a long, beaver fur coat with a deep pocket for a fat wallet. And his pals say, “Hey, Charley Dickens, what a beyuuuutiful coat. Hear your book’s outselling 5-penny mulled cider!”

I’ve never been a privacy freak. A tax freak, yes. I take a realistic view of the world so I’m willing to contribute an annual sawbuck for smooth and unpotholed highways. And maybe another 20-30 dollars a year so the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, Coast Guard and Alabama National Guard can protect me from those who would kill me with glee.

Some of the responses to my post on General Pinochet have reminded me that along with the fable of Santa Claus and his reindeer, which is so prominent right now because it is the Christmas Season, there is another fable that is still going around. And while the Santa Claus fable is innocent, serving merely to entertain small children, this one is definitely not innocent, but positively vicious.

It could become very difficult to get in the near future, if we see the political class follow up on the latest frenzy: “Teens turn to cough syrup to get high, Feds say.”

“It’s bad that kids are buying cough syrup and using it this way — it’s not good for them,” said John P. Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

An excellent piece by Michael Malone in the WSJ today (thanks S. Berger):

Given a fate of living under the magnifying glasses of SOX and FD, who in their right mind would want to sit on a corporate board these days? The smart board-level people I know in Silicon Valley now reduce their involvement to being merely corporate “advisers.” Thus, the intellectual capital of America’s high tech company boards is falling by the month.

This morning’s New York Times business page reports that Toyota is expected to replace Ford as the second-best selling automobile manufacturer in the United States next month. This is a significant event in the auto industry. Ford has held the No. 2 spot since the 1920s.